[NitpickLawyer]

> Not sure what led to that choice.

It's the EU AI act. I've tried their cute little app a week ago, designed to let you know if you comply, what you need to report and so on. I got a basically yes, but likely no, still have to register to bla-bla and announce yak-yak and do the dooby-doo, after selecting SME - open source - research - no client facing anything.

It was a mess when they proposed it, it was said to be better while they were working on it, turns out to be as unclear and as bureaucratic now that it's out.

[flanked-evergl]

If I was Russia and/or China and I wanted to eliminate EU as a potential rival economically and militarily, then I don't think I could have come up with a better way to do it than EU regulations. If it was not for the largess of the US, then EU would become a vassal of Russia and/or China. And I think the US is running out of good will very rapidly. The EU could, of course, shape up, but it won't.

[cedilla]

It's hard not to react sarcastically to this. But I will try:

There's nothing special about EU regulations vis-a-vis other laws. China, Russia and the US also have laws, many of which are also perceived as overly bureaucratic.

[rafaelmn]

Identifying something as a critical competitive industry, then place a bunch of hurdles in front of it's development, and sit confused when we get left behind - that's the EU special.

[cloudrkt]

Left behind on what exactly? Privacy laws? Consumer rights?

[cooper_ganglia]

Technology, AI, semiconductors, cloud computing, consumer electronics, social media, app ecosystems, e-commerce, military technology, energy independence, venture capital, unicorns and scaling, banking innovation, space exploration, biotech and pharma...

[chpatrick]

Novo Nordisk has a market cap of 250 billion last I checked.

[airstrike]

...to name a few

[pipes]

Growth industries.

[viccis]

>then EU would become a vassal of Russia

Russia is currently struggling to make inroads on invading its relatively small neighbor, so I really doubt it would be able to make a bunch of nuclear powers who have a nuclear alliance its "vassal"

I understand that Russia's not fighting just Ukraine but rather Ukraine with massive US and EU assistance but my point still stands.

[flanked-evergl]

It's not struggling as much as Ukraine. Russia, if it was struggling, would accept a negotiated peace. It's quite clear that the last thing Russia wants is peace.

[wredcoll]

I love how the constant comeback to this is "well they're sorta-kinda winning the war" as if maybe barely defeating ukraine is some kind of mark of global dominance.

[bigbadfeline]

> winning... defeating...dominance

People really don't understand war and death, they treat them as some silly sports game. As a result they completely miss the boat not only about military conflicts but also about peace politics.

[lawlessone]

>It's not struggling as much as Ukraine.

OK but Ukraine isn't trying to invade a small country next door and claim a global superpower status.

It's expected they would struggle against a much larger neighbor invading them.

Russia is struggling where nobody expected it to struggle.

[wkat4242]

It's because lives are meaningless to the Russian government. They'll just throw more literal bodies at the problem. Nobody's going to stop them as they're a dictatorship. And now they're even getting North Koreans as extra cannon fodder.

Ukraine doesn't have that "benefit".

[holoduke]

Ukraine is used by the west as connonfodder by western institutions that control western politicians. The west literally doesn't care about life's of ordinary citizens. Specialy if its outside of its country. From supporting cruel regimes, to supporting genocide in Israël, to cheap labour without worker rights and so on. The west isnt a grain better than anybody else.

[testrun]

Russia invaded Ukraine. To stop the killing, all Russia needs to do is get out of Ukraine. Ukraine is a sovereign country, Russia has zero authority over Ukraine.

[wkat4242]

"The West" wasn't really relevant in this discussion, all I wanted to point out is that Russia has a much larger pool of cannonfodder who can't refuse (the benefit of a dictatorship) so drawing things out is always to their benefit.

That the west is also doing some bad stuff (though really in the EU we're not that bad IMO, most EU countries recognise Palestina now, it's just for a few blocking hard measures against Israel) isn't really a relevant topic in this. We're not going to have boots on the ground in this conflict until an agreement is reached because of the risk of escalation.

[wredcoll]

'The west' can do bad things while not actually being worse. It's a complicated world.

[netsharc]

I was going to say "you're nuts!", but... I wouldn't say Ukraine is being used as cannonfodder, but the EU is very interested in Russia not winning in Ukraine, because if Putin wins, the EU will have a big refugee crisis (although "slightly better" refugees since they're white and share a similar culture, compared to the reception of brown and Muslim refugees).

Also the EU pays for countries like Turkey and Libya to prevent refugee ships from coming to their continent. If that means sinking those ships with people on them, well...

[scotty79]

Dictators, not unlike markets, can stay irrational way longer than you (or a country) can stay solvent.

That's why democracies are so good. Because it's hard to do too stupid things in them persistently.

[OtherShrezzing]

I think you have an over-aggrandised opinion of Russia's geopolitical, military, and economic power.

[Cthulhu_]

I'd rather be free and my data safe than be an economic world leader. False dichotomy, I know, but I don't mind the people before money mindset.

[flanked-evergl]

This is a false dichotomy, you can have privacy and still be militarily and economically relevant.

But say that you were right, and you have to choose between privacy and relevance, if you choose privacy, then once you are entirely economically dependent on Russia (Europe is still paying more in energy money to Russia than in aid to Ukraine) and China — when Europe is a vassal — it won't be able to make its own laws anymore.

[staplers]

  I'd rather be free and my data safe than be an economic world leader.

You often need the latter to maintain the former.

[Y_Y]

How often?

[staplers]

Ask any non-five-eyes or backdoored chip producing country.

[Y_Y]

They don't post here often

[londons_explore]

Almost every country or group of countries today is either a world leader, nearly a world leader, or a vassal state of one of the first two.

[jimbokun]

It's not clear that the inscrutable process described is providing either.

[ekianjo]

With chat control you won't get either.

[bee_rider]

We’ll see if these LLMs end up having a real use, once the “giving away investor money” business model dries up. They really might! But it seems early to say that the EU has missed out on anything, before we see what the thing is.

In general, it is hard to compare the US and the EU; we got a head start while the rest of the world was rebuilding itself from WW2. That started up some feedback loops. We can mess up and siphon too much off a loop, destroying it, and still be ahead. They can be setting up loops without benefitting from them yet.

[myhf]

In the 1940s, the CIA wrote the Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] explaining methods to damage their rivals' operations through largely bureaucratic means.

Today, we have fully automated the methods from this manual in the form of LLM Chatbots, which we have for some reason deployed against ourselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual

[thenaturalist]

Comments like yours remind me that while HN is a competent technological forum, it's best to never, ever, engage in serious macro-economic/ int. politics discussions as the average user engaging in the latter topics is so far off base with common knowledge in these areas, any insider wouldn't find common ground.

Overconfidence bias is real.

Knowing your circle of competence is a gift.

[jimbokun]

They seem to be improving a lot on their defense spending, at least.

Will take them a while to get out from under the US umbrella. But acknowledging the problem is the first step.

[flanked-evergl]

I'm grateful that Europe is increasing defence spending, but I'm cynical regarding Europe because so far, it's been absolutely no hindrance to Russia's expansionism, and in some ways it has inadvertently provided Russia with material assistance while Russia engages with expansionism.

Spending on defense is not the same as. Norway is spending more on everything all the time and getting worse outcomes all the time. We spend more on police than ever, even per capita, and crime is up, we spend more on military than ever, and our actual metrics are down. I think with most of Europe the defense spending is the same, I hope I'm wrong, but if you up regulation then you have to spend more to get the same results, and Europe has runaway regulation in addition to people who try to hijack institutions for other purposes.

[suddenlybananas]

The EU is a vassal of the US, that is its entire raison d'être.

[t43562]

I think some in the US see it the opposite way - a system for preventing the US from dominating it piecemeal. This explains their support for "free speech" for the various neo-(no we're not nazi!) parties in the EU.

[falcor84]

What? How did you arrive at that?

[suddenlybananas]

To be honest, it's so blatantly obvious (especially with the recent meeting of European leaders and Trump) that I find it difficult to understand your surprise. I mean Christ, Europe is teeming with American bases.

[llbbdd]

Yeah I don't know how this isn't just the common understanding of the situation. The EU/UK is constantly working around whatever the US wants to do, and the US does whatever it wants.

[wredcoll]

At the risk of trying for nuance online, therebis a rather large difference between america being (the only) superpower and a country being a vassal.

[falcor84]

raison d'être means "reason for existence" and none of what you said supports that assertion

[lawlessone]

>(especially with the recent meeting of European leaders and Trump)

I got the same impression seeing Trump meet Putin. The US is a vassal state of Russia.

[lawlessone]

>If I was Russia and/or China and I wanted to eliminate EU as a potential rival economically and militarily, then I don't think I could have come up with a better way to do it than EU regulations.

Personally I'm not too worried anyone is going to become a global superpower from generative AI slop.

[wredcoll]

Ah yes, famous industrial/scientific powerhouse... russia???

[llbbdd]

I'm amazed that they could pull themselves together enough to publish an app at all.

[totetsu]

this part? https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/16/

[L_226]

Which app is that?

[NitpickLawyer]

Check here - https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/assessment/eu-ai-act-co...

Start on the right, and click through the options. At the end you'll get a sort of assessment of what you need to do.

[crimsoneer]

I mean, neither the UK nor South Korea are in the EU, nor does it have equivalent laws. I suspect ongoing push from US and China that nobody has the right to be involved in AI regulation that isn't them and just general vibes.

[jonas21]

South Korea has a number of unusual regulations, including extremely strict restrictions on spatial data [1] and an AI law that, among other things, requires foreign companies to have a representative physically in South Korea to answer to the government [2]. So it's not too surprising to see it on the list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

[2] https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/south-korea-ai-law-2...

[NitpickLawyer]

> nor does it have equivalent laws

The UK has their chat thing where if you provide chat (even with bots!) you have to basically be a megacorp to afford the guardrails they think "the kids" need. It's not clear if open source models fall into that, but who's gonna read 300+ pages of insanity to make sure?

[kookamamie]

At the same time Time selected Henna Virkkunen on their AI 200 list: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305860/henna-v... - they are one of the architects of this AI Act nonsense.

[whimsicalism]

i don’t think it is incorrect to select an architect of this regulation as one of the most influential people on AI

[jimbokun]

Doesn't have to be influential in a positive sense.

[whimsicalism]

exactly

[flanked-evergl]

EU is fully invested into virtue signalling over actual tangible results. People keep saying how much stronger EU's economy is than Russia's, and how Russia is basically a gas station with Nukes, but the thing is, even with EU's "strong" economy Russia has them by the balls. They have to go hat in hand begging the US to step in because they can't do anything themselves, and the US is not going to keep propping up EU long term, especially not with how hostile the Europeans are towards Americans.

I live in Europe, I don't want Europe to become a vassal of China/Russia - but if something drastically does not change it will. Russia is Europe's Carthage, Russia must fall. There is no future with a Russia as it is today and a Europe as it is today in it, not because of Europe, but because of Russia. If Europe does not eliminate Russia, Russia will eliminate Europe. I have no doubts about this.

But as things stand, there just seems no way in which we practically can counter Russia at all. If Europe had determination, it would have sent Troops into Ukraine and created a no-fly zone — it should do that, but here we are.

[switchbak]

"If Europe does not eliminate Russia, Russia will eliminate Europe" - this aggressive warmongering is what led to the Russian invasion (NATO expansion), and is actively making the world a much less safe place to be.

[flanked-evergl]

The west has done everything to make nice with Russia for decades, every new American president since at least Bush 2 thinks that this time he will be the one to charm the Russians, and every time the Russians shit the bed. The Russians don't want to make nice, they want to destroy the west. And I don't want to be destroyed.

[llbbdd]

It's a little annoying honestly that this reply is downvoted to oblivion and nobody seems to have a real reply. I'm not sure that there's a "everybody just gets along" answer to this, and maybe that's why.

[suddenlybananas]

Russia is not a serious threat to Europe. France has nukes and a competent army, and Russia has been shown to be a relatively weak power in its difficulties invading Ukraine. Even if they win the war ultimately, it took so long that it is difficult to imagine them winning in a war with serious powers like France.

[OKRainbowKid]

Militarily, I agree. But Russia is actively (and successfully) eroding out democracy and societal coherence. They don't need to win militarily if they can instead promote infighting and help corrupt and russia-friendly parties rise to power.

[mvuijlst]

This is obviously more a risk in the US than in Europe.

[suddenlybananas]

Blaming the rise of the far-right on Russia is a bit absurd. Immigration isn't popular even if you think it should be.

[cycomanic]

There is plenty of evidence that Putin is propping up far right actors all over Europe, is running considerable Desinformation campaigns but yeah it's all those pesty immigrants fault /s

[wkat4242]

France has a few nukes, less than 300. And mainly sub based (and only a handful subs). Nothing compared to Russia which has 5500. They could be taken out of play.

[ldng]

oh yeah, major nuclear winter, that's the solution ... /s

[wkat4242]

No, but it makes a first strike by Russia possible.

It's better to have a balanced number of warheads so that this isn't possible.

For this reason the US and Russia always negotiated before reducing warhead numbers bilaterally. But the EU on its own is not in the same league.

[flanked-evergl]

> Russia is not a serious threat to Europe.

Ukraine will all the backing of Europe is making no progress, if this was true, Russia would be expelled from Ukraine tomorrow, as it should be. Ukraine is an embarrassment for Europe, it strongly suggests that Europe is basically meaningless on the global stage.

And the most embarrassing of all is, Europe is still buying gas from Russia.

[switchbak]

"Ukraine will all the backing of Europe is making no progress" - Far from "making no progress", Ukraine is slowly getting eroded. Russia has serious problems in sustaining this conflict, but Ukraine's are far more serious and near-term.

"suggests that Europe is basically meaningless on the global stage" ... it will take many years of deep military investment to provide a proper counter to Russian aggression. As of right now, Europe has been shown to be in a very weak and exposed position. This was obvious years ago, and should not be a surprise today. This is true of most of the NATO member states.

That said, simply because Ukraine is unable to expel Russia does not mean that it is a grand threat to Europe proper. Perhaps some eastern countries face some limited conflict, but I'm not convinced by this "domino theory" that Russia would engage in a WWII style invasion of Poland, Finland, etc.

[flanked-evergl]

I'm entirely convinced that Putin and others in Russian leadership will stop at nothing to destroy western civilization, China is mostly indifferent to it, Russia is antagonistic to it. They know our weaknesses, they know how to get under our skin and we seem to have no defence to this. If Europe ever gets out of this slump it has to take out Russia, if not, Russia will eventually take out Europe.

[holoduke]

Man that sounds just like a victim of propaganda. Ever looked at your own governments? Are they really serving your needs?

[llbbdd]

Yes? Are yours not?