Regularly, yes. On a lot of these sorts of products, nothing happens without governments making deals first. Mostly because governments have a need to make sure they get weapons too, not just money for the components they make.
Perhaps should be described as "sale is forbidden by default, but deals are common".
This goes 100% for either completed weapons, or components that can be directly used as a weapon, then you have "dual-use", and the less directly it's a weapon, the more free you are to do what you want.
Can you name any examples? European countries and the EU as a whole don't have an equivalent of the US's ITAR 'See-Through' rule, which lets the US control the usage of a system that has any US components.
I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.
But this is the one-component-is-the-weapon, with everything going in one direction version of such a rule. An F35 has 300,000 components from 19 countries, so you can imagine what a maze the agreements for that one are.
It's also not just about the weapons and the danger they pose. It's also about jobs. Know-how (both spreading and restricting know-how). And even the traditional "synergy" (you've designed helicopter blah, hence you make radio component so-and-so, so how about you manufacture NATO standard blah radios and antennas) and the occasional monopoly (it's kind of secret but there aren't many companies that can make the obvious alloy needed for the trust vectoring to name one obvious thing)
Our side is NATO, and we make weapons that are designed to push the global integrated worldview and human rights ("America and it's allies") that we espouse as an alliance. And this view permeates all weapons. For NATO guns, one, you'll never get ridiculous ammo stores (that would enable you to eliminate a population for example), we all work on these weapons together, design them together, and if you try to use your own ammo, everything will fail. Most NATO weapons are defensive. You aim a NATO weapon at a (small) target, it finds that target and either kills it or it disables itself and falls to the ground, essentially intact. Russian weapons are the total opposite: they're meant to kill and if they can't kill their target, they'll just kill whatever and whoever's nearby. Sometimes up to the point they kill the weapon's operators. They will fire "cheap ammo" and literally come with instructions on how to make it. They are meant to kill on a very large scale, without precision and they are most definitely not safe to use. This philosophical difference applies to everything from machine guns to nuclear weapons.
A quick Google search will find you plenty of European legislation. And you should look at those laws like the Belgian laws here, like they were a company "Values" document. That is how the EU/Belgium (and other countries) react "by default", but specific treaties explicitly create exceptions to those rules between specific parties.
So like this: exporting guns and ammo is certainly not something any country allows their companies to do, but most/all countries make specific exceptions in treaties.
This just happens to have the advantage that it makes it extremely easy for politicians to deceive voters about weapons. "Belgian law says it's illegal to export weapons". 100% technically true, and totally misdirects people into believing Belgium doesn't export weapons, which is absolutely false.
Meanwhile, Belgium exports ~50 million euros worth of weapons. But Belgium is just an example, it's not like the Netherlands or France or (definitely) UK, or the EU as a whole are different.
You missed the point. The example asked for was this:
"I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government."
That would be something like "Belgium says the USA can't sell F-35s to Israel because the wings are Belgian-made" similar to how the USA prevents ASML from selling their machines to China.
Oh that's what you want. In the clusterfuck with the Turkey involuntary withdrawal from the F35 program half the treaties were renegotiated (you see, can't have any Turk produce weapons unless he's a "genius", that would not be fair. In other news: the Turkish definition of genius is mostly being the son in law of Erdogan [1])
I believe this agreement is part of the restructuring after that cluster... Note that the agreement is both about production and buying. [2]
"Finland has required extensive domestic participation, with industrial cooperation valued at a minimum of 30 percent of the contract price of procuring 64 F-35A fighters. Under the agreement, Finnish firms will produce the F-35’s forward fuselage structures, including components intended for export aircraft. The agreement also includes ..."
As to how the EU is involved: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus... (ie. that's where you go to ask for loans to start a factory for making F35 components, they have a page listing the deals ... somewhere). Note that this is one of the EU institutions that isn't in the budget (well, the loans aren't). They're not spending tax money to make those loans, they're printing money to make those loans.
So the Finnish government is making this deal, including details on export (and this is obviously weapons exports).
How is it an example of European governments preventing American weapons from being sold? Are you saying the Finns unilaterally decided that Turkey can't have F-35s, even if the USA wants to sell F-35s to them?
You misunderstand. Everything is prevented by law, with the purpose to make any change in production involve negotiations with the government, who then negotiates weapons/jobs/local production/... Without those negotiations, and the resulting exceptions to the law nothing can be sold, even dual use items are restricted.
And, of course, the other side of that coin: weapons export regulation is Europe is not something that is meant to actually prevent weapons export. Rather it is used like a company policy: it makes sure everyone regularly has to give the government something they want.
Which is, to put it mildly, not how politicians present those laws.
No, you misunderstand. You keep talking about things irrelevant to the key point.
Look at the political pressure the USA puts on ASML in the Netherlands to prevent them from selling certain products to China because those machines contain some American parts.
The question is explicitly when the reverse has happened, not some general info about European weapon exports or legislation.
Things like Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR(that applies to a lot of hobby stuffs I'm interested in) are multinational and global. The US implementation is the most painful, but they're like non-Linux unices, sameish in concept and not like first-worlders get free passes.
(And these regs aren't complete nonsense; the technologies regulated by these are useful for guided munitions. It just so happens missile technologies are fully commoditized by now and also happens to be immensely useful for totally peaceful purposes too)
These, again, are export control restrictions at the point of sale and transfer, and the US follows them too. It's not the same thing as what we're discussing regarding the US's changing requirements regarding systems that embed its components.
Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.
For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]
That’s why I approximated the fuselage as two EVS (the frontal area) and I only looked up the drag coefficient of a 737 because it’s a well-known narrow-body airliner.
I don’t know what speeds they flew, but AFAIK most maiden flights are very tame. My point stands, low hundreds of kilowatthours of energy seems like the right ballpark.
> That’s why I approximated the fuselage as two EVS (the frontal area)
Have you ever seen a car and a plane? The Tesla model x has a frontal area of 2.6 sqm and a 737 fuselage alone, without any wings is already 11 sqm.
With all attachments it’s at least 20 sqm.
And half of the energy for altitude gain and half for drag is way too optimistic.
> This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is only after verisign bought the 2ld holder that they became the holders and are now proceeding to extinguishing them after embracing and extending.
Why should I care as the customer? If I buy a for-life subscription plan and the company gets bought, can they just not honor it because it’s a different company now? Maybe they should check which promises they are buying when acquiring other companies.
Love that, I have similar desires to be able to control some climate controllers so I can get a more native bluetooth connection to it and override their programming for fine control of devices and have it never phone back home. One of these days I'll have time to throw an LLM at it, but I've been working on a dead project for 4 years ago I dropped because I realized how daunting it was going to be turn it into a product, but now I've made progress that would have taken me a year, in a few weekends.
I'm not sure. To be more specific, my car has a Delphi MIB2 Standard head unit (which uses NDS.Classic maps). I think the keys are likely to work with all MIB2 Standard head units, as that's how VW categorizes the updates, but I don't know about other MIB versions.
Is it realistic to keep people working jobs that don’t get anything done in the long term? I know most people will say that’s already happening, but imagine a society where basically every job is just a bullshit job made to keep you occupied, do you think people will continue working in a society like that?
Like you foresaw, I'll say this is the reality for most people. I think that just like now, those who want to do meaningful work will seek opportunities to do so.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
Yes, it's realistic. We're at least a couple of generations into this experiment now. Millions of people travel to and from an office to sit on a chair, doing nothing, all day, every day. This in turns keeps a whole bunch of people employed servicing their cars, preparing their food, sweeping the floor behind them etc.
None of these people question whether their jobs are really necessary for the few things we really need: food, shelter, warmth, health etc.
A couple of generations ago most women were employed in the least bullshit job of all: running a household. But now they're all wage slaves too. So yeah, it does work.
That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?
Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.
Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you.
My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer.
Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.
I agree, but often corporate policy overrides most people's preferences, which is why such processes exist - to ensure that travel arrangements match corporate policy rather than individual preferences.
In my experience corporate policy is primarily built to control cost. It will not allow booking expensive flights when cheaper flights are available. But when prices are similar, it doesn’t really dictate much.
And in many cases having a corporate policy means just adding a few more constraints: it makes the problem more like a logical puzzle and this can nerd snipe people.
Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.
When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation.
(And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well.
Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning.
It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then.
These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :)
I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly.
But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[].
[]: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
I wouldn't even use a bot for that, there's price comparison websites and of course I know where to find the cheapest stuff already.
Which makes me think: would a generation raised on AI and automating these things even consider looking for e.g. deals on household consumables? This is spiraling doomerism at this point, but, do people who outsource the hard thinking to LLMs get fresh ideas or inspiration still?
I mean: I've been using price comparison websites since we've had a web with enough prices to compare them, and they always find some way to fail. And I don't possess the hubris required to think that I always know where to buy the cheapest of anything.
And the only reason I'm thinking about buying dish soap is because I'm washing dishes. Without some kind of other influence, I won't be thinking about it again until the next time I'm washing dishes. But meanwhile, there I am -- washing dishes, and thinking about buying dish soap. I'm stuck doing this job until it is finished and my hands are wet; I might as well engage the bot.
> Which makes me think: would a generation raised on AI and automating these things even consider looking for e.g. deals on household consumables?
Sure. If finding a deal on a household consumable is what they're behooved to do, then why would they not? People broadly do adapt to the world they grow up in, and to use the tools available to them.
We don't use phone books or video rental places anymore. We're still getting by.
And people will misuse the machine as well, but that's also not new.
When the engine light comes on in ~any car from the last 30 years and the dude at Autozone plugs a widget in and declares "It says here that it's an O2 sensor!" and people blindly treat that as a firm diagnosis, then they sometimes find disappointment: They install a brand new O2 sensor and things don't improve at all. That won't change.
(In reality, that result just means "The measurement reported by the O2 sensor is irrational." That could be because the sensor is bad, but it could also be because any other part of the fuel+air system -- from front to back -- is being funky instead.)
> do people who outsource the hard thinking to LLMs get fresh ideas or inspiration still?
As much as they ever did, I suppose. Not everybody is naturally inquisitive, nor gets to be above average.
I wanted some banana plugs for my speakers, as well as I needed some longer speaker wire. I kinda wanted it for the weekend so I could watch movies with some friends. I didn't want to order online as that wouldn't arrive in time. Three stores around me had some, but they were quite far apart and I didn't want to drive to all of them, so I needed to figure out which store had ones that were actually decent and not too crappy.
LLMs completely and utterly failed at this.
The Mensa test results are impressive but are in no way shape or form relevant to real world scenarios.
I wanna see benchmarks on successfully completing benefits applications, on finding the best option to purchase X from, on correctly identifying a piece of furniture and its condition and setting a correct price on it and selling it on craigslist/FB market place and so forth.
I've been looking for usable, insulated, stackable banana plugs that work with 12 AWG wire for over a decade.
For a lot of my audio things, I can get by with MDPs from Pamona Eelectronics. They're insulated-enough, stackable, dual-banana plugs on 3/4" centers and where they work, they work very well. (I don't recall if 12AWG is within spec or not, but it can be made to fit.)
But they do not work on audio widgets that do not have 3/4" spacing, like my aging Lexicon receiver and its great quantity of binding posts for speakers.
I don't care if they're glitzy or fabulous-looking. I just want functional, insulated, stackable single banana plugs.
(The common marketplace is full of elaborate gold-plated non-insulated things. I guess they're pretty, but they're a hazard and nobody will see them again soon at all if everything goes well. Their function-follows-form beauty is only detrimental.)
Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it:
I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists.
The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?
I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"...
But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.
Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc.
But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken...
And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...
And the reason why there are 10 clicks is that that is the number of decisions that is required to get people to hand over their money.
There will have been an A-B test with 9 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
There will have been an A-B test with 11 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
The people making these sites are not dumb. They are also sitting on thin margins nowadays, and mostly from the airlines and hotels rather than from the users.
That doesn't apply to a corporate travel portal. If you're on the portal, you're booking a business trip. You're not going to not book a trip because it takes 1 click too many.
That's approximated by the portals - the people building these go and look at Expedia for their flow and design ideas... so the information permeates across.
For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence.
A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.
And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.
Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.
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