TBH there will likely be a _huge_ demand for "digital sovereignty consulting" over the next while, especially in the EU (and maybe also Canada).
Here in Denmark, the previously unthinkable is happening: because of Schleswig-Holstein's leadership in moving to OSS, the Danes are now seeking to learn from the Germans (or at least, that particular set of Germans) about digitalisation! That trend, plus the Danish government's all-in-on-vendors/consultants approach to digitalisation, will likely open a sizeable market - and the traditional vendors like Netcompany have taken a large beating in public opinion themselves, so it's a good time to start something in this direction.
And at the Digital Tech Summit in Copenhagen this year, digital sovereignty (and the lack thereof) was a very prominent theme across both public and private sector talks. As was the comparative advantage the EU has in _trust_, and how that helps e.g. businesses around cybersecurity, privacy-oriented SaaS, and data management expand even outside the EU - which makes it extra infuriating to see continued political interest in things like Chat Control and cracking down on GrapheneOS. This trust is IMHO pretty much the only advantage the EU has in the global tech marketplace, and we're busy throwing it away.
As a Canadian-American living in Denmark, I've seen both sides of this. In short: trust and mistrust are _both_ self-reinforcing concepts.
To take an example - would I want the current US government to be better at compiling information across all its agencies / departments? Absolutely not. What it does with its current level of consolidation is authoritarian enough that I'm not moving back there any time soon. I hear similar sentiments from my Hungarian colleagues, who are quite familiar with competitive authoritarianism in their own country.
Of course, this mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. I don't trust the US government, so I want it to be bad at its job - but then it's bad at its job, so I see it as ineffective and bloated and continue to mistrust it.
IMHO the only way out of this spiral is the hard way: a system must do the hard work to show itself trustworthy, and it must do so _before_ people will entrust it with the information that would make the job of being trustworthy easier. As with human relationships, it takes a _lot_ more work to repair trust than it does to break it. Unlike with human relationships, you also have systemic factors: the system needs an unbroken series of good, principled leaders; it needs to visibly and credibly punish corruption, not turn a blind eye; it needs to de-escalate divisions, not inflame them; it needs various institutional safeguards to work properly, not chop away at them; it needs to allow meaningful dissent and criticism, not crack down on it; it needs to learn from expertise, not undermine it.
Most importantly: the system needs to learn from its failures, and adjust the rules and incentives of the system itself to prevent those failures from recurring. This is generational work.
I see a lot of complaints about scope creep and vision drift here, so I'll add a different perspective: I use Notion right now, but have been considering a switch to Obsidian for a while now (variety of reasons, chief among them a desire to reduce my own dependence on US-based tech platforms and tools).
The lack of something like Notion databases / tables was the last thing stopping me from migrating over; I found this feature really helpful for organizing my thoughts and tasks as I want them organized, and not having it would have been a noticeable UX regression for me.
With this launch, I'll take a deeper look. It's that simple: it provides a feature many want, largely because it's seen as a killer feature of comparable closed platforms.
Government investment in science is...the only way basic science happens, really. I'd recommend reading The Entrepreneurial State [1] here: in essence, basic science pays off too slowly to interest even the most deeply-pocketed capital interests, but it pays off, so wise societies invest in it; Silicon Valley owes its existence to massive formative public investments in underlying technologies.
Not to mention that smart people generally prefer to live in places that value and protect science, so it's _also_ an indirect form of geopolitical talent recruitment. (See brain drain + brain gain impacts of science policy, for instance. There's a strong argument to be made that US mid-20th-century dominance in science and engineering was largely driven by a lot of very smart people fleeing Nazi Germany.)
Basic science isn't so much a lottery ticket as a bond with unknown maturity measured in decades, a _very_ high rate of return, a high minimum investment, and dividend-like payouts created by adding skilled scientists, engineers, etc. to your tax base.
Science is incredibly cheap. It can have a long time to mature but interestingly that is dependent on the number of "bonds", with quicker returns when there's more "bonds" issued.
I'd say there's 4 common classes of misinterpretation:
Perception bias:
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Most of science is performed by grad students and academics. Neither of which are known to make much money and the former is known to make poverty wages lol. I can say as a recent graduate that one summer internship at a big tech company gave me more money than my university's spend for the rest of the year. And as an intern I was still much cheaper than a full employer. My equivalent yearly salary was higher than most professors in my department too.
I'd say 80+% of research is being done at this scale. A few hundred grand per year, if even that.
We often hear about the big science projects and this creates the notion that it's expensive but it's usually misleading. You might hear news like the $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission, but that's spread out over many years. Work began in 2015, construction in late 2019, full assembly in early 2022, and launch in late 2024, where there's 6 years of flight and the budget is for a mission life until late 2034. Amortized that's $5.2bn over 19 years, so $274m/yr ($347m if we conservatively count from 2019).
Distribution:
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Most mega projects have a cost that's distributed over many funders. Take CERN. It cost about $10b to build, took 10 years to construct, and costs $1bn/yr to operate. That's distributed through many countries, the largest contributor being Germany, which only accounts for ~20% (so $200m/yr), followed by the UK (15%), France (13%), and Italy (10%). There are also occasional contributions by the US.
Scale:
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All these numbers are large, but they're also the biggest projects and there's few projects that big. $100m seems like a lot of money to us because we're imagining it in our bank accounts. But that's not the same as money in a government's bank. The US budget is $6.8 Trillion! $100m is 0.0015% of that! In other words, if you had a million dollars to spend each year you're talking about $1.5k (or $1.47 of a $1000 budget). This is not a big ticket item.
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I'm sure you agree with most of what I've said but I wanted these points "on the record" since we live in a time where we're frequently arguing about $1 from a $10000 budget instead while ignoring the $1000 items. We need to get our heads straight. It's like someone complaining about the cost of your bus ticket while they're buying the latest fully loaded Macbook Pro. I don't think their actual concerned is the budget...
100% agree that spending on R&D is _very_ efficient in terms of just about anything you could conceivably care about - downstream economic outcomes, quality of life, geopolitical strength / prestige, etc.
For instance, in 2023 the US spent ~$190B in federal funding on R&D [1], compared to a budget of ~$6T [2] - i.e. about 3%. It's really really not a lot when you consider the aggregate impact over decades.
But it is still a lot in an absolute sense. This funding supports an entire ecosystem across both academia and industry that directly creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of which require highly specialized skills. I mention this not to create a sense of sticker shock, but to drive home the point that making this investment is a big and complex task - and one that takes a long time to rebuild. I firmly believe that the current chaos in the US will take at least a generation to repair.
Just a note you may find helpful. I feel your post is too long to be digested and responded to in a forum like this.
Maybe I'm wrong, and if so I apologise! But as soon as I saw the essay like format, I knew I wasn't going to spend time on it. I think shorter points that provoke discussion may work better here.
Thanks for the support. I know I can be wordy but I also come to HN to have more nuanced conversations than somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. Honestly, I think a lot of political fighting is caused by removal of nuance and the tendency to be rushing for rushing's sake.
The tricky thing is, long posts like this tend to provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing, and then either going way down into the definitional weeds or galloping to the next nitpick without acknowledging any error.
I think the long content is fine as it stands, but it isn't necessarily a good seed for discussion in a comment thread (as opposed to an underlying article).
> provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing
I'd say that's where the community is made. Either the community supports this type of behavior or not.
I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.
But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.
I appreciate the comment, I know I can be a bit wordy. I tried to organize so it's visually easy to get the tldr and each block could tell you the tldr from the first sentence. If you have suggestions of how to distill, I'm open to the feedback. Or if you'd like to add a tldr yourself that's a good contribution.
But also, this is HN. I wouldn't have this conversation on Twitter and I hope we can have more nuanced conversations here, as well as I hope the average user has a bit more intelligence/attention than a place like Reddit. Maybe I'm assuming incorrectly
Agree that it's messed up, but it's _not_ working for free:
> I was laid off in May, and per Danish law, as an employee of over nine years, I have a six-month notice period. I've been relieved of my duties, but I am still officially an employee until the end of November. I'm also entitled to three months of severance pay after my notice.
As someone currently living and employed in Denmark, I can confirm that this is how it works as per Funktionærloven § 2 s. 2-3. Once you've worked somewhere for 6 months, the employer has to give you 3 months notice when terminating your employment. Every 3 years, that notice period increases by 1 month.
Depending on circumstances, other regulatory requirements, etc. employees let go might be placed on garden leave: they get paid for the notice + severance period, but aren't expected to come in.
On the other hand: he mentions working 60 hour work weeks. That is _very_ unusual in Denmark, mostly because in many cases it's illegal by the 48-hour rule (see e.g. https://english.ida.dk/working-hours).
He hints that he was taking work home on the weekends and I'm guessing for no extra pay. I used to do stuff like that when I was much younger. Cannot imagine it at his age.
A writeup about how I'm migrating large portions of my digital life away from Big Tech platforms. I'm not making as exhaustive or dramatic an effort as e.g. [1] - but in exchange, the goal is to show that this is something people can do (and should consider doing (and for the tech-savvy audience here, should consider helping other people do)).
Open to suggestions on platforms / tools, questions, respectful debate, etc.
(Disclaimer: I've never tried to move large numbers of people off of Facebook; I have organized community groups from scratch before, and I have led initiatives at work that consisted largely of convincing people to do a thing. Much of this advice is from that perspective. YMMV.)
So: my advice is to not think of it as all-or-nothing. You will not be able to move 300k people off of Facebook overnight. This is somewhat akin to every IT migration project ever: it always takes longer than you think, and is not always a linear process from "fewer people migrated" to "more people migrated".
It's also akin to community organizing: there is no substitute for actually talking to people about it, especially in the initial phases. Or: high-touch sales, where you may initially need to spend a lot of energy and time per person successfully moved over. The other common thing here is that you will hear "no" a lot, which is a valuable experience anyways (but will be frustrating).
Also: unfortunately, no one will care if it's self-hosted or federated, outside of niche tech circles. They will care about whether they can reach the people they want to reach, and whether the user experience is good or not. This is reality: talking about these points will not help you.
Some things you'll probably need to do:
- Identify a single credible alternative platform.
- Identify specific groups of people who are willing to be early "de-adopters". For instance: a local youth group, a sports club, whatever. Ideally you are a part of this group already; you then have a much better chance. Businesses will likely say no, so you want community groups.
- Within those groups, identify champions: people who care about the same thing you care about, and are willing to commit time and effort to help.
- Together with your champions, build a toolkit that allows you to scale up your efforts. This may be guides on how to talk to people about the change - what works, what doesn't. This might be instructions for setting up a specific platform. It might be communications channels, leaflets / flyers for putting up in public places, whatever.
which is very much about community organizing but it has an aura of "people spreading rumors about bicycle thefts at the movie theater downtown (why don't they call the cops?)", the woman who radiates creepy signs of precarity (is cleaning up and looking for the phone number of the people who are suspected to run an illegal landfill) and then posts screen shots of the creepy come-ons she gets from guys who want to be her sugar daddy, etc.
Maybe there's a space for a platform that specifically targets small, community, in person kinds of organizations, maybe even targeted to a particular geographical area; something like Meetup but just a little less structured.
Here's a fair sized local organization (has more than one run a month) that has a good site
But making that scalable is tricky; somebody in the club's leadership is a Wordpress pro. $5 a month would be cheap, but people are niggardly. If you're a web tech native owning a domain name is table stakes, but I think you'd lose 80% of "normies" even the phone-dependent "internet natives" if they had to get a domain name. There is a certain amount of panic over the breakdown of community organizations, see the line of research described in this film
and rather than getting $5 a month out of people who think they can't afford it, getting funding from somebody like the United Way (for a particular area) or the Knight Foundation might be a better idea.
Let’s be honest, Nextdoor is about people seeing that a black person is suspiciously going into a home using their garage door opener, driving in their garage and using their key…
My problem w/ a subreddit is that reddit would show you a lot of stuff that is off-mission for the group and surrounding community. Also I'd expect such a page to be focused around getting people to show up to events rather than having discussions (e.g. the moderation problem is much easier if discussions are only for the purposes of the group; off-topic rants about divisive subjects are easy to squash; you don't have the problem of the rumor mongering about crime which I think is toxic on nextdoor but doesn't cross the line)
I wouldn't mind ads but I'd want to see ads of the old-school sponsorship variety (the running club could see ads for the local running shoe store, one of the local grocery stores, an overfunded non-profit like the United Way, etc.) as opposed to the auction-based, personalized ads that you'd see on reddit. Similarly if a sidebar on the running club had a link to a local board game or ham radio club I'd think that's OK but the mission on my mind is to get people to join the ham radio club where they're going to do comms for the running club, not to maximize time on site.
Cool! This could be interesting as the base for a quick kanban board for mid-sized personal projects.
That said: agree with others that sharing state between devices (either yours or others), and being able to collaborate on the same board, is sort of the canonical feature requirement of kanban boards. They can be used for 1-person projects, goal tracking, etc. - I've used e.g. Notion boards in this way - but they gain most of their value from allowing multiple people to share awareness of task status and ownership.
Plus the use of localStorage means I'd eventually blow away my board state by accident - which is kind of a showstopper IMHO; being able to trust your tools is important.
Still: nice to see people experimenting with what you can do just using web basics :)
