pembrook

Since the topic of 'Europe' has become a culture war issue (like everything), I can see that most comments here are showing a bias. You're defending OP who openly says he 'will always cheer for Mistral' regardless of objective reality. Is that not bias?

Among Americans, it appears that, if you're a college-educated white collar worker (champagne socialist), hippie degrowther, big tech alarmist, or just a left-leaning urbanism enthusiast (the current reddit/hn audience) you want the entire world to become the fantasy version of Europe you have in your head...so anything Europe does is the best thing thats ever happened, regardless of objective reality.

Or if you're the opposite, you think the EU is essentially playing out the collapse of USSR-lite in slow motion. I'd say I'm closer to this camp just looking at the financial situation, as someone actually living in the EU.

Is either position entirely rational? No.

I personally want Mistral to succeed. But this cannot happen unless we accurately assess the situation and objectively discuss the quality of their offerings compared to the alternatives, as well as the way that Europe is doing everything in its power to kill any intra-country cooperation or private sector innovation.

Use Opus 5.5 and then use this back to back and tell me I'm wrong.

Ughh the overly positive and cheerful comments here from what is usually the most critical/pessimistic audience on the internet is a huge tell.

If we cut through the political bias and wishful thinking for a second, here’s the truth: The model is not competitive. I would never waste my time using it for coding work, and I’m someone in the EU.

Great effort, but keep at it. This just isn’t good enough.

I’m sure you guys can make a boatload of money with regulatory capture and compliance games in the EU, but please don't give up trying to produce something thats actually competitive.

The law is not some immutable thing, in fact its something that we humans evolve over time on a case by case basis to improve and adjust.

Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.

I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.

But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you probably didn't see Dhurandhar or Ne Zha 2 last year (the highest grossing films in India and China respectively)?

Yea the pandemic is overfit as a reason for most things. Production had already left over the preceding decades.

Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation/distribution easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned, QE/ZIRP/0% rates re-inflated a housing bubble, unions kept raising rates to keep up with housing in LA, internet/social content began competing with studio productions hurting demand, studios stopped investing in new stories, etc. etc.

It's not just about cost though.

Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream hours of film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.

Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.

I'm amazed nobody has challenged OP on his narrative explanation for why the film industry left LA since it's completely wrong.

It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally the only thing that raises living standards.

The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.

China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 5 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.

Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.

In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global.

We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.

Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.

This is a bunch of regurgitated horseshit that business school grads repeat to each other like a game of telephone based off some PR puff pieces written about McKinsey in Fortune magazine back in the 1980s.

Pure strategy advice represents less than 20% of McKinsey billings (as publicly revealed last year).

Both firms are full of low level talentless grunts, essentially just fresh grads from different tier schools.

The only measurable difference between the two is that Accenture makes heavy use of geographic talent arbitrage by hiring heavily in India so they can do higher volume/lower-rate implementation gigs. The companies that spend the most with consulting firms are usually legacy dying companies and governments, not exactly a picture of competence (you think OpenAI or Anthropic are asking strategy advice from McKinsey?)

All professional services firms are commodity human time resellers, there is no special sauce or reality behind the 'brand narrative' behind any particular firm.

Yes that's what you think you're paying for.

But in reality, you're paying for AI-written powerpoint slides slapped together by a 23 yr old kid fresh out of college (for another client, with your logo slapped on it), that the senior partner looked at 2 times in a meeting and gave a few nitpicks about.

And the senior partner hasn't ever done anything real either, since again, their whole career has been selling powerpoints and never facing any consequences (upsides or downsides) for the outcomes of their recommendations where they could learn anything.

But of course, the buyer of consulting services, usually an in-house executive at a giant company who had nothing to do with building the company (since that happened 100 years ago), usually also knows nothing.

So what you have is an arrangement where glorified children sell google/chatgpt sourced generic powerpoint 'Expertise' to faceless managerial class members who either:

a) have been promoted beyond their level of expertise and are afraid of taking responsibility for anything for fear of getting fired

or

b) are cynical and experienced and want to launder their actions through an external 3rd party as a reputation-covering mechanism

or

c) the largest cohort: the lazy, do-nothing managerial class who don't want to do work their own teams actually should be taking on so they outsource it

Source: I have worked in consulting for 10 years.

Their valuation comes from the Saas side of the business.

In fact, the bear case on Palantir is always that it's actually a consulting firm masquerading as a Saas firm.

No they're not.

McKinsey would like you to think otherwise of course. They paint a brand image of only doing high-end C-suite strategy work, but ultimately thats a vanishingly small part of the business. Their bread is buttered (just like Accenture) on labor heavy implementation gigs.

Fundamentally, the business of billing out human hours is the same, as are the the incentives. Doesn't matter if its a strategy consulting firm in NYC or an advertising agency in Nepal.

They will all inflate scope, inflate titles/rates, hire mostly cheap new grads, and slowroll-and-expand any engagement.

And they will all take ANY work you give them, regardless of in-house expertise (which they rarely have, given the goal is to pay employees as little as possible to capture margin).

The advertising agency in Nepal will claim to offer strategy consulting to your C-suite, just as McKinsey NYC will happily churn out a powerpoint deck about advertising in Nepal if you're willing to pay them.

Hence why professional services firms all trade at low multiples. It's an undifferentiated commodity business of re-selling human labor in project-based chunks.

It sounds like you're agreeing with my point; good people do good work, the brand name on the invoice billing you for their time is irrelevant.

That said, I would be highly skeptical of any 'very experienced systems engineer' who took a job at a glorified post-collegiate body shop like McKinsey. At least in the US, given all the opportunities available, it means something has gone horribly wrong (EU/ex-US might be different given it's a dead zone for tech).

This is a tell you haven't interfaced with consulting firms much before.

When you say [insert firm] is [good/bad] at [thing], what you're actually saying is:

"The team of kids at the firm's Minneapolis office did a good job on this specific project."

There is no special sauce or "process" that could consistently deliver that outcome given consulting firms are just hourly billing body shops with high turnover that rarely hire true subject matter experts (they don't pay well enough). They have no equity in the advice they hand out, they don't suffer consequences if they're wrong absent doing something illegal, so nothing is ever learned other than how to extract more projects from the next lazy corporate bureaucracy.

It's wholly dependent on the kids who were staffed on the project and how insecure/eager they were for approval at the time.

Average tenure at all professional services firms (doesn't matter if its consulting, advertising or accounting) isn't very long, and there's almost zero knowledge sharing between individual offices of the same firm since they are competing for billable hours. So generally it's a crapshoot every time.

What you can consistently be sure of when hiring McKinsey, is that you are offloading responsibility for decision-making to a 3rd party fictional mirage of 'competence' that everyone pretends is real, so you can claim its not your fault if something goes wrong or is unpopular...and keep your cushy big company executive job.

- no workflow-specific application will ever scale as fast as demand for generalized intelligence

- nobody knows how the market for workflow-specific applications will settle once AI fully penetrates the economy over the next 20 years and what will be left and what feature groupings make sense. Tons of money will be lost trying to figure this out

- applications that target specific workflows are already packed with competitors with a highly tailored distribution strategy for that market who you would need to beat, vs owning a fast growing new category (LLMs)

- it’s very likely the real money will not be made by disrupting software (sub-2% of the economy), it will be made by disrupting other much larger industries

- everybody said the same thing about Google and yet Google quickly topped out as far as how many products they could execute well, now they can’t even stay competitive on AI, the larger the surface area of a company, the more diluted its focus and the more surface area where it can be disrupted

Yes they do if you operate a massive national chain and would like to minimize deadly health incidents due to avoidable human error.

Europe doesn't need to continue using fax machines and bury its head in the sand.

There's also the option to adopt digital technology and just not be an idiot about it this time since the price of intelligence is now effectively 0.

Or, France can continue preventing any productivity increases from technology and watch its social systems continue to collapse.

If it were just a phase out vs. a more aggressive ban do you think this funny HN hypocrisy would suddenly not exist?

Comments would be the same.

HN Headline: Europe dumps US & Chinese tech in key area

HN Response: Fantastic! EU is amazing! Sovereignty over all else!

---

HN Headline: US dumps Chinese tech in key area

HN Response: Booo evil USA! Evil Big Tech! Regulatory capture!!

Yea the evil capitalists are the problem!

Video games are definitely an essential need for the modern leftist internet incel, so to allow capitalists to risk time and money producing games you can choose to voluntarily play, and then allow them to charge rents in exchange for you volunarily playing those games....well that's the definition of criminality!

The government should seize the video game means of production and all video games should be government produced. Quality will definitely go up, not down, the more the government starts meddling in this highly essential market. There's zero downsides to weaponizing the guys with guns to write laws giving you free shit, it works amazing every time.

Switzerland is an okay counter-example I'd say, Singapore not as much since their 'guest workers' aren't real immigrants and get NONE of the social benefits/housing that Singaporeans get. Very very few people become proper immigrants (full residents) to Singapore.

The real problem with both Switzerland and Singapore examples though, they're small tax havens full of rich people.

Kind of like Monaco...which surprise...is actually 70% immigrants!

But when the counter examples are Singapore, Switzerland and Monaco...I think we both have to be honest and look at what we're actually measuring ("the global super rich are higher trust regardless of country of origin").

Finding exceptions doesn't disprove the correlation.

I accept your surrender.

If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.

Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.

Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.

Singapore is just further evidence of my statements being true.

They also brutally enforce social norms and anti-drug policy, and in 2025 they had a total of 35K people granted permanent residency (in a country of 6M people).

In Singapore you're confusing temporary foreign workers with true immigration. In fact Singapore is an extremely low immigration country.

None of these foreign workers qualify for Singapore's public housing or healthcare for example.

I'm pro immigration and left-leaning, but I don't disagree with the right wingers that ethnic homogeneity leads to higher social trust (many studies have demonstrated this). I prefer having immigration though.

Care to offer a rebuttal to any of my statements?

Would love to hear you destroy me with superior logic and/or educate me where I'm wrong.

Or we can just stick to attacking me personally because what I've said makes you emotionally upset.

I think we've reached the logical endpoint of populism.

This bill essentially can be distilled down to: "Companies are required to give me whatever I want for whatever price I want and they have to give me customer support forever."

Will just result in every game moving to a Saas model. And then a bunch of braindead people will be complaining about that as if the thing they voted for didn't cause that shift, requiring another piece of legislation that just kills the smaller publishers altogether.

High trust is a byproduct of an ethnically homogenous society.

I prefer not having good public bathrooms and instead prefer more personal freedoms, economic growth/dynamism, and immigration. But it sounds like you would prefer different trade offs.

I just think its funny that internet populists believe you can have everything. You can't.

Turns out when you're an ethnically homogenous, xenophobic, low immigration country that brutally enforces social norms and anti-drug policy, you can achieve enough compliance to have nice public things even in urban environments.

You cannot have high birth rates, high growth, high immigration, libertarian personal freedoms or much innovation however.

There is no perfect design, only different trade-offs.

This is not intended as rage bait, I am again just distilling marketing language to reality.

If you don't pay the money your government decides you owe them, they will arrest you and put you in prison if you do not comply in virtually all countries. This is fact, not emotional language.

And yes, I fully acknowledge that authoritarian centralization can achieve the most efficient outcomes in certain areas (like infrastructure, military, utilities, etc).

But let's not lie to ourselves and pretend the government is not a giant monopoly that forces you to buy its products at gunpoint whether they are good or not. Allowing too much % of the GDP be captured by this monopoly, always ends in declining living standards, runaway debts, exit controls and ultimately collapse...every single time it has been tried.

HN doesn't need more pro-government voices, as it is already a a left-leaning audience. It needs the opposite, which I'm happy to calmly provide even if constantly being downvoted.

The seller does, because if the government removed that specific tax, it changes nothing about the market value of the home (competing buyers would also not have to pay that tax, buyer capacity to pay doesn't change either way).

Absent the tax, the seller would simply recoup more of the value of their property.

I think the confusion here is that there exists an economic truth, and then a separate and conflicting language/branding around this economic truth to make it more palatable to people having their money taken from them at gunpoint by the state.

I'm bringing up economic reality, you're rebutting this with the government marketing language.

Yes, I know 'employer contributions' is a clever trick to make people believe they aren't paying as much to government as they are, but in economic reality they are paying for this.

Ah yes, a red herring, plus my favorite HN hypocrisy, all in one comment.

The 'information wants to be free' crowd complaining about protecting intellectual property now that it threatens their income stream...has to give the patent trolls and the RIAA a delicious bit of schadenfreude.

I invented this react button style with 8px border radius, ChatGPT stole it from me, I want rents!