Thank you US-americans for preferring Danish meds instead of just eating better and doing some sports :P

XDDDD

Of course, overconsumption of everything is wasteful, by definition. I get other people’s critique. You don’t need AI to tell you what to eat for breakfast, and you will be better off sharing your worries with a human. You might write better code yourself in many cases, it’s usually worth trying (and search for help once needed). But LLMs are tools, and there is plenty of proper use for them.

Energy-wise, the European alternative is more likely to be closer to sustainable. Also, the water stress may look different in some European countries. Scandinavia has been experimenting a lot with transferring heat from data centers to district heating systems. I don’t think they would care much about that in US (you need district heating, first of all…).

Solidagent is a good in-between option, they run global state-of-art “open source” models on EU-located servers. Regardless how open they are, models like Deepseek are much more sustainable to walled gardens of Big Tech (not to mention that Deepseek actually used less resources to achieve similar performance).

And as others said, MistralAI also works well.

I’ve been using Koofr and I am very happy. It works smooth and fast, they have great blogs for more custom stuff. Backuping local folders is very easy, I also got to replace Google Photos with it (2 in 1!).

Nextcloud seem to be a standard for many things. I’ve barely used it, you would need to choose a provider, maybe it would work with Hetzner. I think Nextcloud requires more work to set up than Koofr or OneDrive, but is more customizable.

“Countering a common criticism against Esperanto, the statistician Svend Nielsen has found no significant correlation between the number of Esperanto speakers and the similarity of a given national native language to Esperanto.”

Wikipedia describing the results of this paper: https://svendvnielsen.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/explaining-the-density-of-esperanto-speakers-with-language-and-politics/

This article in German says they can build up to 280,000 drones a year:

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/kroatien-drohnenabwehr-eu-russland-100.html

(Note: The company was founded in 2018, so this is what can be done in 8 years with limited funding)

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the “success culture.” Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider “winning against the whole society” as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!

Simplistic (Europe and USA are non-homogenous), but this simplicity is needed to build a positive myth. And a positive myth might need a region, a culture, and institutions willing to stand for it - however universal it is.

I agree and appreciate the article a tonne.

And I think it is more to the point, and less naive, than might seem after the first reading. The issue is the reliance on Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Thinking we need European Google or Microsoft to solve is a failure of imagination. We (largely) have the technology to do it differently. What we lack is the will to do it differently.

Almost everything Big Tech does could be solved with a protocol and diverse server providers. Prove me wrong.

(I mean, what Big Tech does for its presumed users, “the common people”…)

Yes! The US economy relies so much on overinvestment. All the American giants and startups had international investment fueling them for years before they made profits. The dollar relies on everybody securing savings in US treasury. The less of it the better.

And my diversified European, Latin American, and Asian stocks slap as well (⌐■_■) I need to get more stuff from Canada!

Also, Thunderbird solves my next issue with an app for desktop sync, thanks!

I understand that this is a feauture. I guess depends on usability-privacy tradeoff. If their app was easier to use, I would probably have stuck with it.

I used both Google and Samsung Calendar before, the Samsung one was much smoother and intuitive. With CalDAV it is easy to switch between services, I’m trying out Etar now but can always switch back or to sth else.

I’m trying out Etar, looks great (picking which calendars to sync or not is a bit slow, but that is a one-time job ¯\(ツ)/¯)

Yes, CalDav is the thing, thank you!

Thanks! I got it set up now (⌐■_■)

I try to pay with Swish when possible. But it is a bit cumbersome.

Blik, the Polish member of the European Mobile Payment Systems Association has a contactless payment solution that works as smooth as using a card. But I think they somehow collaborate with Mastercard on it. Some terminals in Sweden apparently can connect with Swish via Bluetooth, but I never got to set it up. So I use the QR code…

I wish these mobile payment systems would be integrated better across borders.

Yes!

• doomscrolling to fediversing;
• getting off Coca Cola and Pepsi Co. products (alternatives are both tastier and healthier, too many to list here, it will depend on where you live, anything from Fritz Cola and Green Cola through VitaminWell to your local kombucha brand);
• Google Photos and Dropbox to Koofr, I got two-in-one;
• Google Search to Karma/Ecosia.
• Google Translate to DeepL and Reverso Context (the latter being much more helpful if you actually want to learn);
• ChatGPT to Mistral and solidagent. Thinking you need a larger model is often like thinking you need a larger car: it really depends how you use it. With some brain power a smaller and less “reasoning” model might give you more to sieve through;
• Google Maps to Citymapper in Stockholm/other big cities (It was always JakDojade in Poland <3);
• it is not a change as much as an add-on, but getting Minimalist Phone on top of my Android (I hope I will get established in a de-Googled environment in a foreseeable future).

And possibly the biggest one: Divesting!!!

As my antivirus expires, I am looking forward to switch to Bitdefender. I’ve been avoiding most American non-digital services before. Using alternatives to credit cards in real life is annoying in Sweden, but I try my best. It is easy online, though.

Short answer: Yes, it is.

Long answer: 59% of their shares are in free-float, and 43% of the free-float shares are owned by some institutions from North America (The non-free-float shares are owned by European organizations). The rest of free-float is European. Assuming all the North American shareholders are from the USA (which is likely not true), 75% of shares are owned by European institutions:

https://group.hugoboss.com/en/investors/share/shareholder-structure