Mistral Large 4

Woah, this seems like a big deal (assuming the benchmarks are as good as claimed)? Mistral slightly proving me wrong (and I'm not mad).

Claims to be on par with GLM 5.3 in DeepSWE (from https://thenextweb.com/news/mistral-releases-large-4-a-1-tri... )

Le Chaton Fat is here!

• HelloUsername · 20 hours ago

  Le Chonk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD51W2txi1Y

  • Narciss · 20 hours ago

    Yeah just saw that, I'm gonna keep converting it in my head.

https://venturebeat.com/technology/mistral-debuts-large-4-le...

The blog post https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/

Since the Chinese companies publish their research it would have been odd if Mistral didn't start catching up.

• keithnoizu · 20 hours ago

  touche

• throwa356262 · 20 hours ago

  It certainly has helped OpenAI and Anthropic get their KV cache costs under control.

• Tade0 · 20 hours ago

  It's no secret that everyone is dis-stealing from everyone else.

  • drbscl · 19 hours ago

    I don't see how distillation relates to using the published techniques developed by Deepseek, Moonshot, Zhipu, etc

Benchmarks are better than expected! And probably got there without distillation ;)

• water-drummer · 20 hours ago

  Is there a reason to believe why they wouldn't distill locally running open weights Chinese models?

Looks like they are doing 50% off to stay price competitive with DS Flash V4.1

Impressive vision benchmarking. If the vision model is truly as good as astra, that would make it best in the world. Also strong on cyber benchmarks (better than all chinese models), so this is a good defender model. Lots of people shitting of Mistral for no reason imo. These are pretty good numbers across the board. Definitely good enough to use as a daily driver over other llms, if you have moral qualms with the others. For certain use cases, like cyber security, this may be the go to model. I like to make fun of europe, but there's lots for mistral to be proud about in this release imo.

• i_love_retros · 20 hours ago

  Curious, what do you like to make fun of Europe about?

  • will4274 · 20 hours ago

    Europe has spent the last twenty years in stagnation - generating about half as much wealth and technology as you'd expect for its size and advanced economy. Simultaneously, Europeans are notoriously arrogant. It's a mockable combination. Edit: unfortunately, it's a question that voting does not really permit you to answer on this website.

    • steinvakt2 · 20 hours ago

      I'm biased (I'm European), but I'd much rather be middle class in Europe than in USA.

      • will4274 · 20 hours ago

        I'd much rather the people of every continent have the combined technology advancements of three major powers vs two.

      • formvoltron · 19 hours ago

        Do you realize the variety of breakfast cereals you are giving up?

        • oblio · 19 hours ago

          Also the range of things with added sugar. I never imagined sauerkraut (you know, sour cabbage) could have sugar added to it.

      • WarmWash · 19 hours ago

        The US is biased to favor the top half of society. Hence why there is a lot of vocal poorer people and a lot of low profile wealthier people (I'm not including the 1% or even the 5% in this). When you are in the 75%ish of the US, it's very easy to make a case that life in the US is better. But we don't really talk about that because it's pretty taboo when poorer people are struggling much more than they would in Europe.

        • will4274 · 19 hours ago

          Poor people in America (25th percentile) have more money that middle class people (50th percentile) in Europe. This wasn't true 20 years ago.

          • femtozer · 19 hours ago

            more money but what about access to healthcare, education, vacation?

            • jandrewrogers · 18 hours ago

              Poor people in the US have fully subsidized healthcare and education. Americans don't have vacation in the same way Scandinavian countries don't have a minimum wage. Even the most left-leaning States in the US have not written it into law because it is effectively addressed by custom. Americans are sufficiently happy with it that vacation isn't a political topic.

            • WarmWash · 17 hours ago

              It's a shrinking issue once you get out of the bottom ~50%, and a non-issue once you get above ~75%. Again, the deal with the US is that the rich live better and the poor live worse. Or put another way; people who make money get to keep more, and people who don't make money are given less. Because there are so many more people who have money, and because those people like living comfortably, available healthcare and education is world class. Make sure not to read that as "All healthcare and education", it's "available healthcare and education". Generally people who are earning a lot don't care as much about vacation, but every white collar job will generally give at least a standard 15 days off and 10 holidays. Ironically as you move up you are generally given more vacation while actually using less.

            • whatsThisBtn4 · 14 hours ago

              I think we are seeing the decline of even this. The European debt crisis, the United States security umbrella being disinterested in Europe, austerity, increasing retirement age, an inability to defend Ukraine without the United States. The running gag they don't have AC... Even poor populations worldwide have access to the 3 things you described, but the quality is lower. European decline has been mentioned since the 1930s.

          • broptimist · 19 hours ago

            This is untrue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... Median wealth per adult has the USA at #28, below Italy, Spain, Slovenia, and Portugal.

            • will4274 · 19 hours ago

              Income is the relevant metric. Most poor people (worldwide) have negligible savings. USA 25th percentile 28k to 30k EU-27 50th percentile 24k to 26k.

              • broptimist · 18 hours ago

                This is moving the goalposts. You said "have more money than."

                • will4274 · 18 hours ago

                  Yes. Spendable money. Income. The common meaning of the phrase among non-rich people.

              • jbs789 · 18 hours ago

                This comment contradicts your earlier comment though, where you mentioned “poor people have”, a clear reference to wealth rather than earnings.

                • will4274 · 18 hours ago

                  > a clear reference to wealth rather than earnings. No, sorry, it isn't. People commonly use the phrase "has money" to refer to income in American English.

                • satvikpendem · 17 hours ago

                  In the US people don't say "has money" as meaning net worth, they are generally talking about spendable money ie a paycheck unless you're talking about someone super rich who "has money" or "comes from money."

                  • jbs789 · 11 hours ago

                    Maybe. Open to the idea others use the same words to mean different things. Will is being imprecise while also being argumentative which is fun. In my literal mind, someone who spends money has none. They had it. To have money is to be wealthy, not to simply earn it.

                    • satvikpendem · 5 hours ago

                      That's simply not how it's used in the US then. To spend money is to have it in the first place.

              • kelnos · 1 hour ago

                Does 28k-30k in the US get you the same (or better) quality of life than 24k-26k gets you in Europe? I doubt that; I expect a European on 24k is living better than an American on 30k. But that also depends on where: I'm sure 24k will get you farther in, say, Sofia, Bulgaria, than in Paris or Berlin. Same is true of different places in the US.

          • preg_match · 19 hours ago

            Money is one thing, quality of life is another. Also money alone isn’t even a fair comparison because stuff costs different amounts across countries.

          • jittles · 15 hours ago

            And yet the poorest 25th percentile of Americans are not enjoying a better quality of life than the European middle class. If those numbers are accurate, all they tell us is that personal wealth is an even worse indicator of having a life worth living than we would have thought 20 years ago.

          • eloisant · 15 hours ago

            You have to look at purchasing power parity. A bigger salary is no good if you have nothing left after paying housing, groceries, bills, education, healthcare...

          • IlikeMadison · 14 hours ago

            Imagine being so bitter you are lying this much. Wow.

        • jandrewrogers · 18 hours ago

          Almost half of US households earn $100k+ now. The median American is affluent by European standards. The "middle class" of Europe and America has become less comparable over time because median incomes have significantly diverged. You see it in many aspects of lifestyle and the kinds of things they can afford to buy. 20 years ago this was not the case. The minimum wage in some parts of the US is now higher than the average wage in most of Europe. The US has a population that will always struggle to survive without government assistance. Per multiple US statistical agencies that is about 10-15% of households.

          • IlikeMadison · 14 hours ago

            >The minimum wage in some parts of the US is now higher than the average wage in most of Europe. definitely not in Western Europe.

            • jandrewrogers · 12 hours ago

              The minimum legal salary where I live will be >€80k in a couple months. The minimum hourly wage is equivalent to about €40k annualized. Does the average person in Western Europe earn €80k? These types of minimum wages used to be limited to expensive locales but it is spreading across the US pretty rapidly. Now you see minimum wages rapidly approaching $20/hr in places far enough from a major city that houses still cost $250k.

              • superice · 7 hours ago

                All of which is useless if one trip to the hospital for something regular can still put you in serious debt. If the financials of people in the US are so great, why do the stats of healthcare, student, and general consumer debt look so bleak? Either you all suck a being high income, or it is not the only interesting factor.

                • imtringued · 2 hours ago

                  >Either you all suck a being high income, or it is not the only interesting factor. This is actually what I think of all of you guys. Americans completely suck at being high income. They have so much money and yet they waste it. Zero care for efficiency whatsoever. Edit: Making housing and healthcare expensive is a policy choice and can easily be averted in so many ways.

              • kelnos · 1 hour ago

                Your numbers are just wrong, then. The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and 19 US states are at or below that number. That's a hair above $15k/yr. That's quite a lot less than €40k/yr (~$45k/yr). Let's talk about that $45k/yr. That's an hourly wage of $21.63. No state in the entirety of the US has a minimum wage that high. The current max is Washington, DC (not a state, but they also set their own) at $18.40, which comes out to under $39k. That's all for hourly work. In the US, there is no minimum for salaried work. If you agree to be paid $1/yr for your work, that's what you get. So, the minimum hourly wage where you live is absolutely higher than the US, nearly triple that of much of it.

          • kelnos · 1 hour ago

            "$100k" means nothing without knowing the cost of living in the particular place a person lives. As an extreme example, $100k is not "affluent" if you live in a US city like San Francisco or New York. If you want to keep your housing expenses to a reasonable percentage of your income in those places, you're going to be living with several roommates in a small apartment in an old building in an undesirable neighborhood. Even outside the most expensive cities, we have lots of affluent suburbs throughout the US, and I guarantee you those households have to earn quite a bit more than $100k/yr in order to live there. Good luck if you're a family of four making $100k in one of these places. Well, you aren't in one of those places; you live somewhere much cheaper.

        • ragall · 18 hours ago

          Not 75%, more like 95%. Only about the top 5% have a chance of a better life than the equivalent in Europe.

      • Jgrubb · 19 hours ago

        I'm biased as well, being American. I think I'd much rather be middle class in Europe than the USA as well. Middle class in the US is a constant feeling of the ladder dissolving just beneath you.

        • will4274 · 18 hours ago

          If you're middle class in America and you'd like to be middle class in Europe, you can just do that.

          • newswasboring · 18 hours ago

            People always make this case, if you're not satisfied then move. As someone who has changed countries twice and continents once, I can attest it's not an easy or convenient thing to do. Money or lifestyle is one thing, but you're also leaving behind family and culture. Statements like these are so dismissive to that struggle that it's almost offensive to me.

            • will4274 · 18 hours ago

              The point is that middle class Americans can become middle class Europeans, but middle class Europeans can't become middle class Americans, because they can't afford it. I didn't say it'd be easy. I'm just pointing out that only one of the two groups being discussed has a real choice in the matter.

              • newswasboring · 16 hours ago

                That is the entire point I'm trying to make. You can win the argument by being pedantic about the precise thing you were saying, or we can recognize the broader implication of what you are suggesting people to do. Only economically viable means nothing when it comes to life decisions.

              • autuni · 3 hours ago

                Why do you think that middle class Europeans can't become middle class Americans? I know more than one example where that was no problem at all. It's not like a middle class American or European could just move and then not work and just live off of their savings. They move and get a job (ideally the other way around), jobs tend to pay relative to the living cost of where you live. That's why people compare spending power instead of how much money you earn, because that comparison is meaningless.

            • satvikpendem · 17 hours ago

              No one said it was easy, just that it's possible, saying this as someone who's also moved continents.

            • Jgrubb · 13 hours ago

              I have no idea why you're being downvoted, because you're absolutely right. I have circumstances that make moving abroad something like a nuclear option. I could take my job with me, but that's the least of it.

              • newswasboring · 2 hours ago

                Because some HNers like to pretend discussions on single axis are fruitful.

          • jbs789 · 18 hours ago

            I have to imagine in several years when you have a wife/husband and kids and ageing parents your views will change.

            • will4274 · 18 hours ago

              The point is about economic mobility - of course, people get tied down as they get older. Middle class people from wealthy nations who move to poor countries are relatively rich by the standards of their new country. Middle class people from poor countries who move to rich countries are relatively poor by the standards of their new country.

              • vouwfietsman · 16 hours ago

                Depends. If you are middle class in US with little savings, moving to Europe will probably make your life worse as relative wages are lower for many professions (e.g software eng). If you are middle class in EU and have little savings, moving to US will do the opposite and you would be better off. Your comparison holds for the inverse: getting most of your quality of life from static wealth.

                • yladiz · 12 hours ago

                  Define worse/better.

        • whatsThisBtn4 · 14 hours ago

          Get off Facebook and get on Wikipedia. Or go visit there. Even in rich cities, it felt like I was in the lower middle class area in my suburban area.

          • Jgrubb · 13 hours ago

            I haven't been on Facebook in 15 years. I spend every night on Wikipedia, following random links. I worked for a Parisian company for a decade and have been around western EU more than most Americans. Probably dial back your assumptions a little bit. I've earned my opinions just as much as you have.

            • whatsThisBtn4 · 9 hours ago

              So is this cope?

      • eloisant · 15 hours ago

        I don't think you realize the situation of the US middle class. High education costs. High healthcare costs. One serious disease or accident can bankrupt you. Buying a house usually means a 30 years loans at 7% so after 10 years you still have 85% of capital left to pay off. Salaries are higher but everything is more expensive, so in purchasing power parity it's basically the same.

        • steinvakt2 · 13 hours ago

          Yes, I wrote that I prefer Europe

    • a3w · 20 hours ago

      If you remove tech companies, US and A has spent the last twenty years in stagnation, too. If that bubble bursts, both are on par. If it bears fruits and we build ``it'', everyone dies, which is par, also?

      • will4274 · 19 hours ago

        Gemini says (20 years growth): - USA: 51% total, 27% without tech. - EU: 25% total, 21% without tech. - China: 345% total, 205% without tech.

      • cavemandaveman · 19 hours ago

        A 'bubble bursting', if that happens, doesn't make the tech sector go to zero. Apple doesn't suddenly stop making iPhones. It would take a hell of a lot more than that for the US economy to fall to European levels.

      • eloisant · 15 hours ago

        There is tech, but oil as well. It's both tech and shale oil that saved the US from the decline predicted at the end of last century.

      • u8080 · 2 hours ago

        >if you remove your most innovative and profitable part of economy you'll be on par with EU Is that irony I can't grasp on? Do people really argue like that?

    • ramblerman · 20 hours ago

      Ah yes... the "European". From the Scandinavian viking to the Sicilian - one homogenous group that agrees on everything and acts the same.

      • will4274 · 19 hours ago

        Well, the Scandinavian and Sicilian do share one currency and one immigration policy and one set of regulations - which are the things that we generally look at when we analyze economies.

        • ramblerman · 19 hours ago

          > Europeans are notoriously arrogant. It's a mockable combination. Not a very rigorous economic argument - besides they also don't share an immigration policy, nor a single currency (Denmark)

        • robk · 19 hours ago

          Not currency! Only Nordic on euro is Finland

        • suddenlybananas · 19 hours ago

          Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns all use a different currency. Finns and Sicilians do share a currency though, but all these countries have different immigration policies and regulations. I don't think you really know how the EU works.

        • static_motion · 2 hours ago

          You have no idea how Europe works, at all.

    • kranke155 · 20 hours ago

      read Varoufakis for the story on how this happened. European surplus capital gets recycled as VC money into Silicon Valley. So it's not like there's some big choice to be made, its potentially a systemic part of the global monetary flows.

    • ramon156 · 19 hours ago

      Ironically, the US is always busy with growth. How about celebrating a victory for once? Take a look at NLNet vs YC. At NLNet, You set your milestones, do the work and get rewarded. YC just throws money in the hopes one company is a unicorn. Both support growth, but they're not comparable at all.

    • ofrzeta · 19 hours ago

      Arrogant? Actually we are not the ones running around and claiming we are the best country in the world :)

      • will4274 · 18 hours ago

        I guess you didn't read the thread :)

        • ofrzeta · 18 hours ago

          Not completely but I did read some of your comments. In terms of economic growth you have a point, I guess.

          • will4274 · 18 hours ago

            It was a joke. I was trying to say that I found a few arrogant Europeans

      • rustystump · 15 hours ago

        Europeans are crazy arrogant and racist but it is the soft kind lacking self awareness. Every person I have ever spoken to who is not white has told me they experienced more prejudice and racism in Europe than America. (at least the ones who have actual been somewhere in Europe) America still has areas of hard bigotry but most places are wildly diverse and accepting. The favored EU countries everyone holds up are so white and homogeneous it is comical. This is not dunking on Europe or any specific country but comparing America to some Scandinavia country rich in oil is an apple to oj situation just like comparing America to China or Saudi would be.

    • i_love_retros · 19 hours ago

      Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans. They also have so much better transport infrastructure it's embarrassing for Americans. Like all the money America generates, where does it go? Maybe you're just bitter?

      • fearmerchant · 19 hours ago

        Demographics.

      • adventured · 19 hours ago

        Show me the HDI of the US vs each country in Europe, including all the poor ones. Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order: Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic. The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.

        • bluebarbet · 15 hours ago

          HDI is indeed a better metric than the various alternatives based on dollars. But still. The six US states that score less than 0.9 (i.e. Kentucky, Mississippi et al) are supposedly peers of EU countries like Portugal, Estonia and Croatia, i.e. exactly the places that well-off footloose Americans are choosing to move to (Portugal is packed with well-heeled US refugees). So apparently HDI does not fully measure quality of life, either. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

      • will4274 · 19 hours ago

        Trends become the future. If European stagnation continues, those advantages will vanish by the time we're old. I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it. Edit: y'all are supposed to be our moral allies in creating a utopian future with prosperity and world peace. Instead the most likely outcomes seem to be that you'll fade to irrelevancy and rather than compromising between America's vision and Europe's vision, we'll compromise between China's vision and America's vision. We liked your vision more than China's.

        • vouwfietsman · 16 hours ago

          I see you are making a lot of similar comments. I am not sure where you get this perceived 'arrogance', I'm sure some of its there, but I'm similarly sure it can be found for Americans or Chinese. People being people, what's new. > y'all are supposed to be our moral allies This all comes across as rather black and white. I don't know why you take this stance. I'm sure you understand that it would be very hard for you to understand Europe as a whole, and judge it, just like it would be hard for me to do this with America. Regardless, when talking morals, I'm also sure you agree there are numerous examples where America has not held up its end of the moral utopian future of prosperity and world peace.

          • will4274 · 9 hours ago

            We used to be a duo where America was pragmatic and European conscientious. In the new duo, China is pragmatic and America conscientious. If you think america wasn't holding up its end of the moral utopian future before, don't watch the news for the next fifty years.

      • bob1029 · 18 hours ago

        > Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans. I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective. > Maybe you're just bitter? This comes off as psychological projection.

        • ragall · 18 hours ago

          > I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's Very few Americans have any experience about how life is in Europe, while the contrary is much more common.

          • will4274 · 17 hours ago

            Gemini says: Around 28% to 32% of Americans have visited Europe in their lifetime, while roughly 15% to 20% of Europeans overall have visited the United States.

            • ragall · 17 hours ago

              Gemini is shit, just like other LLMs. Tourists don't have any idea how life is in a visiting country. How many US citizens have eve emigrated to Europe, vs European citizens that have emigrated to the US and have an idea of how day-to-day life is there ?

              • will4274 · 17 hours ago

                Gemini says: Over the past 20 years, approximately 1.8 million to 1.9 million Europeans have emigrated permanently to the United States (measured by lawful permanent resident status/green cards), while an estimated 1.6 million to 2.0 million Americans have moved to Europe on long-term residence permits and visas I'll just say that I don't think the reason is a lack of knowledge and leave it here.

                • ragall · 16 hours ago

                  UK doesn't count, becausd it suffers of many of the problems that affect the US. And especially here on HN, there are almost no US citizens that have moved to Europe, and many European citizens that moved to the US, and can talk out of experience.

      • whatsThisBtn4 · 14 hours ago

        This is Euro cope. No one thinks this outside the 5 minutes someone in Europe reads an article about how France says they will send troops to Ukraine. But the troops never will come.

    • autuni · 3 hours ago

      > Simultaneously, Europeans are notoriously arrogant. It's a mockable combination. Funnily enough, you can just change European to American here and that's how many Europeans view Americans. Mostly in terms of the wealth distribution though instead of the overall wealth, and the fact that Americans just blindly claim they're the best in everything without hesitation. Maybe we should focus on huge, exploitative companies that suck out the wealth from everyday Europeans and Americans instead.

  • lukewarm707 · 19 hours ago

    If the UK is in europe, you should make fun of the following: they don't have a first amendment. So to me, it's an authoritarian state preaching freedom.

    • i_love_retros · 19 hours ago

      They also don't have a second amendment so it balances out

      • lukewarm707 · 19 hours ago

        Doesn't that make it even less free?

        • i_love_retros · 19 hours ago

          Ask the school kids in America how free they feel

          • lukewarm707 · 19 hours ago

            That would be mixing my comment (freedom from the state) with general liberties. (edit, terms the wrong way around)

    • mortalapeman · 19 hours ago

      I mean laws and rights are only useful if enforced. If the arm of government responsible for enforcement just doesn't and the people allow it, then what good is that purported freedom?

      • lukewarm707 · 19 hours ago

        Freedom from enforcement?

    • gond · 19 hours ago

      Sometimes, comments are so baffling, I couldn’t formulate an answer even if I tried, and that’s not due to the content. This is Not Even Wrong.

      • lukewarm707 · 19 hours ago

        Perhaps if there is no decisive counterargument, it is a valid opinion?

        • Toutouxc · 15 hours ago

          You can’t argue against Not Even Wrong, because it doesn’t mean anything.

    • mcv · 19 hours ago

      The order of amendments is just the order in which the constitution has been amended. It's meaningless to talk about "first amendments" in other countries. Talk about the actual laws and rights described therein. And as you can probably tell by now, the first amendment in the US is not actually preventing the US government from promoting a specific religion or silencing speech. It's just words on a paper at this point. Look at the actual practice. Several European countries do a much better job at protecting the rights described in the first amendment to the US constitution.

      • lukewarm707 · 19 hours ago

        > "Talk about the actual laws and rights described therein." Freedom of speech. > "Look at the actual practice." The UK does not have that? The situation in the UK is very obtuse. It is confused.

        • mcv · 18 hours ago

          The UK does not have what? Book bans? Science censorship by the government? The government pushing TV shows off the air for criticising the government? The president banning certain news media for asking questions he doesn't like? The UK is not the world's biggest champion of free speech, but I think it's still doing better than the US right now.

          • will4274 · 18 hours ago

            The US doesn't have book bans. Some public libraries not stocking some books isn't a ban. You can still buy Mein Kampf (or whatever you like) on Amazon. The president also didn't ban the media - he just didn't allow them in the Whitehouse. This is something we're rightly concerned about and pushing back on. The UK on the other hand, does ban ordinary speech by ordinary people in their homes. It's orders of magnitude worse than the United States, as any cursory examination would show.

            • mcv · 18 hours ago

              American public schools are notorious for banning books. Much more so than in many European countries. And the issue is not that fascist literature is getting banned, but quite the opposite. > The president also didn't ban the media - he just didn't allow them in the Whitehouse. This is something we're rightly concerned about and pushing back on. That's still a ban. It's interfering with the media's ability to report on the government. It's great that you're concerned, but it's still happening. > The UK on the other hand, does ban ordinary speech by ordinary people in their homes. In their homes? Do you have examples? I've never heard of anyone in the UK getting in trouble for criticising the government; it seems to be a time honoured tradition there. Whereas in the US, they now check your social media at the border and might not let you into the country if you've said anything critical of the president. And there's also the censorship on science, which is every bit as serious as the crackdown on government criticism.

              • will4274 · 17 hours ago

                The UK arrests 12,000 people a year for their social media post. This tabloid has some examples https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru... . There is less example-focused reporting in more serious international media outlets (British state media avoids this topic).

                • mcv · 15 hours ago

                  NYPost is not the most reliable source, but I can see several other sources reporting similar numbers. I also see criticism, including from the former PM, so it seems the UK police is indeed overly broad in its interpretation and enforcement of the law. But note that there can also be legitimate reasons why certain social media posts could be illegal: threats, blackmail, cyberbullying, hate speech, etc. Free speech is never absolute; there are always limits to it; also in the US. The most important (though not the only) reason why free speech is so important, is that it must always be possible to criticise the government, or powerful people in general. That is the big area where the US is attacking free speech: Trump's fragile ego can't handle criticism, so he leverages his power to deny critics, or even just journalists who ask serious questions, access to the White House. Or to remove them from TV (see Stephen Colbert). I don't know if anything like that is happening in the UK. Some of the reasons mentioned for arrests sound absolutely ludicrous, it definitely sounds like the police is far overstepping its mandate there. But the figure also seems to include threats and harassment, which I would say make absolute sense to prosecute. I haven't seen any evidence of government criticism getting punished in any way, but it's absolutely possible I've missed it; this was a very brief survey. If so, the UK might well be as bad or worse than the US in this.

              • senderista · 15 hours ago

                Do you literally think that elementary school libraries should stock any book ever published, regardless of content? Nobody actually believes that. There will always be a line somewhere, the disagreement is just over where the line should be drawn. That's why all the talk of "book banning" is disingenuous.

                • viraptor · 14 hours ago

                  They don't have to stock everything. But it's not about stocking regardless of content - it's about refusing to stock specific content. They're not removing the least interesting N% - it's very targeted.

                  • senderista · 13 hours ago

                    Of course it's targeted--do you think elementary school libraries should be stocking books with, say, violent sexual content? That is my point: everyone agrees a line must be drawn somewhere, the argument is just where to draw the line. Everyone is in favor of "banning books" from school libraries, they just differ on which books should be banned.

                    • viraptor · 5 hours ago

                      Why must the line be drawn anywhere in relation to the sexual orientation of the characters? I mean, violence, sure. But we know this is not the targeting that's happening. And neither is sexual violence banned - you can easily find the bible in schools.

                    • mcv · 4 hours ago

                      Sure, but where they draw the line is to exclude a lot of widely lauded literary cornerstones. People aren't complaining about banning porn, they're complaining about banning literature.

      • cesarb · 18 hours ago

        > The order of amendments is just the order in which the constitution has been amended. It's meaningless to talk about "first amendments" in other countries. Also, at least here in Brazil, the way the constitution is amended is by patching it. For instance, our constitutional amendment number 115 ( https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/e... ) patches article 5 of the constitution to add protection of personal data as a right. But we wouldn't talk about "amendment 115", we would instead talk about "article 5 item LXXIX of the constitution"; that is, what matters is the patched text, not the law that patched it. I don't know about other countries, but it wouldn't surprise me if they take a similar approach.

        • mcv · 18 hours ago

          Same in Netherland. We don't count changes to our constitution, we simply refer to the article in the constitution.

    • ascorbic · 15 hours ago

      No, it doesn't have a first amendment, but it does have ECHR articles 9 (Freedom of thought, conscience and religion), 10 (Freedom of expression) and 11 (Freedom of assembly and association)

  • TacticalCoder · 19 hours ago

    > Curious, what do you like to make fun of Europe about? Well I'm european and... That Switzerland (Europe but not EU) has more companies in the Top 70 by market cap than the entire EU (Switzerland has two, the EU only has ASML) is kinda something that warrants making fun of. That the biggest European software company is SAP, in 71th position is both sad and tragic: it shows how lame and irrelevant Europe is when it comes to software. So Europe is nowhere in software and friggin nowhere in hardware: sure it's got ASML but ASML now has officially... Zero customer in Europe. Zero is not much. Then Japan is at least trying to come back into the game with nano imprint litography. Europe is betting it all on AMSL (which anyway is majoritarily US-owned). So software: nothing. Hardware: nothing besides ASML. Overall the EU has six companies in the Top 100 by market cap and they're all, besides ASML, near the bottom of the Top 100. We could also maybe make a bit fun of how the EU destroyed it's car industry (the main industry in Germany, which is the biggest economy of the union) by handing it all to chinese EVs? Or what about the US warning the EU, years ago, to not become entirely dependent on Russia for energy? And EU not listening and then seeing its energy price skyrocket when the proverbial shit hit the fan? (Russia attacking Ukraine) And we could, also, at least make a bit of fun of entire streets in cities like Paris and Brussels that used to have luxury shops and fancy restaurants that are all turned into places selling cheap kebabs? What a great success: I'm sure this one makes the komrades happy. It projects an image of grandeur and success: kebabs. Or the constant attacks on free speech in the EU. Or the surveillance apparatus that's being put into place. And let's not forget: there were promises made to Russia to never grow the EU to the east. Then the EU started exciting Russia by saying they'd incorporate Ukraine into the EU: I'm not against that but doing that did trigger a war. And now suddenly the EU is waking up and feeling all warmongering, wanting to dedicate a big percentage of its spending to weapons and tanks and missiles. The warmongering tiny pet that the EU is is kinda laughable too. At this point it's more like I don't know what is there left to not make fun of about my EU. For what's going on is just sad, plain sad.

    • i_love_retros · 19 hours ago

      Bro there's more to life than software and hardware. Try to get outside today :)

      • metalliqaz · 17 hours ago

        Those are the aspects most relevant to HN, though.

    • umpalumpaaa · 18 hours ago

      I think you picked the cutoff (70) so that the numbers look worse than they are. If you look at the top 100 it’s 16 (EU) vs 4 (Switzerland). 16 is still not good enough. That being said none of the 4 companies from Switzerland are in software and hardware. ABB is maybe the closest (data center electricity). Also Switzerland is a very very rich country. Neutral. Also other countries like Germany has a lot of small companies that are world leaders in their field. That’s part of Germanys resilience.

      • niklasrde · 18 hours ago

        The EU accounts for 14% of global GDP, so accounting for 16% of top 100 in market cap isn't terrible (if we're weighing each in the top 100 equally).

        • hn_throwaway_99 · 15 hours ago

          It's not like those are independent variables though. The idea is that if Europe were more competitive and did a better job fostering innovation then both its percentage of global GDP and top companies by market cap would be higher.

        • eloisant · 15 hours ago

          and 5% of the population so still not too bad

      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 15 hours ago

        > I think you picked the cutoff (70) so that the numbers look worse than they are. Reminds me of a point I heard about sports statistics. If a given team is reported as having "won 4 out of their last 7 matches", there are good odds that they also won 4 out of their last 8 matches. Also pretty good odds that their seventh-last match was a win, otherwise the stat would be 4 out of 6. (It could also go the reverse direction if the goal is to make it look worse than it is.)

      • cccbbbaaa · 14 hours ago

        Judging by rank is a bad metric anyway. Why should ST, Infineon, NXP, Arm (UK, not EU), Airbus, Safran, etc. be considered irrelevant because they are not in the top 70 or 100?

    • wafngar · 16 hours ago

      You are proud of tax evasion? Would be fun to restrict market access for Swiss companies …

    • mopsi · 15 hours ago

      > And let's not forget: there were promises made to Russia to never grow the EU to the east. Then the EU started exciting Russia by saying they'd incorporate Ukraine into the EU: I'm not against that but doing that did trigger a war. Simply not true. The EU is a democratically elected body and nobody can give any promises what their successors will or will not do, because that will be decided by the electorate and not by any current official. Not to mention that the initiative for joining the EU has always been on the side of new members, against the opposition of many existing members who fear displacement and disruption to their positions inside the union. All the narratives about how the West has been "encroaching" upon Russia depend on denying the obvious fact that the initiative has come from Eastern European capitals, not Brussels or Washington.

    • Toutouxc · 15 hours ago

      I feel like this posts says more about yourself than about the EU.

    • cccbbbaaa · 15 hours ago

      No hardware besides ASML? Nonsense.

    • IlikeMadison · 14 hours ago

      > Well I'm european and... Yea sure. You sound like a typical Russian bot.

    • danielovichdk · 5 hours ago

      You live in a small scared country with the same kind of people all around you, with very little diversity. Your taxation was the only thing your otherwise poor country could come up with. And now you only have this little enclave which silently melts away while you get stuck there, scared of the rest of the world. The Swiss are a special breed. Too small to bark, too small to make an impact, but just small enough for the rest of us to laugh at when some rich dude can't understand why the rest of the world doesn't want to be like that. You're scared of the world, not one bit interested in making it a better place for all mankind. Wanker

  • fearmerchant · 19 hours ago

    Not the OP but it often appears that there's a hostility to tech.

    • ragebol · 18 hours ago

      I don't think it's a hostility to tech but different values that value consumer rights more than it values 'move fast and break things'. We have good things here and we don't like someone breaking them. Problem is that we thought the US was 'cool', with US movies, music, digital services, cooler than our own and thus we helped give the US the lead. The US has lost it's coolness though, now we just think it's creepy.

      • mrheosuper · 3 hours ago

        >that value consumer rights yeah, like BMW subscription for heated seat.

    • lopis · 17 hours ago

      Or perhaps tech companies, specially USA ones, are hostile to people and their rights.

      • johnisom2001 · 12 hours ago

        See what he means?

  • superxpro12 · 19 hours ago

    The paradox between supporting consumer rights with actions like universal usb-c adoption, but also complete elimination of any privacy rights at all. Like the surveillance state is insane. No e2ee chats, backdoors in everything.

    • aqme28 · 18 hours ago

      Isn't that just the recent highly controversial Chat Control push? Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.

      • Forgeties79 · 18 hours ago

        Privacy in certain domains is better protected than others.

      • qeternity · 14 hours ago

        > Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US. Please, like what? GDPR?

        • isbvhodnvemrwvn · 14 hours ago

          Let's just say you won't find my name, address, my yearbook pictures, history of where I lived, anywhere on the internet. I can quite easily get this information for all distant cousins in the US. And that has been the case long before GDPR was a thing. The culture around privacy is simply different.

          • qeternity · 13 hours ago

            Except that the government has all of this information and much more. And you have no protections from the "much more" bits, unlike in the US. It's incredible that Europeans today think the culture of privacy is different. American privacy protections (from the government) were born out of European flaws. The difference is that Europeans love the nanny state regulating private enterprise (GDPR) but never pointing that same effort against itself.

            • static_motion · 2 hours ago

              This being written by a citizen of the country that has Palantir and Flock cameras being installed all over the place is incredibly funny.

        • spixy · 12 hours ago

          Yes, GDPR.

    • niklasrde · 18 hours ago

      There are e2ee chats. There are some parties/politicians who want to get rid of them, but so far they are proposals. If/when these things go beyond committee stage, politics and democracy need to do their job and be sensible. PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law.

      • rdm_blackhole · 15 hours ago

        > but so far they are proposals That is false. They are not proposals, they are being actively discussed in trilogues which is way way past proposal stage. Chat control V2 trilogue negotiation was last week and it included mass scanning of messages and private data. Thankfully the EU parliament rejected the idea but every 6 months like clockwork it comes back. The next trilogue is in November. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-trilogue-u... If this was passed, it would force every single cloud provider and e2e chat provider to keep, filter and pass on your private information to Europol and other security agencies.

        • layer8 · 15 hours ago

          The trilogues are the standard informal step when the Commission submits a proposal. It remains a proposal until it is rejected or approved. The formal next step after submitting a proposal is the Parliament’s first reading [0], which hasn’t concluded yet (the Parliament hasn’t adopted a position yet). So it’s still in the proposal stage. [0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T... Quote: 1. Where reference is made in the Treaties to the ordinary legislative procedure for the adoption of an act, the following procedure shall apply. 2. The Commission shall submit a proposal to the European Parliament and the Council. First reading 3. The European Parliament shall adopt its position at first reading and communicate it to the Council. [ many more items ] Item 3 hasn’t happened yet.

      • qeternity · 14 hours ago

        > PATRIOT, FISA and Bush's surveillance programme imho give more powers to certain agencies today already than are codified in EU law. This is not true. Whether you believe that FISA courts have teeth, or whether 3 letter agencies abide by the law, in most of Europe you do not even have the pretense of this. UK/FR and to a lesser extent DE are all much worse. The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015, and the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption for domestic surveillance . The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US.

        • palata · 14 hours ago

          > Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries. > The worst parts of Patriot Act were undone in 2015 So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore, is that what you believe? > the "F" in FISA stands for "Foreign". [...] Europe continues to push policies [...] for domestic surveillance. So if it's surveilling allies, it's all good in your opinion? > The present day and trajectory in Europe is far far more grim than in the US. "Far far"? Do you even realise that Europe is not one single country? The US elected Trump, twice .

          • qeternity · 14 hours ago

            Yes, I am an American living in Europe. I have pretty good insight into all of this. > Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries. And yet neither party in the US is pushing for it... > So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore, is that what you believe? Do you have any evidence to the contrary? Or if you believe this without evidence, do you have any evidence this is not occurring in Europe? > So if it's surveilling allies, it's all good in your opinion? Lol, lmao even. Yes, of course it is. Allies spy on each other. The Europeans do it to each other massively and have done since the dawn of Europe. Good lord, go read some history. > "Far far"? Do you even realise that Europe is not one single country? The US elected Trump, twice. Again, I live in Europe. I am well aware, but thanks for the classic European condescension. I don't like Trump. But how has he weakened privacy rights? And yes, beacause I don't want to write dozens of caveats for each teeny tiny member state, I consider Europe to be dominated by happenings in DE + FR + UK. I don't care what Latvia does.

            • awestroke · 14 hours ago

              > Do you have any evidence to the contrary? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures

              • qeternity · 13 hours ago

                > So the NSA doesn't do any kind of domestic surveillance anymore Yes, of course. That is why GP said "anymore". Thanks for playing!

            • TomGarden · 13 hours ago

              > thanks for the classic European condescension. This is such a strange statement about a massively culturally diverse part of the world. Many European countries speak such poor English that it'd be a miracle if they developed some sort of unified condescension. I'd argue a big part of Europe not performing as well as other parts of the world economically is the LACK of any defined culture, it's really more like a hodgepodge of countries that have a thin layer of cooperation

              • qeternity · 13 hours ago

                I have no clue what English comprehension, monolith culture, and condescension have to do with one another? Or even the presumption that I only speak English? It's not a strange statement in the slightest if you live here or spend any appreciable time here. I take it you do not.

                • palata · 10 hours ago

                  I think you misunderstand their point. I think their point is that it's difficult to talk about a "typical European condescension" given that "Europe" is not one culture. It's made of many very different countries. If you randomly take two Europeans, they probably speak a different language and have completely different opinions, but chances are that they can't even understand each other. If you randomly take two US citizen, they most certainly have a shared identity.

                  • LoganDark · 16 minutes ago

                    I think that is not nearly as certain as you say. Some identities are very very outside the norms of local culture. (For example, I identify non-human, which is quite rare in any part of the world)

            • andrepd · 13 hours ago

              This comment could not have been more stereotypically American. I stress "stereotypical", I'm obviously not saying Americans in general are like this. > I don't like Trump. But how has he weakened privacy rights? Attacks on rule of law and civil liberties have increased, and the right to privacy is one of those liberties. It's of course not limited to Trump, he wasn't in office when Snowden showed the world the scale of American mass surveillance on domestic and foreign citizens. > Do you have any evidence to the contrary? I'm totally unsure what you are attempting to imply. That mass surveillance by the American state stopped at some point in the last 10 years? > Allies spy on each other. The Europeans do it to each other massively and have done since the dawn of Europe. Good lord, go read some history. What does that even mean "read history" ahaha. Espionage != mass surveillance. You do understand the difference, do you not? > thanks for the classic European condescension > I consider Europe to be dominated by happenings in DE + FR + UK. I don't care what Latvia does. l m a o. Oh say can you see...

              • qeternity · 13 hours ago

                > This comment could not have been more stereotypically American. Of course. As I noted before, dripping in European condescension. Nothing you can actually point to, just condescension from a region that has been left behind over the past century. > Attacks on rule of law and civil liberties have increased, and the right to privacy is one of those liberties. It's of course not limited to Trump, he wasn't in office when Snowden showed the world the scale of American mass surveillance on domestic and foreign citizens. Which right or in what way has the right to privacy been attacked? Fully agree with you on attacks on rule of law. And I find Trump incredibly dangerous. But I do not think privacy in the US today has suffered. Please educate me. > I'm totally unsure what you are attempting to imply. That mass surveillance by the American state stopped at some point in the last 10 years? I am not implying anything. The Freedom Act curtailed a bunch of activities. You are implying nothing has changed. All of the Snowden revelations implicated many European countries: intelligence agencies spying on each others populations. I am asking you if you believe nothing has changed in the US do you 1) have any evidence of this and/or 2) believe that anything has changed in Europe? You've answered neither. > What does that even mean "read history" ahaha. Espionage != mass surveillance. You do understand the difference, do you not? Do you understand that the mass surveillance of European people was done at the behest of the intelligence agencies of those countries? And ditto for the NSA. The agreement was "you spy on mine and I'll spy on yours and we'll swap the intel". I am not talking about espionage. Foreign intelligence agencies spying on foreigners...what did you think they did? > l m a o. Oh say can you see... God, it's so painful. Yes in the same way that you talk about the US as a monolith and not 50 individual states. You don't care what Rhode Island does any more than I care what Latvia does. Christ you guys are insufferable. It's no wonder everyone is leaving in droves.

                • tommyage · 11 hours ago

                  > Of course. As I noted before, dripping in European condescension. Nothing you can actually point to, just condescension from a region that has been left behind over the past century. Let's see about that; Just me, some small guy with no knowledge on the topic. > Which right or in what way has the right to privacy been attacked? The US scans your device if you enter their land, e.g. Oh; I heard ICE uses cameras to spy on their own citizen? What about the raising Flock Cameras? > But I do not think privacy in the US today has suffered. Please educate me. A giant corporation just attacked another one. There were no repercussions. If you think that isn't privacy: How about leaking civilian data to outsiders of the government? DOGE, anybody? > I am not implying anything. The Freedom Act curtailed a bunch of activities. You are implying nothing has changed. All of the Snowden revelations implicated many European countries: intelligence agencies spying on each others populations. I am asking you if you believe nothing has changed in the US do you 1) have any evidence of this and/or 2) believe that anything has changed in Europe? You've answered neither. Why does he has to provide evidence but you don't? Also, I have never heard that an European Country spied on civilians from another country. That's an US and Chinese business model. Things changed in the US. It is now a lawless country. A war mongering state which dumps its allies for their own benefit. They are actively hostile. Your second question is so unspecific I have to require elaboration: "believe that anything has changed in Europe?" - I assume you are referring to Privacy Laws? We had plenty of new laws _protecting_ consumers in this regards. Handling data responsible. Wait; What are you guys doing over there? Ah, right: You are pushing Age Verification and demand information on our criminal record systems. You are pushing biometric tracking. You are telling buys of your weapons that you have the right to disable them. Honestly: The US sucks right now. You guys have elected the stupidest idiot, twice. And now without any regulation you are actively supporting a technology which will undermine _all_ citizen in the world. > Do you understand that the mass surveillance of European people was done at the behest of the intelligence agencies of those countries? And ditto for the NSA. The agreement was "you spy on mine and I'll spy on yours and we'll swap the intel". I am not talking about espionage. Foreign intelligence agencies spying on foreigners...what did you think they did? Again: You are accusing all twenty five member states in one statement. To me you are just yelling polemic nonsense. EUROPOL is _cooperating_ with the US. They are hunting people breaking our laws. If any individual is lawless within our boundaries of justice, European states have the rights to try to prosecute them. > God, it's so painful. Yes in the same way that you talk about the US as a monolith and not 50 individual states. You don't care what Rhode Island does any more than I care what Latvia does. You are implying your behaviour. The US has _one_ president in order to bundle the power. Your states have their national rights. If you compare the US to the EU you are not informed. > Christ you guys are insufferable. It's no wonder everyone is leaving in droves. By appearing with such statements on the Internet as an European Civilian you are undermining our values. Maybe if you can not align with them you should proceed your journey.

            • rebolek · 13 hours ago

              You don’t care about Latvia and I don’t care about some dickhead who "lives in Europe" and knows it all. And I’m not even from Latvia, you’re just pathetic.

            • palata · 9 hours ago

              You are so stereotypical, it's very funny :-). I believe that there is a bit of an asymmetry between US people and... well the rest of the world, in that the WHOLE world has some level of insights into the US. Whether they want it or not, for many different reasons. However, the US don't typically have a good insights into... the rest of the world. Which does make sense: the rest of the world is pretty big. Of course the US is more complicated than "they elected Trump". Sure, there are 50 states. But everybody knows that (be it just because your president repeatedly threatens to annex Canada as the 51st state ;-) ). People in the rest of the world do not need to "live in the US" to have that level of insights, because the US makes sure they do, by force if necessary. The mere fact that you don't seem to be aware of this asymmetry at all suggests that you over-estimate your "pretty good insight into all of Europe".

              • kelnos · 2 hours ago

                As counterpoint, though, I've heard some absolutely bonkers impressions of the US made by some Europeans. And that's not isolated; there seem to be lots of Europeans who have some very strange ideas about what it's like in the US. I do agree with your general point, though: I would expect your average European to have a better understanding of the politics of the US than your average American would have of even a prominent European country like Germany.

          • adjejmxbdjdn · 13 hours ago

            >> Some politicians in Europe push for that, until now it has been refused by the others. Unlike in the US, there are many different parties in European countries. And Europe is made of politicians from many parties from many countries. > And yet neither party in the US is pushing for it... This is a bad retort. The U.S. has 2 relevant parties. Most countries in the EU have at least twice as many relevant parties and there are over 25 countries in Europe, so you’re looking at close to 100 relevant parties.

        • oakpond · 13 hours ago

          > Europe continues to push policies like Chat Control and attempt to backdoor/ban E2E encryption for domestic surveillance. Let's not forget that Chat Control is pushed by US non-profit Thorn, and implemented by software that this non-profit develops! Furthermore, if you look at how this software actually works (even in "self-hosted" setup it sends hash values to Thorn's servers [1]), it's pretty clear that this tech could easily be abused to perform surveillance on the EU from within the US. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260721220432/https://get.safer...

      • Yizahi · 12 hours ago

        E2EE are are alive for maybe a few more years tops, until Chat Control 2.0 is voted in. ADDW enables mandatory spying camera in every new car. EU AI act allows AI surveillance without any court order (the only tiny useless hurdle is to record video first and then observer can use AI on the records at will). eIDAS2 allows legal MITM browser certificate attacks. Media Freedom Act (duh) allows deploying spyware against journalists in cases of "national security", as usual vague and undefined. And the list goes on. Modern day EU, over the past 5 years or so is just as bad anti-privacy as USA, for no clear benefit too. Just surveillance for surveillance sake.

    • mcintyre1994 · 18 hours ago

      I can't think of any e2ee app that's banned in the EU. I know Signal and WhatsApp are not.

    • muvlon · 17 hours ago

      I don't think it's a paradox because the EU is not a single actor. Just like any government, they do some good and some bad things.

    • layer8 · 17 hours ago

      You have a very distorted perception of the state of privacy rights in Europe.

      • zelphirkalt · 17 hours ago

        Well, the GP is describing, what soon might be.

        • layer8 · 17 hours ago

          That’s quite unlikely, given the constitutions of various EU countries and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

          • yeahforsureman · 16 hours ago

            Not to forget the European Human Rights Convention as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), although it's not an institution of the EU but the Council of Europe, spanning all EU states and then some. The Court's case law is recognized as is by EU, and includes some landmark privacy rulings, e.g., against access to contents and metadata of electronic comms without a court order (or comparable legal safeguards), or any forms of bulk surveillance.

            • rdm_blackhole · 15 hours ago

              Yes, the court can overturn laws that are deemed to infringe on privacy rights but this path takes years. The last time a privacy invasive law was enacted it took something like 8 years to be overturned. Are you willing to live in the EU knowing that for the next 8 years the EU agencies will have access to every single message, email and picture you send your loved ones just in case one of those could be CSAM? Even if that was overturned, how will one know if he data they intercepted and illegally obtained will be destroyed or if the text messages you sent to your wife/husband are not going to end up sold to the highest bidder on the darkweb?

              • kolinko · 32 minutes ago

                Which country is better?

          • rdm_blackhole · 15 hours ago

            https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-trilogue-u... > given the constitutions of various EU countries EU law superseded any state law by default and that's by design. Even if the EU law is immoral and dangerous like the Chat Control law. So a country's constitution will not save you if tomorrow all chat apps are doing client side scanning.

            • zelphirkalt · 14 hours ago

              In practice it _might_ still save you, if the country is willing to pay annual fines to the EU for not implementing some law or policy. But communication tools are always at least a 2 way thing, where you communicate with someone else. If that someone else has their chats leaked due to living in another EU country, where chat control is implemented, then even your constitution will not protect you. Scenarios like these make me consider, whether one day I need to vote for my country to also leave the EU, as it might become a surveillance nightmare. The moment chat control impacts me and my chats on my devices, I think I will have had enough of this. But the economic consequences are scary of course. So damned if you leave and damned if you don't. Sucks.

          • zelphirkalt · 14 hours ago

            There are forces pushing for chat control again and again and again, until one day people are not vigilant enough to prevent this BS from happening. Then it will take ages to repeal and repair the damage done. Once there is some chance to vacuum up some personal data, businesses, government, and security forces will be very quick to grab that chance, and very slow to give that data up again, should it turn out, that the whole damn thing was illegal all along, due to some constitution. The malpractices might continue for years even after things have been declared illegal.

            • hsuduebc2 · 11 hours ago

              Yea, they only need one successful attempt. I'm still quite not sure about the motivation, the fact that politicians have an exempt from this law is scandalous at least.

              • kolinko · 28 minutes ago

                Yeah. Fortunately Germany has a quite firm stance against surveilance, for well known reasons ;), and with Germany against it will be extremely difficult to pass this.

          • ctolsen · 14 hours ago

            To add some practical results to that: the Data Retention Directive[1] was struck down by a bunch of national constitutional courts before being completely annulled by the EU Court of Justice. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

          • LtWorf · 2 hours ago

            The constitution of Italy says that we can't use war to solve international controversies. And yet we were in iraq… constitutions are somewhat meaningless if you have authoritarian governments that can ignore them.

        • throwa356262 · 16 hours ago

          In the mean time, this is the current reality in the states: One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49852065 And Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057 I dont buy this "europe not free" nonsense.

          • hsuduebc2 · 11 hours ago

            Yea, it's cope.

      • qeternity · 14 hours ago

        As an American living in Europe, it's generally Europeans who have a distorted perception. Most Americans know the bill of rights and the 1st/4th/5th amendments. Many Americans will know of the Patriot Act/NSA/Snowden revelations. The same is not true of Europeans and they generally believe their rights are much stronger than they are. Most Brits are not aware of the true nature of the Investigatory Powers Act. Most Frenchmen are not aware of Article L851-3.

        • kelnos · 2 hours ago

          I don't think we're talking about perception though. Europeans can certainly perceive their privacy rights to be greater than they actually are, but that doesn't mean those rights are inferior to that of Americans. Outside of things like the GDPR (which is more about data held by corporations and not the government), I don't know all that much about privacy laws in various European countries (and I expect they vary quite a lot country to country), so I don't know either way. As for the US, 1A doesn't guarantee any form of privacy. 5A does, but in the very narrow sense of not requiring you to incriminate yourself. 4A is indeed about privacy, but it feels like those protections are constantly under fire, and SCOTUS regularly rules against private citizens who believe the government has run roughshod over their 4A protections. Beyond that, judges seem to rubber-stamp surveillance warrants all the time, and it's currently very legal for law enforcement agencies to purchase private data on citizens from private businesses that have managed to collect it through whatever means. What's the point of the need to get a warrant before tracking someone's movements if the police can just pay Google or T-Mobile for location data? And don't get me started on Flock... they're a government surveillance agency without the "government" part. Then there's the border search exemption, which is just nuts. Fortunately it seems some federal judges are sane and think the government shouldn't be allowed to trawl through our phones at the airport, but those rulings are not universal across the US at this point. And if and when that sort of case ends up in SCOTUS's lap, I don't trust them to do the right thing. Frankly I think the US's privacy posture (when it comes to people keeping things private from the government) is pretty bad. Maybe it's still better then Europe, but that's still nothing to celebrate.

        • kolinko · 34 minutes ago

          Privacy from government is one thing, from corporations is another. Can you name a single law or privacy practice that Americans have that Europeans don’t? As for Brits, they left EU and they are definitely going the 1984 way, I think this is generally agreed.

    • gobdovan · 17 hours ago

      In EU, it's politician > industrialist >>> EU citizen > outsiders. It's almost never only about consumers. Via tech regulations, they protect European incumbents first in effect. They see US is ahead and make laws to destroy their moats. If Apple was in EU, you wouldn't have saw universal usb-c, because it would have hurt an EU company. But the more you look at how tedious is for a non-EU company to sell to EU customers, the exemptions they don't get, the specialists fees they got to put on the table, you'll see EU is more coherently described as protectionist than pro-consumer.

      • kolinko · 12 hours ago

        First of all - if it was true then it wouldn’t be much worse than US or China. But in general, people usually complain the exact opposite of what you’re saying - that the regulations we have handicap our companies.

        • gobdovan · 8 hours ago

          They handicap our little companies more than the incumbents. The Commission itself acknowledged that regulatory costs affect SMEs proportionally more than bigger competitors [0] and the OECD explicitly found that policy failures and regulatory barriers tend to hurt startups more than incumbents [1][2]. The way I see the broader pattern is: more regulation -> larger bureaucracy -> larger bureaucracy has more scope and more incentive to regulate -> incumbent absorb growing compliance burden easily -> entrants get hit harder + ad-hoc regulations to hurt established outsiders even harder. [0] TOOL #22. THE "SME TEST": https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5d2011d7-5470... [1] No Country for Young Firms? https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/no-country-for-young-fi... [2] OECD, about Germany 2025, e.g.: 'Industrial and labour market policies have tended to favour incumbents and hampered the reallocation of resources to young and innovative firms, weighing on allocative efficiency and slowing down structural change' ( https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... )

          • kolinko · 2 hours ago

            Ah, this one I experienced myself. At least in Poland the requirements before GDPR was the same for small startups and for large enterprises. If you wanted to set up a newsletter for a bunch of friends you had to do, technically, the same requirements and reports as the large telcos. The only way to manage it was to effectively ignore it. I’ve met people who were afraid of setting up a landing page because you technically had to fill in paperwork and whatnot. Ditto managing VAT across the borders and a bunch of other stuff. It is better now in some ways - I think some newer regulations had it written down that they apply above a certain turnover threshold. We also we have saas-es to deal with a lot of beauricratic bs, and now also agents. But I imagine for more human/real-world stuff the issues can’t be overcome with tech. E.g. if you hire a 4th team member and that person immediately goes into months-long health/birth timeout, it can derail a whole project. We barely avoided that once - didn’t hire a person due to culture fit, but we later suspected they planned to take a leave shortly after getting hired. It’s a common thing in bigger corps but they can afford it. As a side note, in Poland used to have a lot of such BS, but our general culture is about hacking around it. For example it’s common for smaller companies to have employees „self employed” to avoid most of regulatory burden of hiring, whereas the bigger companies need to have employees actually employed with all the legal consequences. Technically anyone can get audited but below 20-50 people the government won’t bother, so it balances itself out. Germany is another animal altogether - the last time I was doing business there you couldn’t even theoretically open a new company at all because they had a catch 22. To open a company you had to have a bank account to pay the notary, and to open an account you had to have a company. And either the notary or the bank had to blink.

      • OtomotO · 3 hours ago

        In the US it's People with money >> Politicians >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Average citizens. But hey, you got Hollywood propaganda and unwavering patriotism to make up for it.