Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.
Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026
(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.
But you can see:
> Powered by [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/)
Fine since this is an open source product, but not full EU sovereignty of the software stack.
Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support for the free open-source version like so many products have done in the past.
If a EU entity forks it and maintains it, then that'd be end-to-end sovereignty IMO.
~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix/
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy.
> "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong country again."
...
> One poll, from Pew, suggested that 93% of Latinos who cast their votes for Trump rated the economy as their primary issue, with violent crime and immigration trailing far behind.
> Data from the new CBS poll shows that a significant majority of Latinos - 61% - disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, while 69% disapprove of his handling of inflation. The vast majority said they judge the performance of the US economy through prices.
Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/
Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook
Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/2025-fighter-jet-delive...
Re: rockets.....well we don't want to judge by tonnage lifted, where SpaceX dwarfs the entire planet's efforts. Still it appears Europe struggles to put even a handful of new rockets up, so I'm not sure why you are characterizing that as "plenty" either:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/20/1113582/europe-i...
> Europe is already great. It's why hundreds of thousands of Americans moved here in 2025.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS? Citation needed please. A migration of that scale would have journalists writing about it. Accurate data seems hard to come by but one expert puts TOTAL US expat numbers in Europe around 1.1 million.
https://aaro.org/living-abroad/how-many-americans-live-abroa...
> As for being a vassal: Trump was warned of the consequences of invading Greenland and he backed down immediately. Some vassal.
Yes sometimes vassals oppose their suzerain's most egregious overreaches of power successfully. King John of England's barons pressured him to create the Magna Carta. Afterwards...they were still his vassals, as they were before it.
Just ask Mark Rutte: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/29/rutte-is-right...
A relevant opinion piece from a European: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/nothing-more-than...
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home
I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-...
People globally have routinely acknowledged that:
1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs
2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc.
3. This is good
The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.
Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口
n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.
https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...
Because it's very hard to compete against monopolies when there are network effects. What you can do is regulate them. The US government has been working very hard in the last decades to prevent that.
Recommended: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
On a side and more general note: "Global Innovation Index 2025"
"Europe hosts 15 economies ranked among the global top 25, including six in the top 10. Switzerland (1st) retains the global lead, followed by Sweden (2nd), the United Kingdom (6th) and Finland (7th). Thirteen out of 39 European economies covered moved up the ranks, marking a notable increase from nine last year.
Notable movers include Ireland (18th), Belgium (21st) and Norway (20th), which breaks into the top 20.
Eastern European economies also show solid momentum. Lithuania (33rd) leads globally for unicorn valuation and digital innovation – with leading positions in app creation, ICT use and Knowledge-intensive employment.Europe is also home to dynamic innovation clusters, led by Germany with seven clusters and the United Kingdom with four, including Cambridge and Oxford. However, European innovation clusters trail the US in venture capital strength."
<https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2025/article_0009...>
https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/over-75000-americans-moved...
real source here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/migr_resfirst...
Yes of course I can be honest. We don't have any of that. But if I'd sketch out a genuine European future in software to me it would look something like this. You have technologies like Tim Berner Lee's Solid[1] and social protocols like Mastodon/Bluesky/etc owned as public infrastructure and operated by its people. You could imagine each region of Europe having its own sovereign digital space federated with individuals owning their data, a genuine network mirroring the region as it is.
The big problem with this isn't just technical, it's mental. The user of today anywhere is a consumer. It's like turning a serf into a citizen. I don't think this is a five year vision, it's more like a 50 year program. I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.
Russian agents are thought to have committed numerous acts, almost all of which could be considered acts of war, on EU/UK soil, or against EU/UK nationals
* Poisoning of the Skripals with a chemical warfare agent, one dead, 2018, Salisbury, England, UK [0]
* Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with a radioisotope, one dead, 2006, London, England, UK [1]
* Vrbětice ammunition warehouse explosions, one dead, 2014, Zlín Region, Czechia [2]
* Jamming of GPS signals used by EU President Ursula von der Leyen's jet, 2025, Bulgaria [3]
* Arson of the Marywilska 44 shopping center, 2024, Warsaw, Poland [4]
* Shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over the Donbas, 2014, 283 dead, most of them Netherlands citizens [5]
* Sabotage of underwater telecommunications cables, railway lines, cyberattacks, probing airspace with armed aircraft, and on and on - just Google it, I don't have enough time to mention all of these.
... you were saying?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrbětice_ammunition_wareh...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/russia-europe-jamming-spoofing-gp...
[4] https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/05/12/poland-confirms-russi...
[5] https://www.britannica.com/event/Malaysia-Airlines-flight-17
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover...
(0ct 2025)
Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app:
For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).
India and the EU have managed to work as adults and find a way to sign an FTA [0] and Defense Pact [1] last week. The adults in the room found a way to compromise and turn a zero sum game into a stag hunt and anyone repeating tired tropes like above is either extremely uninformed or a bot.
[0] - https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...
[1] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-...
Since it is relevant here: support for uploads was code written by a French contributor, and reviewed by a developer working for the French gov (ANCT/DINUM) and a developer working for Grist Labs. Grist Labs has since maintained and improved on it. The forms feature itself was inspired by an integration built by Camille Legeron at ANCT.
Everything you see in our standard docker image is open source. Yes, you can enable and pay for enterprise features too.
Their recent update removed the paywall from SSO (and unfortunately the Gitlab SSO workaround) for social logins up to 100 seats, afterwards there's an absurd per seat cost similar to its non-open source brethren. One day if needed, I plan to drop-in an SSO middleman allowing anyone to leverage their own SSO layer (which will map to the login form with username/password) to avoid the SSO limits altogether. Though good enough for my needs, and likely yours too. Especially if you're open to paying for their seats.
[0] - >>43574128
[1] - >>44989996
Insulting facts are still facts, regardless of feelings about the facts. I am not in politics, being liked is irrelevant to me.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...
Comment right above yours: >>46877163
> even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.
One would hope, but evidently not!
If anyone involved in this transition read this, please contact us, we already got open source technology to replace box / Dropbox / OneDrive and Gdrive
As a Frenchman, this stings. I have been working since 2017 in creating an open source alternative to Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), the reality is out of 60 customers, only 2 are French and most contacts I've had with French entities only shown interest onto open source because they were not willing to spend a dime on anything.
Customers are mostly US entities and other countries in Europe. The gist is our technology is already working accross every possible storage technology and every identity provider, has a clean modern UI, has gateway capabilities to expose your data with open protocols like SFTP, FTP, S3, MCP, with virtual filesystem capabilities that enables a decentralized approach through federation and tons of other advanced setup, is deployed in production in places like US military, MIT, European Commission and many other othher high profile places.
We just launched https://www.filestash.eu a few days ago hoping to talk to people in France who are interested in translating the talk of data sovereignty onto actual actions. If anybody who is reading this is truly interested onto a sovereign Dropbox and is willing to put talks onto a concrete reality, reach out to me, I'd love to talk to you
I did try a local installation of Docs when i first saw the project a few months ago (i do not remember if it was posted here or on Reddit, though i think one of the developers posted in the comments wherever i saw it), it seems fine though it did feel a bit sparse for all the docker containers it expected from me to setup. I guess for an organization this might be ok, but it did feel a bit overengineered, especially since the actual functionality doesn't seem to be much (and the core editor isn't even written by them).
That includes:
Dependency on US-hosted digital services (emails, chat, calendars, ticket systems, online editors, file hosting, sync services, payment providers) — e.g., Gmail, Google Docs.
Dependency on third-party authentication providers — e.g., login via Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, and iCloud on iPhones.
Dependency on US cloud infrastructure providers — e.g., companies relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Dependency through supply chain partners who rely on US tech — e.g., digitization partners using AWS/Azure impacting invoice processing.
Dependency on US-based business IT software and data services — e.g., banks using Microsoft LDAP, accountants using Dropbox, telecoms storing data in Oracle data lakes.
Dependency on US-controlled operating systems on user devices — e.g., Windows, macOS, iOS, Android.
Dependency on US-designed chips in most devices — e.g., Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Apple chip hardware.
The chat seems extremely basic, so not really an alternative if you need chat with e.g. message edit/delete/formatting/pictures as well as video/audio.
1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Innovation_Index>
> Europe's issue is that it only considers itself.
That may be one perspective. A similar point could probably be made about the US in some contexts. Europe, after all, is not a single entity but a collection of individual countries.
Bonus: A last index, done by IMD World Competitiveness Ranking. It is not an "exclusively American produced" indicator, but it is independent of European institutions and relies on international data.
<https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center...>
ps: Netherlands is ranked 8 in the list (IDK why you asserted it was absent). Moreover it is well covered in the first link I provided.
> Microsoft, for example, cancelled Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in his home country of the U.K. have been blocked.
The Bavarian state for example just signed a huge deal with MS.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cloud-Row-in-Bavaria-over-billi...
We’re just stating facts: DINUM stopped funding upstream development at Element in 2022/2023 when their post-COVID funding evaporated, and this then directly contributed to the licensing changes at Element at the end of 2023 (https://element.io/blog/element-to-adopt-agplv3/) as we tried to figure out a way to survive (which, thankfully, worked).
But we also know that the Tchap team is very budget constrained internally themselves to keep it running, despite the growing criticality and huge visibility of the service, and are trying to find ways to fix the situation at every level.
This is not a challenge limited to France: the question of how to support the upstream when heavily using open source was one of the top topics of last week’s Open Source Week in Brussels, involving folks at every level in European government.
Also, if you could cut down on the ideological battle stuff generally, that would be good. I'm not sure your account has quite been using HN primarily for that (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...) but it's close enough that you should probably recalibrate.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-definition-of...
That said, the Dutch government is collaborating with La Suite (fr) and OpenDesk (de): https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/
We're discussing how to work best with downstream dependencies as well. So far they're actively sponsoring Yjs, but not prosemirror/tt.
fyi, here are some early thoughts by the PM of Docs on how to collaborate between public sector and OSS (companies): https://github.com/virgile-dev/playbook-work-with-oss-librar... (we surely don't check all the boxes yet, but it's good to have the discussion!). Feel free to jump in!
https://obsproject.com/kb/virtual-camera-guide
https://usercomp.com/news/1413136/ffmpeg-virtual-camera-guid...
I used that back in the days in 2019 / early 2020 when it was not yet possible to share your screen on msteams under wayland in chrome and firefox.