What is this whole thing about Europe being behind on AI? Do Mistral and DeepL not exist? Yes, I know DeepL is niche, but IMHO it is the best translation model out there.
I've tried using Mistral for various tasks, and it is so far behind the American models that I just never bother using it despite still having lots of Mistral API credits leftover. Even their OCR and TTS products are surpassed by generic US models - I use regular Claude Sonnet for OCR because it is more accurate than Mistral OCR.
I could rant about this, I am just so disappointed at how Mistral completely gave up and pivoted into bespoke fine-tuning consulting. The terrifying thing is that they don't seem to even understand how far behind they are, as if they never tried Opus, let alone Fable / Mythos. Or they do understand and that's why they focus on consulting now.
Well, the front page of their website claims "Frontier AI In Your Hands", so I guess they're not marketing it that way.
I personally think there's a hint in that Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 5x the price of Mistral Large 3, and that Mistral Large is not listed anymore as a "Featured Model" and hasn't been updated since Dec 2025:
But what I really base it on is an interview the Mistral CEO gave on the Big Technology Podcast back in January this year:
Alex Kantrowitz: "Do you consider yourself, is the most important thing you do building the models? Or is the most important thing you do the service? Are you primarily a model builder, or primarily a service provider?"
Arthur Mensch: "We are there to help our customers get to value."
Alex Kantrowitz: "So, service!"
Arthur Mensch: "We are here to... but to get to value, they need to have great models. And to get to value, they need to have the right tools to train the models. And so the best way to train, to create those tools, is effectively to train the best models. So the two things are extremely linked together. We create models that are very easy to customize. We create models with tools that we then export to our customers, so that they can use them, and we help our customers train their own models. You can't go and sell to an enterprise that you are going to help them create great custom systems, if you can't show to the world that you are effectively the leader in open source technology. So the two parts are equally important, the first is enabling the other, and there's effectively a flywheel there because we make our choices when it comes to the model design in a way that is enabling the various customers we have. As one example, we've put a lot of emphasis on having models that are great at physics, because we work with manufacturing companies that run into physical problems. So that's the flywheel we have set up. Having the science team and the business team sit together."
It's at 22:37 in the video. Elsewhere in the podcast he mentions that they don't believe in a large unified generic model, they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models (OCR, TTS, bespoke trained)... but unfortunately I don't have a timestamp link for that part.
> they think the future of AI is small dedicated-task models
I mean, I do too. Or at least, this will be a large market. But the natural leader for that space is the firm building the frontier models. They have the most control and access for distillation.
It is behind in the sense that if tomorrow the US and China place an export ban on their models all we're left with are Mistral's ones.
They are not bad, and they have made huge progress, but you're still one year behind if not more.
May matter less and less as time progresses, or it may matter more if research further speeds up.
Honestly I wish capitalism and globalization kept working as they did for decades, but since more than a decade we're reverting to inefficient protectionist steps, one after the other.
Don't worry about the small web. Most people running the small web don't do it for others but themselves. They don't care whether they have 5 visitors or 1 million. Visitors are just the cherry on top, my main reason for maintaining a small web page is to put down my thoughts, organize them, go back to them if I need to, and helping whichever stranger stumbles upon them along the way.
The small web and indie web audience doesn't use google. They use RSS readers:
The main threat to small web is the reachability, I serve Atom and JSON feed, support microformats, microsub, and micropub, syndicate my posts to other platforms all without ads or telemetry. But all that effort means nothing if it doesn't reach the intended user base, it's just shouting at the void.
We can have a small community somewhere, but people who search for niche things should find them -- which used to be search engines after the .com boom and the burst. Now we are back to the small forms again, which is lacking the reach because--- new people can't reach the forms as they can't find them in the first place.
If someone new to the internet find the website, then nothing else matters.
Airbus was never born as a European giant. It was a merging of many national champions (Aérospatiale, DASA and CASA) that were each already making full airplanes. They figured out how to spread out the manufacturing later.
Airbus currently has two factories finalizing the airplane assembly: one in Toulouse and one in Hamburg. You could copy this model and just open different fab in different countries to spread production.
Also, another model is one country making wafers, one country making EUV-lithography machines and parts, one country mining and refining silicon, etc.
There's no "one country making lithography machines". The mirrors come from Germany already. Other parts from about 160 other countries around the world. The EUV tech itself is an American invention and was picked up by ASML. That is why USA has the say in who gets it.
The poster is the author of the website. So I think it's self-promo mixed with "hey, look how interesting is the amount of 'bureaucracy' involved when one wants to move out of Germany"
I don't gain anything from promoting my free, hyperlocal content here, but I love to talk about my work and the discussion here is unfailingly interesting.
I liked it, even though I have no intention of changing my domicile from Germany.
The checklist somehow seems very German, including the advice that you don't have to turn in a resignation letter if you're fired. I know that sounds snarky, but the bureaucracy laid out is so vast it's actually warranted.
As a USAmerican though, I see it as more general—a statement about how modern, "1st-world" civilization has become so god-damned complicated.
I catch myself (especially since I have kids) realizing how difficult it is to navigate some aspect of modern life (for example, various payment methods—credit cards). A kind of mantra that always rises in my thoughts is, "No one would ever have designed the system to work like this."
Somehow, independent actors, independent reasons, likely the ability to make it this complex has indeed made it this complex.
It's no surprise then that just functioning in this modern society induces a level of background anxiety. Pretty much the opposite of "touching grass".
> “AI makes it easier”, was it hard to stumble across out-of-context clips and photoshops that worked well enough to create divisiveness?
Yes. And I think this is what most tech-literate people fail to understand. The issue is scale.
It takes a lot of effort to find the right clip, cut it to remove its context, and even more effort to doctor a clip. Yes, you're still facing Brandolini's law[1], you can see that with the amount of effort Captain Disillusion[2] put in his videos to debunk crap.
But AI makes it 100× times worse. First, generating a convincing entirely video only takes a little bit of prompting, and waiting, no skill is required. Second, you can do that on a massive scale. You can easily make 2 AI videos a day. If you want to doctor videos "the old way", you'll need a team of VFX artists to do it at this scale.
I genuinely think that tech-literate folks, like myself and other hackernews posters, don't understand that significantly lowering the barrier to entry to X doesn't make X equivalent to what it was before. Scale changes everything.
Just have video cameras (mostly phones these days) record a crypto hash into the video that the video sharing platforms read and display. That way we know a video was recorded with the uploader's camera and not just generated in a computer software.
There aren't that many big tech companies that are responsible for creating the devices people use to record and host the platforms and software that people use to play back the content.
This is generated on device with llama.cpp compiled to webassembly (aka wllama) and running SmolLM2-360M. [1] How is this different from the user clicking on the link? In the end, your local firefox will fetch the link in order to summarize it, the same way you would have followed the link and read through the document in reader mode.
Like, can we all take a step back and marvel that freaking wasm can do things that 10 years ago were firmly in the realm of sci-fi?
I hope they’ll extend that sort of thing to help filter out the parts of the dom that represent attention grabbing stuff that isn’t quite an ad, but is still off topic/not useful for what I’m working on at the moment (and still keep the relevant links).
They should advertise that. I pretty much reflexively avoid any mention of AI in interfaces because they usually mean "we're sending this all to openthropigoogosoft so I hope you don't have any secrets."
One of these features is "Active Hood" or "Pop Up Hood" which uses pyrotechnic to pop the hood of the car in case of a frontal collision with a pedestrian, thus making the front hood of the car acting as some kind of stiff airbag for the pedestrian. This helps reducing the risk of life-threatening injuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zfwUL3joI
> Go 1.25 introduced a waitgroup.Go function that lets you add Go routines to a waitgroup more easily. It takes the place of using the go keyword, [...]
99% of the time, you don't want to use sync.WaitGroup, but rather errgroup.Group. This is basically sync.WaitGroup with error handling. It also has optional context/cancellation support. See https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/sync/errgroup
I know it's not part of the standard library, but it's part of the http://golang.org/x/ packages. TBH, golang.org/x/ is stuff that should be in the standard library but isn't, for some reason.
I thought exactly the same thing. I use errgroup in practically every Go project because it does something you'd most likely do by hand otherwise, and it does it cleaner.
I discovered it after I had already written my own utility to do exactly the same thing, and the code was almost line for line the same, which was pretty funny. But it was a great opportunity to delete some code from the repo without having to refactor anything!
> and the code was almost line for line the same, which was pretty funny.
One of the core strengths of Go is that it fits the zen of Python's " There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" and it does this very nicely.
I never used errgroup but I realize that it's essentially the same what I end up implementing anyways.
With standard waitgroups I always move my states as a struct with something like a nested *data struct and an err property which is then pushed through the channel. But this way, my error handling is after the read instead of right at the Wait() call.
I would create an unwarranted bias towards people working for companies doing mostly opensource. If their previous job was writing safe code for rockets and airplanes, the candidate will very likely be qualified to write embedded code for tractor/cars but incapable of showing previous work due to confidentiality agreements.
I mean, I was hired out of university, and I had a portfolio of programming and a github ready to go to show that I could program, without having a previous job to show code from at all, let along one with an NDA
Do you have an updated portfolio though? For many people working in private industry, they aren't allowed to share code from their job, and their previous portfolio projects are from college, which would not be good enough for a mid or senior level role. Would you hire a (non-junior) frontend developer who shows you a React todo list they made 8 years ago?
You were young without kids or any other responsibilities, so you had spare time to nerd around. Not everybody is in that position. With this requirement you would create a bias towards single parents or folks talking care of the handicapped partner/parent, as well as another bunch of other categories of people.
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