Same if you are coding, ask "Is it possible" not "How do I" as the second one will more quickly result in hallucinations when you are asking it for something that isn't possible.
That the relations between EU and USA are not in an historical maximum, no discussion... but enemy? The hyperbole is a little big too far fetched.
> I hope EU companies will stop manufacturing US airplanes and other things.
Independent of how little we may like current US politics: a) it will probably change, more sooner than later. And b) starting a trade war with the US is not very good idea. We like it or not, there are many things that we need desperately to be able to produce. Starting with computers and SW. And please don't start with "OOS SW" as much as I like the idea, and I constantly advocate for it, even if we start yesterday, it will take decades to build everything again.
Though I think the EU is thinking that blowing up critical energy pipelines and seriously damaging Europes economy through the resulting much higher energy prices wasn't too friendly.
All to boost US energy exports, make US manufacturing more competitive and met US geopolitical goals.
ie that's not declaring war - but's it's a pretty big FU wake up call. Turning a blind eye when the US treats central and south american countries with contempt is one thing, but it's a bit of a shock when it openly does the same to you - cf Greenland as another example.
> Though I think the EU is thinking that blowing up critical energy pipelines and seriously damaging Europes economy through the resulting much higher energy prices wasn't too friendly.
Although if you ask "cui bono?" there are some pointers in that direction, is not proven, and there are also pointers in other directions. I refrain of accusing without reasonable proof.
>All to boost US energy exports, make US manufacturing more competitive and met US geopolitical goals.
I cannot blame them for that. Of course anything they do is in their benefit. Some may argue, is precisely what the government should do. It is clear, that while the action in Venezuela was against a very shady government, was done thinking in US interests (as can be clearly seen by titles as "Trump Says Venezuela Will Buy Only US-Made Products From Oil Deal Proceeds").
So yes, they do all in own interest, and the EU isn't and wasn't very different. Alone if you consider the long colonialism years. Now the EU is acting poorly, but I would say not out of altruism, but incompetence and bureaucratic stagnation.
I will not say "is impossible" they do the same in Greenland... For good reason I think. BUT comparing the 2 is also farfetched. I know plenty of people from Venezuela, and unless you were part of the government, you were strongly against it. I know no venezuelan (from the at least 100 I know) that wanted Maduro there. And many are still in party modus. Granted, I know primarily expats, so, survivor bias may apply... but still.
Ruling by oppression does not make you friends until eventually you may find yourself alone. The US government and hyperscalers may think that in the coming decades they can take on the rest of the world on their own, and I'm not looking forward to that future materializing.
> Granted, I know primarily expats, so, survivor bias may apply... but still.
Exactly - the views of people who have left Cuba, Venezuelan, or Iran are typically not representative - by definition they chose or were forced to leave.
Indeed if they have left - why are their views informing armed intervention - should Italian American's force political change through American might in Italy over the people that still live in Italy?
It's all just performative - bottom line Trump doesn't care about good governance and democratic in Venezuela - indeed he has just come out against fresh elections - all he cares about is the flow of money and resources.
But this isn't something unique to Trump - just look at the history if US meddling in central and south america. Democracy and the will of the people ( whatever that is ) isn't the driving factor.
BTW totally accept Europe has a very similar past, and to some extent present - and you could argue that the fact that the EU is less involved in this sort of thing these days is a question of capacity rather than desire.
However that's rather my point - in a globalised world - the differences in power will equalise meaning whether countries like it or not just going around doing what you want is going to no longer be an option - and it's better to gracefully accept that and adjust rather than rage against the dying of the light and inviting in the four horsemen.
Again, that is not speaking well of the acting government. Is just not normal that so much people choose or even worst are forced to leave. That just does not speak well of that regime. Does it? So dismissing their opinions does not seem to be a useful reasoning. I know from friends of mine in many different places in Latin America (mind you, in both "left" (brasil/MX) and "right" (Arg/ Chile) countries) that there are literally thousands of venezuelans in exile. That is not normal and is not a good sign.
> bottom line Trump doesn't care about good governance and democratic in Venezuela
Totally agree. But as I said, is not "Trump". Is not a person, is institutional. Which you could reasonably argue is much worse. But OTOH, there are many people again, does not matter if they went or stay... many people from that very country that are very happy with the intervention...
My way of seeing it is: we have to wait to be able to weight the prons and cons. WWII + Plan marshal was basically the same, wasn't it? And I'm pretty happy with the results and how everything played out...
> Again, that is not speaking well of the acting government.
Being forced to leave in itself is not a bad sign - do people not flee the US to Mexico to avoid justice? Perhaps they were part of an old corrupt cabal running the country for their own benefit?
Or perhaps they had to leave because of dire economic circumstances largely caused by foreign sanctions rather than internal mismanagement?
Let's be clear I'm not a fan of the current governments in the countries I've listed, but then I'm not a fan of Trump either. In neither case does it justify military invention - I'm not advocating abducting Trump to free the America people from a leader who sends troops on to the streets in cities of his political opponents.... and openly ignores the constitution.
> But OTOH, there are many people again, does not matter if they went or stay... many people from that very country that are very happy with the intervention...
The whole point of democracy is you don't have people like you and me making arbitrary choices from afar based on hearsay - and if there isn't democracy - in my view it's still a democratic choice to decide whether the cost of a rebellion is worth the price. Outside countries shouldn't be making that choice for other people ( We decided that your son dying is a price worth paying for a change in political system ).
Note that doesn't mean you shouldn't stand for your values and be assertive - and driving very hard to ensure no military inbalances. However that's a long way from self-interested coups under pre-texts.
> WWII + Plan marshal was basically the same, wasn't it? And I'm pretty happy with the results and how everything played out...
A closer comparison would be the 1953 coup to remove a democratically elected government of Iran in an attempt by UK/US to get back control of the oil. The installation of a non-democratic autocrat who was friendly to the west directly lead to revolution and the situation today.
It’s disingenuous to talk about Maduros popularity without mentioning the brutal sanctions placed on it by the US, which caused the crisis in the first place.
Literally all the people I know from Venezuela, even supporters of Maduro will tell you it started long before. Like 20 to 30 years ago. Even by the period of Chavez, or even before that. I think you don’t know very much about Venezuela. And is very disingenuous state opinions without enough knowledge and lots of ideology.
Every Canadian I know will chime into conversation about how we'll resist when your batshit crazy authoritarian leader decides to invade us. Your government is behaving like an enemy. It's not hyperbole when they're actively waging economic warfare and making worst threats.
USA an enemy to EU because of Venezuela? LMAO, EU has said nothing. In fact we agree. We have no relations to Venezuela. Now if the USA attacks Greenland, that is different.
It seems the be explicit US policy to force people to choose between China and US.
This seems to come from the US obsession with hegemony as the only strategy ( without realising that only works for 1 out of 200 countries ) - everything is framed as a US/China tussle for top dog.
Note this isn't a purely a Trumpian thing - he is just being more open/less subtle about it.
The US has to realise that it's days of global dominance are coming to and end - just as the UK had to ~100 years ago. What I hope is this time we won't have a couple of world wars during the transition to a multi-polar world.
The interesting bit is that Trump and many of his supporters seem (to me) to be openly working to bring an end to US dominance and promote the likes of China to the top spot instead. The US got its global power by being relatively undestroyed by WWII, and thus both willing and able to pay to rebuild the rest of the world, while performing some very sneaky currency and political manipulations. Now the US wants to cut off our allies and strengthen our enemies.
You have to differentiate what countries leaders know and the general population knows.
I'd argue that leaders in South/Central America were under no illusions of how the US operated - the fact that Trump does so openly doesn't really change that. The 'great game' goes on.
What's changed is the wider public perception - both home and abroad. The question is will that create political pressure for a change.
For example, the new openess of the US-Israeli agenda in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere appears to have really shifted the political landscape domestically in the US in terms of unconditional support for Israel. The US self image is potentially shifting - this could have much bigger domestic implications.
Likewise aboard, while the current US hostility to China is not a suprise to the leadership in China - it's a continuation. The view of the US in the general population in China will be shifting, which will potentially create political change in the response.
Now I'm not sure Trump understands he is potentially squandering that soft power, because he lives a bubble which applauds the strongman messaging - and let's face it - he has won 2 elections on the back of it.
That for me here is the real risk - people shifting from thinking they were the good guys ( even if that was not entirely true ) to accepting they are out for themselves - and how that then effects both domestic and foreign policy over time - will US society fragment with people being ever more isolated domestically and as a country abroad?
It is the US and its recent actions, including its rhetoric, that are driving people towards China.
Also, only reacting to US aggression after Greenland is attacked? Not prepare at all and then write a strongly worded letter after the fact?
If, after everything Trump has done, you still think he isn't serious about annexing Greenland then you and people like you, including the eurocrats, are truly hopeless.
Or to put it another way - is the binary US/China choice as top dog a false one?
I suspect most countries would prefer a multi-polar world where the majority is dominant ( democratic ), not one particular country ( autocratic ).
ie why do we have to choose to be under the heel of the US or under the heel of China?
The US has been playing the benevolent dictator role for the last 70 years, but when faced with losing the dictator role, the benevolent facade is dropping.
The US is mistaken to think that countries not wanting US dominance is the same as wanting Chinese dominance - they, in fact, want neither.
They’re pretty good as far as I know, my country didn’t receive any of those but I’ve visited countries in Africa that have received them and they’re getting really great infrastructure and knowledge sharing from them!
China picked up a 99 year lease on Hambantota Port for one Chinese firm in Sri Lanka after they defaulted to the tune of 51Bn.
Zambia defaulted during the pandemic.
Ethiopia defaulted in 2023.
Ghana suspended payments on most external debt to try and make the Chinese debt payments in 2022/2023.
Pakistan just keeps rolling those loans into other loans so it won't default.
Loas got so bad China now owns their power grid.
Suriname defaulted in 2020.
Kenya stopped paying govt workers for awhile to make their loan payments.
"Recent reports from the Lowy Institute and the World Bank indicate that 75 of the world's poorest countries face a record high of approximately $35 billion in debt repayments to China in 2025 alone."
2026 will see more countries default to be pressed into extreme measures to make the payments.
Ok, and? What does that have to do with the USA invading deposing couping 90% of countries in south america, starting wars in the middle east, and saddling all of africa with debt via the IMF and WB?
I guess it comes down to who you your government wants to be in debt to, and if you're willing to potentially starve to death so your government can pay off the loan.
Just when you think it's only the evil dictatorial regime trying to break up NATO along comes a helpful, presumably USA-based HN commenter, to remind you that a lot of USA citizens are also supportive of destroying any semblance of accord with former allied nations and spreading disharmony wherever they go.
It's right for all of us to consider whether our online presence supports fascist dictators be they from USA, Russia, Venezuela, or wherever.
Thanks for the reminder that even here people are sometimes shit, I guess.
I'm pretty sure you know what the parent poster meant, and you should take it as a compliment to you and our HN community that they didn't intend you, or us, to be included in that definition of 'anything US-based'.
Stirring the pot like that isn't helpful to you, to HN itself, or any of our community.
Hackers -the ones from MIT- and smart people hate the US goverment snooping and Echelon like projects more than Europeans. These were either privacy first since forever. If not, they fought hard to say whatever they liked without consequences.
In current times, encrypted accesses to Usenet and IRC via I2P and the like will boost the platforms more than ever. Why? IRC and Usenet are dead simple, Emacs has ports to everything and among being a Lisp env, an editor and a minimal web browser, it's an IRC and Usenet client too even under Android. Oh, and you can set I2P under Android too. Thus, you just have to set Emacs against it. There are several guides online.
Rocksolid BBS' federate with the whole Usenet (and some newsgroups catch anything text based, no binaries). On I2P proxies to Libera.chat, it's just a matter of time to exist. Meanwhile, there's ILITA IRC with I2PD.
Difficult? A Chinese Bluetooth keyboard it's worth very little today, and the gains are enormous. You can chat with people with really small bandwidths but encrypted either with TLS or I2P. You don't have blocks (except bans under IRC), comment limits, enforced timelines and any enshittification coming from social networks. Also, you can short Usenet threads by score. That's it, it's there a brilliant poster and comp.misc, you set the score for all his comment to 1000; then that random Joe will always be on top in any group. Try that with X/Twitter, Reddit or whatever.
You will be able to chat with Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, the Japanese, anyone. Forget tribes, forget the bullshit made to earn zillions of cash from X with shitty fabricated polemics. Forget Meta's snooping and industrial stealing. You aren't enforced to give your real name and address.
Back 15-20 years ago we had many phones with keyboards. They had a purpose but Apple's profits made everyone envious and they started to copy what the leader was doing even thought for some users a keyboard make much more sense.
What make sense for all users would be a swap-able battery. Water-tightness is no longer and excuse with new phones likes foldables that aren't. Fun fact, Apple dumped the swap-able battery before the iPhone was waterproof.
I find it interesting that we seem to have mastered what the human eye can do and even go beyond it with like infrared but somehow we still can't build a chip that can "taste" or "smell".
This is exactly the problem I've been obsessing over. The challenge is that olfaction isn't like vision. you're not detecting photons at discrete wavelengths, you're dealing with ~400 olfactory receptor types responding to millions of possible volatile molecules in combinatorial ways.
MOX sensors (like the SnO2 in this paper) have been around for decades but hit a fundamental ceiling—they require specific coatings to bind to specific VOCs. Want to detect a new substance? You're changing hardware.
The more promising path, IMO, is carbon nanotube (CNT) sensors that actually mimic how our nose works. Instead of measuring bulk resistance changes, you functionalize CNT arrays to respond to specific molecular binding events—much closer to how olfactory receptors operate. detection of new substances becomes a software/ML problem rather than a hardware redesign. That's how biology does it—your nose doesn't grow new receptors, your brain learns new patterns.
Full disclosure: I'm building in this space (https://nosy.network) Nosy is using CNT paired with transformer models to create what we call a "Large Essence Model" (LEM). LEM "GPT for smell" processes scent information similar to how LLMs process text.
Makes total sense to me. Detecting and measuring photons seems much simpler than accurately detecting whole molecules. When we need to detect if a sample contains a certain kind of molecule, it usually requires expensive chemical processes.
Mass spectrometry is a multi-faceted beast, and has many applications. One that comes to mind is ion mobility spectrometry. I am most familiar with FAIMS which is an extremely selective method and can detect trace amounts of specific molecules.
The challenge is piecing together what you have detected to draw conclusions about the sample - in this instance you might detect a specific molecule, but to definitively conclude that it's caused by a particular fungus requires lots of prior testing.
If you just want a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done. But how would you even quantify/qualify the "sensations" of those senses?
Vision is "easy": What I see is what you see is what the machine sees.
A machine shows us what it sees and we can verify that it is working correctly, with a glance.
How would we verify that a machine smells or tastes "correctly"?
> a histogram of all the chemicals that are present, that would probably be doable if not already done.
I'm no olfactory biochemist, but that sounds like science-fiction to me. The, er, reference implementation we're talking about is advanced nanotechnology we don't fully understand.
While we can do stuff like mass-spectrography, that involves destroying complex chemicals and converting them to smaller fragments we can tally, and then guessing at possible configurations they might have originally had.
If someone had a device that could simply tell you the exact chemical formulas of all molecules of any kind in a sample, it would be used everywhere and they would be very rich.
You are right that such device does not exist, but in theory you could combine many analytical techniques to a single black box that could analyze practically all of molecules and particles in the air or even in more complicated samples. It would contain at least some sort of chromatography, nmr, mass spectrometer, infrared spectrometer and various special analytical techniques for some compounds. Also some kind of sample preparation system would be needed.
This would be a very large machine and you would need to provide a sample to it in a test tube or similar manner. Automated blood analyzers in hospitals are maybe the closest thing to a such device.
The machine smells correctly, when the same numbers (or similar when using some norm, e.g. the L2) appear for the same smell (reproducibility) and therefore a mapping (numbers -> smell) can be created. When this starts to exist (practically usable), there can be a database to store the mappings, allowing classification. E.g., the machine says "this tastes like banana". The machines/algorithms/products could itself be rated for precision.
I dont say such machines don't exist, but for my taste (pun intended) the solutions all lack something, either long term stability or having a second source supplier or being able to classify a reasonable amount of tastes or being able to distinguish between two tastes (or lacking all those things together).
I think at least _part_ of the reason why is that it's just a whole lot less useful? There's tons and tons of applications for image and video and the automated analysis of it (for art, documentation or business purposes), whereas taste/smell capture and the analysis of it doesn't have that many useful use-cases (the article points at one of course, I'm not saying there's no use-case but much fewer). So we put a whole lot of effort and money into developing it, which didn't happen for smell.
The human eye is still pretty difficult to beat on some metrics, especially dynamic range (I think top-of-the-line sensors are now competitive, but for a while there was not really any options)
Tesla is the one that started this and cost who knows how many lives. They are the ones who thought it would be great to re-invent the wheel and then when the moron execs at the other companies saw the hype they had to copy it.
The execs probably got promotions for it considering the money saved. The real morons are the customers buying these cars. Brand loyalists don't buy based on logical reasoning.
Trump just kidnapped a foreign leader which violates international AND US law. He is also threatening to do the same in Cuba, Mexico and Columbia as well as just taking Greenland.
At what point is it then necessary? The whole talk is about getting away from this.
ASML is considered 'strategic' and its freedom to operate is significantly constrained by international politics, specifically US-led efforts to limit China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. The Dutch government, under pressure from the United States, has implemented and tightened export license requirements for various ASML products destined for China, including both advanced EUV and some older-generation DUV machines. These controls are tied to US export administration regulations, as some components and underlying technology in ASML machines are of US origin, giving the US jurisdiction. The company must comply with US law, which has led to actions such as rejecting job applications from nationals of sanctioned countries.
Besides this, do you really think ASML's major shareholders, Capital Research and Management Company, Blackrock, Vanguard, would support a board that would consider 'bricking' US machines?
there is a reason why US can force ASML to stop selling its machine to China
learn EUV technology history first, it originated from US department of energy research program, because of cost Gov decided to halt it but multiple private company take over the development but US Gov still hold a patent/license from that technology
"Which are enforced by international agreements. At some point those don't matter anymore either"
and whose in charge of international agreements between US and Netherlands ??? I think you mix up between who in power here
also stop acting like ASML netherland produce the EUV machine, its not lol
ASML US branch actually produce more parts, so if EU want to cut off the US then they also self sabotage themselves since 50%+ machine for Giant EUV is happening at US soil
If putin, then trump and their people agreed on that we are no longer living in a rule based world, patents, licences etc. would hold little value. Realpolitik of the globe will kick everyone's ass.
US let Russia take a chunk of ukraine and China and Russia to certain extend let US control its own hemisphere
just eat up that some major power always playing geo-politic war games that exert its influences
they maybe have a friction and want to mess with each other but the domain of influence is always there and they generally dont want to cross the line for it
Given this thread, imagine a complete rupture of relations between US and EU such that US orders US companies to stop supplying hardware or services to EU.
In this scenario, I don't think it is correct to consider normal business relations, rather "is it *materially* possible?"
? EUV lithography was an international undertaking, some US research projects sure, but also Japanese (Hiroo Kinoshita, 80's), Russian (Georgiy Vaschenko, who is on all the patents for the 13.5 nm laser used (https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Georgiy+Vaschenko)), Dutch (of course), etc.
It's kind of ironic to think of a company as state controlled by the US given how anti-state-controlled the US can be when it comes to companies. ASML has majority shareholders in US companies like Intel and co, but that doesn't mean the US government has a say in it.
I mean they do because of international politics - just like the Dutch government has a say in things - but still.
The most absurd thing I have read regarding this topic is people asking for advice on life style changes they can do in order to reduce the Ozempic side effects...
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