jnurmine

[*] I'm likely "holding it wrong" as I've as of yet failed to experience the "nowhere close to SOTA" claim. I'm not sure I can tell the output of so-called SOTA (Claude, at work) apart from Mistral's, but different people probably use things in different ways with different prompts, or maybe I fill in any blanks mentally somehow, no idea.

Edit: trying to output single asterix for the note

Can you give it a program, a state of output, and tell it to work backwards?

It's mostly a branding issue, in my opinion.

In my experience, one concrete problem is that so many people misunderstand or are unaware of basic things about the EU and why EU even exists. With the former I mean things like how the EU Parliament is put together, the relation of the EU Commission to the EU Parliament, how is the President of the EU Commission chosen (no, it's not "undemocratic"), what does Schengen mean, what is the Euro and WHY does it exist, why was there legislation which mentioned the curvature of cucumbers, and so on.

As there is no big picture, or it is rejected due to ideological reasons, the lack of knowledge and misunderstandings then manifest as fear of the unknown (=the EU). At this point, these people become against everything in EU: whatever new things are proposed from the EU side, it is somehow "lousy", "bad", "failing", "won't work anyway", and so forth. Any EU company has "bottom-barrel products" and "can't succeed", euro cannot work between countries, Europe is "weak" and "gay" and "collapsing".

Also, some people look at an individual member state and confuse it with the whole EU. For example, the nuclear power stance of Germany is seen as an EU-mandated position and then the whole EU is seen to be against nuclear power. This can also work in reverse: Poland sends generators to Ukraine, well done Poland and why is the weak and failing EU doing nothing (except the generators were from RescEU stores, and one such store was located in Poland, so EU was sending them).

When people understand what the EU is and know the basics, of course they might still disagree with things, that's normal, but at least the arguments are more factual.

Examples for Europe, 2025 vs. 2024:

  Sweden: -68%
  Belgium: -53%
  Germany: -48%
  France: -37%
  Switzerland: -28%
  Portugal: -22%
  Italy: -18%

Yes, Chinese companies CAN do high quality products. Of course they can, they're not lazy or stupid. But if the price difference isn't too big, I'd rather buy something made close-by, to keep the money in the local economy (my country or Europe), instead of bleeding it into some faraway place.

Some people do not consider that aspect, they only look at the price in numbers and think that's the end-all, which it isn't. There is an "invisible cost" added. On the surface it might be cheaper for me, but it ends up hurting the local industry, it will create unemployment, at some point social problems, and so forth; in short: it will harm the place I call my home.

For this reason, to me a Chinese (or US, whatever) product would have to be vastly cheaper than something made close-by, yet have a parity in quality to be worthwhile at all. And the equation of vastly superior quality for a substantially cheaper price is rare.

As for the car industry and cheaper Chinese cars: I don't see the how German industry is "dying", as it's not really a level playing field. It's easy for Chinese producers to be cheaper when the Chinese government subsidizes the exports. I'm sure Germany could do higher quality cars cheaper than the Chinese, if the German government were to subsidize a large part of each produced car. Would government subsidies then mean that the industry is "not-dying"? I don't think so.

If things are of higher quality, higher cost is acceptable to many.

As a trivial example, talking about a ca. 5 EUR purchase here, I bought a German-made pencil sharpener (Möbius-Ruppert nr. 0603 "Vertex").

It's basically a small metallic block (brass) with two holes with blades attached. It is surprisingly heavy and while it may sound strange, the sharpening result is simply excellent. (I bought some Japanese-made pencils to pair with it)

Chinese sharpeners can be had for under 0.5 EUR at best, they can be very cheap.

However, I had Chinese sharpeners and they actually were the reason I ended up buying a German one. Unless I lose the German sharpener, I will never need to buy another.

For example, Duralex drinking glass Le Picardie (as in the article), transparent, 36 cl, 18.90 EUR for 6-pack.

That is 3.15 EUR per glass.

At that price the price/quality is extremely good. Chinese products won't even come close to this.

Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?