This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.

As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.

Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.

> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.

Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?

> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.

Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.

> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).

That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

Pieter Levels famously runs Nomad List as vanilla PHP application on a single Linux server, while people keeps insisting you need a fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud setup and the modern stack-du-jour to provide such an application.

The EU isn't even capable of ramping up its own defence capabilities when being faced with the very real threat of a Russian incursion in the next few years, which has me wonder what would be required for them to finally wake up.

I suppose some people just want to see the world burn.

I'm by no means a supporter of copyright and copyright laws, but unilaterally terminating such agreements is a recipe for disaster. How do you think the US would react to such a move?

How isolationism and open source are supposed to stem that tide, is beyond me.

Therein lies the rub for the EU. They think they can just regulate such alternatives into existence, yet have time and time again failed to provide such alternatives.

How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).

Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.

A few years ago, I saw a talk that made a point about how prosthetics that mimic original human body parts are often designed from an able-bodied point of view. They look inoffensive and are designed for the wearer to blend into what's considered normal.

However, these prosthetics frequently are not all that useful. Once one starts to rethink from first principles in terms of function and efficiency rather than aesthetics this opens up an entirely new space of solutions that might be much more efficient than the original "solutions" they replace - the most famous example probably being Oscar Pistorius' running blades.

The same applies to digital transformation - and by extension AI and robotics. We don't need faster horses. We need to rethink and replace existing processes entirely.

However, as I use Google Slides (rather than a Markdown-based presentation tool), I faced the significant problem of having to manually import the content into Google Slides presentations via copy and paste, which was very time-consuming.

Hence, I built a solution called DeckWeaver that not only takes this tedious work off my hands, but also allows me to review generated content directly from within the application, which has the added benefit of fewer context switches and media breaks: https://usedeckweaver.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870690

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Might've been either NComm or Term. Another piece the puzzle I just remembered was compression utilities such as LHA (and later LZW).