> But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.
Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.
Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.
> Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level.
How would an EU organization have less ties to EU businesses than a US corporation that has already demonstrated that it doesn’t care about small EU businesses?
The EU is an inter-national organisation in the sense of "between nations", this means it works almost exclusively with government agencies. This means that it currently has quite limited capability for directly interacting with companies active inside the union.
For example: the DMA was passed in 2022 and the commission took a full year to designated the first six gatekeepers, and two more years to identify two further gatekeepers. So that's the EU directly interacting with 2.5 companies per year. In comparison the EU has about 33.5 million companies.
Keep in mind this is written by a pro-Swedish business lobbyist in Texas, not by an international relations analyst.
I also don't think the US leadership has any plans for Sweden in particular, this is more likely the result of a top down directive to the US MFA to sign tech deals "in Europe" and signing something with Sweden just happened to line up nicely with the calendar for other reasons.
Additionally - furtherance of facial recognition technology would impact travelling to foreign jurisdictions.
One of the most common ways foreign travellers get flagged when travelling internationally is for social media posts made under their own name that their destination country's government may not like. Traditionally if you've kept yourself pseudo-anonymous, you've largely been safe. But if we get to a point where pseudo-anonymous accounts are associated with pictures of people's faces, it will become significantly less pleasant to travel internationally for a lot more people.
The internet has explicitly R-18 chats. Random IRC channels are not nightclubs. I am moving the goal posts back, if you touch them again we're escorting you off of the field.
I can't put a 10 page narrative on how my specific motor should work into a hacker news post ;) you can also imagine the above where the goal is to have the ai exceed the performance of stock motors.
The colleague implicitly agreed that comparing the output was a valid way to settle the matter as they took part in the test, so they weren't using "better" in the way you propose.
I wasn’t really discussing the colleague, but either way, from:
> A colleague was convinced Claude is better so we played a game. We used the claude code and codex harness and I implemented some prs they needed with gpt5.5 and opus4.7 and asked them to identify which came from which only from the code.
I don’t think it’s obvious that they specifically agreed that losing the game meant that. They might just have thought “sure, it might be fun”, if they even gave it that much thought.
“So we played a game” is rather vague and I feel it’s a bit of a leap to read it as: “as an explicit outcome of their claim that Claude is better, we made a formal bet as to whether they could tell the difference in the output, the failure of which would mean a full retractation of their statement”.
If you told someone "I think vim is better for writing code" and they proposed the comparison above as a way to prove it, would you accept and take part of the test?
Apparently the colleague did take part, so I think the evidence we have is that the colleague agreed with the interpretation that "better" was "produces discernible better code".
Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.
Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.
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