I know people here probably don’t want to jump back across, but people are actually wondering if this isn’t just NSFW and if it’s political…

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1ii6qa1/rporn_rrule34_are_banned_tissue_paper_sales/

Was it Elon?

"Europe’s leading AI companies and research institutions combine their forces and expertise to develop next-generation open-source language models in an unprecedented collaboration to advance European AI capabilities, the OpenEuroLLM project.

A consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies and EuroHPC centres coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (AMD Silo AI, Finland) will build a family of performant, multilingual, large language foundation models for commercial, industrial and public services. The transparent and compliant open-source models will democratize access to high-quality AI technologies and strengthen the ability of European companies to compete on a global market and public organizations to produce impactful public services.

The OpenEuroLLM project is aligned with the imperative to improve Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty. The project is a prime example of the type of technology infrastructure needed to lower thresholds for European AI product development and refinement, demonstrating the strength of transparency, openness and community involvement, values largely recognized across the European tech ecosystem.

The models will be developed within Europe’s robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence. Cooperating with open-source and open science communities like LAION, open-sci and OpenML, and additional experts in the field assembled in the project’s Open Strategic Partnership Board, OpenEuroLLM will ensure that the models, software, data and evaluation will be fully open and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industry and public sector needs. These performant multilingual models preserve both linguistic and cultural diversity, enabling European companies to develop high-quality products and services in the era of AI.

The project, which has been awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal, leverages support from previous European projects and the experience of the partners and their results, including large repositories of high-quality data and pilot LLMs developed previously. The consortium commences its work on February 1st, 2025, with funding from the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme."

Prof Richard Wolff has a great analysis of things: https://youtu.be/9u4A0D_Wc9c

It’s only a proposed bill (thankfully), but definitely one to keep an eye on.

I’ve already made this a separate post, but I do think it is very relevant to this. You can already start finding alternatives to US-centralized software and digital services, and these two sites are a great start:

https://switching.software/

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to

I mean, even many US TikTok users jumped straight onto Red Note. I’m not saying I trust China, but living in a US-allied country, I most definitely don’t trust the US right now.

Thanks for heads up! I’ve shared that link to my circles

Especially with switching.software, many alternatives are FOSS (and are labelled as such in their descriptions). I’ll edit the post text to highlight that.

But I also figured people in this community would be keen to know about other non-US alternatives that don’t yet have good FOSS counterparts.

You know, if the mainstream news spent this amount of oxygen explaining that it can be downloaded in various sizes and run securely, the whole world would be in a much better situation.

I am not saying that China don’t do some of the things they are accused of, but the amount of anti-China fear in Western nations is only hurting ourselves.

Calling on everyone else in the West and the global economy: keep your eyes open for opportunities to support the Canadian and Mexican people.

They are standing up to this corruption and fighting it where it stands. This is going to hit them hardest first, and they deserve our support.

Remember there have been worse times and you are descended mostly from people who survived them.

I love this

Yeah totally agree. He has proven to be one of the slimiest people on the scene. I mean, he is pretty much throwing his colleagues under the bus in this statement too lol

I’m not in the US (thinking of you guys everyday), but when I found myself feeling depressed by the direction of big tech, I realized that open-source and the Fediverse was the healthy and exciting way forwards. It was the one thing that felt like I remember the internet feeling like in the late 90s. I think you are spot on. It is the only way that democracy can survive in tech.

Sorry for confusion guys - here’s the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ieonxv/comment/maa0dcx/

Ah interesting - cheers for sharing!

OpenAI was started to be as open as possible, and to prevent the kinds of capitalism-driven Closed-AI development that they have now themselves become.

My personal opinion is that closed AI systems are only good if the owners are trustworthy. And in the long-run, no single owner can be trusted. There are risks with letting everyone copy and customize AI, however the worse danger is that the power gets too centralized with one single company.

Open-Source in AI usually posted to HuggingFace instead of GitHub: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

Yeah it’s a fair call, but to me it is the very context of why people are made at Proton that makes me suspicious of articles like this.

I can’t find the original summary post someone made, but here’s the last response from Proton CEO. Read the comments as well to get a good summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/

TL;DR: Proton used their official accounts to share CEO’s pro-US-Republican thoughts as their official stance. They since apologized and said they would use personal account to share those thoughts. But (IMO) now having posted this blog on the actual Proton website, it says to me that there are some serious bias alignment issues with a company that is supposed to be a safe-haven away from all of that.

Well you just made me choke on my laughter. Well done, well done.