As an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).
While I agree that having a well-balanced life isn't necessarily the cause of Europe "falling behind", I'd like to point out that the US also shares some of those issues:
bad policies: massive tariffs, extreme spend of the military-industrial complex at the cost of education and healthcare, a completely pointless War on Drugs that just increases violence (to be fair, many states have more or less legalized cannabis at this point), war in foreign countries (if all the money spent of Afghanistan had just been distributed back to American taxpayers in the form of either tax cuts of stimulus checks, how might that have affected the economy?)
bad leaders: I think most historians would agree that president Trump is not exactly Mount Rushmore material
bad deployment of capital: at the state level, this would mirror 'bad policies', ie I don't think war the Afghanistan/war on drugs was a net gain for the US taxpayer. On the private side, the boom/bust nature of tech investments - how many were buying Pets.com stock in 1998? How many people bought trendy NFTs in 2019? How many completely unviable businesses get funded today just because "our product has AI"?
I agree the US has many problems, and I really don't want to make this a EU vs USA thread. I also wouldn't say the US is "successful", whereas the EU is not. I just think the EU has amazing potential and isn't living up to it.
Also I think any success the US does enjoy over the EU is in spite of the things you mentioned, and a large part of that is the US simply has a much larger economy, much more money, and much deeper and well developed capital markets. Which just goes to show how much more the EU could aspire to, being a much larger bloc of countries with a larger population and all.
I am honestly curious who you are pointing at (in particular if you exclude British leaders)
Partly because I am actually curious, I don't doubt there are bad leaders.
But partly also because, without any details, this is a very general trope, that I don't really think is very healthy at the moment. Since it is food for right wing extremists (you probably know yourself where some politicians in USA originate from).
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to engage in tropes, I'll be more specific.
Emmanuel Macron is so unpopular that he has to forestall elections until 2029 to remain in power. In the meantime, his unpopularity means France cannot form a government or pass a budget, while the political center erodes under his leadership, giving way to the far left and far right.
Angela Merkel presided over a disastrous energy policy (outsource the coal mines to Poland, close all nuclear reactors, rely on cheap energy from Russia) which made German industry, and Europe by extension, precariously dependent on outside partners which are proving to be very unreliable. This has resulted in reduced economic performance, increased consumer costs, leading to popular discontent. This coupled with a poorly thought out immigration policy are hallmarks of her time in power, the fallout of which Germany is still dealing with today.
Ursula von Der Leyen is a direct descendant of Merkel, but with much less to show. She was complicit in all of Merkel's poor policies, and has not been able to address any of their negative consequences effectively. She has failed to rearm Europe, she has failed to revive economic growth (indeed, just the opposite, embracing at times a de-growth agenda which might on paper be noble, it incompatible with our current economic systems), she has done nothing to reassert Europe's sovereignty in matters of defense and energy, she has presided over the worst excesses of the European Council, which counter-productively rob individual countries of their sovereignty through a combination of bad lawmaking and policy (see the Draghi report), and poor executive decisions (see EU forcing Poland and Romania to buy $2 billion of vaccines they don't need and didn't ask for last week).
I won't even get into Donald Tusk, Viktor Orban, Karol Nawrocki, Hollande, Sarkozy, and all the pre-2020 Italian prime ministers (special shout out to Berlusconi lol).
Finally, I respect that it might be bad to engage in tropes, but I think it's also frame any criticism as playing to the far-right. Indeed a big problem in Europe is centrist politicians have suffocated any criticism by labeling it as "far-right". Over time, as their incompetence leads to more criticism, they label more people as far-right. This has had the reactionary effect of pushing otherwise normal centrist people into the far-right camp, which explains the rise of Le Penn and AfD, to the point that about 25% of voters in France/Germany are unfortunately voting for these far-right options.
Any healthy society must allow for debate and criticism, without labeling everyone who disagrees as extremists.
Ideally you would want someone like Charles De Gaulle.
The job is inherently difficult, and I think a big problem is institutional decay/drift leading to a bad pipeline of leaders, which is why you have so many poor, weak, and ineffectual leaders serving back to back. The UK is a prime example of this, but I think all of Western societies are struggling with this to one degree or another.
Indeed hindsight is 20/20, and I won't pretend to have all the answers. I just personally think we have a particularly rotten batch of leaders which can't only be explained by the leaders themselves, but also by the institutions and policies which spawned those leaders.
One of their journalists also doxxed Naomi Wu, intruding on her personal life, making her lose her income, and possibly getting her in trouble with Chinese authorities:
https://x.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1209815150376574976
Kinda goes to show you the kind of people who write these stories. Ethics haven't been on their mind for a long time, and them preaching to anyone about ethics is rank hypocrisy.
> A third tweet posted by Jeong in 2014 said, “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
I moderated a large Reddit community (circa 2014). She threatened to have articles written about how we were racist/misogynistic, unless we removed comments she didn't like.
There’s a context to that you’re missing. The people saying that are usually using the formulation that racism = prejudice + power. So can black people in the U.K. be prejudiced? Yes, definitely. Racist? They’d need to be in a position of authority for it to matter.
Other people use the formulation racism = prejudice about race, and end up talking past each other.
You are correct that there are multiple somewhat-conflicting definitions of racism but “taking past each other” isn’t really what’s happening.
The “classic” definition of racism is something like “a system of oppression based on race”. People pull that out to explain why “[minority] people can’t be racist”, but that that definition isn’t about people. It’s about systems, so if we take that definition, no individual can be racist. Most of the same people who trot out this definition will still call majority-race individuals racist (clearly using a different definition). It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to swap definitions in a self serving way like this.
> racism = prejudice + power
This seems like an oversimplified perversion of the “systemic” definition and doesn’t make sense if you actually consider it. By this definition a poor white woman basically couldn’t be racist, while a rich black man could.
There's a term for that: systemic racism. The redefining racism thing just comes from a bunch of people who wanted to be racist without admitting racism -- often, ironically, from a position of power.
Systemic racism is something different. It's the legal system being set up in a way that favors/disfavors certain groups. It's not something a person does.
Yes, it's power + racism, which is the idea that the "power+prejudice" redefinition was getting at with the added clarification that the power has to be real rather than in the eye of the beholder. It achieves the stated purpose of the redefinition but without providing cover for people who want a reason why their racism is good while yours is bad.
Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.
I agree with your first statement. However I wouldn't dismiss them just because of that: as an analogy, most of the most effective campaigners against slavery were not slaves themselves.
I do agree that in this particular case the lady in question seems rather nasty, and the whole woke movement seems to be quite the circular firing squad.
for a good counterbalance to those just finding out the nyt is a state dept mouthpiece at best, read about real journalists and why there seem to be so few of them, read Pegasus by laurent richard. Spoiler alert, real journalists who expose powerful peoples' wrongdoings simply get killed.
One of the journalists was Jason Koebler who later cofounded 404media. That is imho pretty legit outlet which uncovered many pretty damning stories about tech.
404media is good stuff, one of the few news outlets I pay for. I didn't dig too deep on the above comment because I have a deep respect for journalists despite admittedly many of them servicing things I dislike by choice or coercion or for remuneration or fame, etc. Reading about journalists in more authoritarian countries was seriously depressing
Just like Knight Rider and Matlock had to deliver enough entertainment to keep you from switching channels and instead have you watch the next beer ad.
Btw I don't know how closely you follow Naomi Wu, but take that with grain of salt.
(def. not defending bad journalists)
Naomi has huge youtube and she is very public figure in Shenzhen.
She has very weird opinion on Chinese government, she acts to like it but on the other hand with her sexual orientation (which was public knowledge, plastered all over reddit, twitter etc. way before any articles) and her admitting to bypass Chinese firewall etc. which is illegal.
Kinda weird, to do this, when you're public person.
And weirdest of all, she has/had Uyghur girlfriend and she basically said, that because of us (US/EU people) boycotting China for Xinjiang concentration camps for Uyghurs, nobody in Shenzen wants to hire Uyghur people, so WE are to blame.
I don't know if she really meant it, or she'd post it to twitter to suck Chinese government, you know what.
Imho, with grain of salt too, I think she was partially managed by Chinese agency way before any articles, and they got angry because she was unable to steer the article to "China great, West is bad".
Because I have experience what Chinese agencies are willing to pay for mediocre influencers in my small EU country (10mil. people) just to visit China and make videos how they're "great". And they have 1/10 following of what Naomi has.
I am not sure this is that clear cut. Naomi Wu agreed to interview then didn't want to answer some of the questions - instead of just saying no… she wrote social media threads and blogposts about how she can't talk about this because it's big bad china and all these western journalists are unprofessional not knowing her risk. For some reason then she tried to actually dox one of the journalists in her video.
Unfortunately looking back it seems pretty plausible that chinese gov censored her exactly because of her blogposts about how she is in danger in china.
The journalist knew what she was doing. Naomi was in China, agreed to do an interview about her self & her work, then the journo tried to drum up clicks by putting her on the spot about politics.
Real consequences for the interviewee, all for some clicks. That's not journalism.
I've read the original article again and I don't think people read it.
The whole interview is very supportive and based around how much shit she is getting. How she is hated for he appearance, how people don't believe she is technically skilled, that people thinks she is a fake persona or that some male is designing her whole career. Also that she gets many personal threats.
This is just her talking about herself and I am not sure how this is about chinese gov politics or how it is damning/doxing her.
Anyway her response was to find home address of one of the editors and put it in her next video. If i would be journalist and somebody did that to me i would expect my company to use their lawyers.
By releasing personal information which a reasonable person would expect to be private? I don't know the specifics of this case (only responding to the overly vague question) but information like address, private contact info, details about their families. Anything you would not immediately expect to become public knowledge simply by writing about topic(s).
Let me shed a tear for the old white men, who hold all the money and power in today’s world p- these heinous social media “attacks” will leave them crying and shaking
I really didn't want to comment on this, but racism, ironically enough doesn't discriminate. If you want to discriminate against white rich people, you then say that you wouldn't against black rich people.
I'm not saying you shouldn't feel upset about rich people's behavior, but their skin color shouldn't enter the conversation.
I don’t want to discriminate against anyone - my point is that you can’t discriminate against people who hold all the power, so I won’t have much sympathy if someone trolls them online.
And yea I believe anyone who is really rich (like 8+ figures rich) is morally bankrupt.
You just validated exactly what I said was going to happen. You think every old white person holds all the money, you sir are a racist. Do you admit it?
Are you able to explain in 1 short sentence what Vice did wrong to her? Because I can't. I remember reading Wu's explanation and couldn't find anything in there, like at all. It was filled with prejudice.
Funny enough in her own words, they don't much care..
> You’re wrong. NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.
I've found it quite satisfying compared to the other "new" ones.
As for the original topic, I just want to echo what others have said, and say that I am happiest in Java when writing it as if it were Golang code. That an the first-class runtime and performance and deep ecosystem make it a great choice in 2026.
I one hundred percent support the above. Jooby is a great performant framework, simple to use with tons of flexibility and features. Super happy with it!
I've participated in some corporate shit-shows in my day, but man I don't think I've ever seen one burn cash this fast.
Another thought: they say the software you ship reflects your org chart ("you ship your org chart"). Given how far Meta has slipped in the last year in the AI race, their org-wide dysfunction is starting to seriously harm them, from Financials to execution to talent. They need to get their act together, starting from the top.
I'm not a fan of Meta, but I'm a big fan of Llama. It was the first notable open weights model, and paved the way for all the others. Just for that I want to say: I'm rooting for you guys. Hope an amazing Llama 5 release comes after all this pain and churn.
I tend to mostly use dedicated servers from Hetzner for my own projects and for my client's projects. Whenever they explicitly want US servers, I tend to go with Vultr's dedicated servers which been serving us well for many years.
I've read several reports from customers saying that their customer service is really bad. Difficult to know with online reviews of course. Does anyone have positive stories to share? I am looking at Australian hosts specifically and Hetzner doesn't have any data centers here.
We use them heavily for test boxes and running experiments. Standard off-the-shelf machines are provisioned almost instantly, and never had any problems.
More custom stuff (eg 100Gb/s NICs) takes a bit longer, but they've always been super responsive and quick to sort out any issues!
The price / performance you get from something like their AX162 is just crazy, although unfortunately with the whole RAM / NVMe shortage the setup fee has gone up quite a lot.
Using them for production for years, never dissapointed.
What you should be aware of is their new exploration of s3 storage. I mean, the s3 works and everything but it's still too eaely - the servers are kind of slow and sometimes fail to upload/download. They are still tuning out the storage architecture. The api key management is kind of too primitive (although much more headache free than configuring aws), and the online file browser is lacking
But for vps servers - they are battletested veterans
In my tests, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is better, there is no comparison. Better tool calling and reasoning than Qwen3-Coder-Next for Html/Js coding tasks of medium size. Beware the quants and llama.cpp settings, they matter a lot and you have to try out a bunch of different quants to find one with acceptable settings, depending on your hardware.
Getting banned from Gemini while attempting to improve Gemini is the most Googley thing ever :D imagine letting your automated "trust and safety" systems run amok so that they ban the top 0.01% of your users with no recourse. Google really knows how score an own-goal.
I really don't understand what is his usage pattern would have triggered that obviously automated ban. Can somebody let me know what they might think is adversarial enough to be considered 'hacking' or similar by a bot?
Google is dealing with a wave of abuse over its Antigravity IDE, with 'account switching' tools designed to use a ton (20+) of free or pro accounts, giving the user essentially unlimited usage. I'm guessing they've deployed some rather aggressive countermeasures to stop this, including banning clients that seem to be accessing "private" APIs outside of a Google product.
Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
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