I've spent years now trying not to consume products from companies I consider immoral. There are a lot of them and, realistically, you won't make a big dent or bring the company down. The average person is, by definition, average, so a boycott based on people doing the good thing at the expense of some personal discomfort will always fail.

But that doesn't mean it's pointless. Companies like Amazon are almost impossible to compete with because of their size. The most important impact you can have as a consumer is not that the lack of your personal revenue is going to keep the likes of Jeff Bezos up at night. It's that you're providing revenue and a user base to alternative businesses that are struggling to exist in a world where most people just use Amazon.

You can make a real difference this way! Focus on growing competitors rather than hoping the bad company will go away because of your abstention. Kind of like using Lemmy instead of Reddit.

This question changes a lot depending on if the non-EU partner in question is the US or a country like South Korea

Of course you're right morally, but it's still an interesting change in tone. This whole thing started when Russia threw a fit about Ukraine wanting closer ties to the EU instead of Russia. Now their official position is that even EU membership is totally fine. Seems like their position weakened quite a bit since 2014.

On the other hand, maybe this means Russia wants to fight the entire EU with their mutual defence pact when they attack again after recovering for a few years through a ceasefire. Or maybe they're gambling that the EU's requirements are too strict for Ukraine to join.

Or maybe it's just all lies again, of course. But still, an interesting weaker flavour of lies, in that case.

Incredible news! We've been needing this for a long time; the research community has been calling for a "CERN for AI" for years at this point.

As a publicly funded researcher working in this field it's very frustrating to see so many of our excellent, well-educated students in Europe end up contributing to the performance of American tech giants (who then use that power to undermine our democratic society). It is also hard to overstate how dependent we are on American compute infrastructure, for example, Google colab, AWS or Google Earth Engine. This last one is especially frustrating because basically the entire European research community relies on access to a service by an American tech giant to access our own globally leading high-quality public access satellite data.

I've seen a lot of negativity on this news as a waste of money. Personally I'm not too sold on the usefulness of LLMs either, their hype is very much overblown. But investing in AI is not the same as investing in LLMs, and Europe absolutely needs this. AI is being used, and has been for decades, in nearly everything we do. This includes not just LLMs and deep learning, but optimisation, formal logic, all sorts of probabilistic inference, forecasting, robotics, simulation, surrogate modelling, satisfiability, and much more. The correctness of the chips your phone uses has been verified using AI techniques. Weather forecasts and disaster warnings use AI methods. The food you eat has been monitored as it grew using AI. Air travel and general infrastructure needs AI to function, much of manufacturing and design needs it, etc etc. These are not just the chat bot "assistants" that tech companies try to push so hard on the public, but computational methods that answer vital questions we cannot otherwise answer.

Being dependent on a country like the US (or China) for something this pervasive and important is a terrible idea. Compute infrastructure, central hubs of expertise, and continental instead of national scale investment opportunities all contribute strongly to European sovereignty in this regard, for all the fields mentioned above (not just the over-hyped ones).