Five Things Tech: Tech Sovereignty, LIDL Tech, Data Center Backlash, AI Engineering, Thermodynamic Computers
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
This week's Five Things Tech has a theme, and the theme is "Europe would like its seat at the table back, please." We have France admitting that technological sovereignty means autonomy in the parts that matter rather than divorcing Silicon Valley entirely, Germany's richest man building a cloud empire out of supermarket infrastructure with the excellent line that if you are not at the table you end up on the menu, and a reminder that the German public sector hands Microsoft 6-8 billion EUR a year that could be funding something of our own. Then things get delightfully weird: a spirited defense of not understanding your own codebase (relatable), and thermodynamic computers that harness entropy itself, which I read three times while nodding along and understanding roughly none of it. If your brain likes a mix of geopolitics, cloud strategy, engineering philosophy and physics that sounds made up but apparently is not, you are in the right place.
Pour the coffee. Let's get into it.
The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)
Ms. Bouverot said Europe would never cast itself off completely from Silicon Valley. She said the idea was for European countries to carve out autonomy in strategic digital areas — making them less vulnerable, for example, to an interruption of service or a breach of sensitive data.
That’s very different from the full vision of digital independence some leaders are promising. And it is not enough for those who say that Europe needs to break free of America and China for a purely economic reason — to profit from the next wave of booming technology sales.
It’s hard, but it makes so much sense. The German public sector alone pays Microsoft 6-8 billion € annually instead of using open source software. Just imagine what we could build with 8 billion € each and every year…
Germany’s richest man takes on Big Tech
Now the Schwarz Group is making headlines with a new story — one about digital independence and Germany as a hub for innovation. “If you’re not at the table, you end up on the menu,” says Wagner from his air-conditioned office.
Schwarz Digits has spent recent years primarily managing the IT infrastructure of some 14,500 supermarkets worldwide. Now, the company is offering its cloud and security solutions to businesses and government agencies as well.
The goal, says Wagner, is to ensure that Germany and Europe regain their seat at the table and are no longer entirely dependent on technology from the United States or China: “We want to restore Europe’s ability to act.”
I went to Heilbronn last year to see in person how the Schwarz Group is transforming German tech. It is really impressive, but many more companies need to follow suit. It can only be the beginning.
The fight against AI data centers is important – but it’s just a starting point
Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.
Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs. The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity.
We need both: more datacenters and more regulation. I understand the backlash, but I don’t think Tech and AI has to become an evil thing, quite the contrary.
In defense of not understanding your codebase
My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good work”. I’d also guess that people who work on large codebases with high-turnover teams (say, the Google web search backend or GitHub) would say “obviously you can’t understand it completely, you just have to do the best you can in your local area”.
These are two largely different ways of programming with different methods, practices and cultures1. However, the first group is over-represented in online discussion about software engineering2. I want to defend the second group against the first. In many software engineering environments, there’s nothing wrong with being in a state of partial understanding. In fact, in large systems a partial understanding is the best you can do.
I think we are in the beginning of a huge paradigm shift where AI engineers will deliver a new abstraction layer for us humans, which allows us to build software with much more complexity than ever before.
Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow
Thermodynamic computing would make use of thermodynamic processes, which distribute and dissipate energy and inevitably increase randomness at the microscopic scale. “The field is about designing computers that exploit thermodynamics as a computational resource,” said Patrick Coles, a physicist at the startup Normal Computing in New York. If it works, it could transform not only the computing industry but the very way we think about computation itself.
This is one of those articles that I read, scratch my head multiple times and think to myself: “sure, why not?” while I do not really understand how this is supposed to work.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico