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Not to agree or disagree, but the McKinsey has been heavily criticised as bogus. For example https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p....

I am sure that the problem of current EU is not lack of excesive taxation.

I don't think that from my comment anyone can infer that I'm opposed to reducing general taxation. I'm, in fact, in favor in increasing taxes for who owns too much, not against reducing taxes to population with lower income.

Still, more tax burden for companies won’t make eu more competitive against the rest of the world. We need to dramatically cut down all the regulations, have a true one market, open capital market. I am still very much pro EU, but it needs to be reformed.

Honestly, I don't think the EU problem is taxation. Really, there's a long list of things that have higher precedence over that, for example, not being so immigration-adverse.

I don’t know where you live, but generally EU’s governments are much more in support of migration than their citizens. The big corporations want that cheap labour and they won’t pay the secondary cost.

Zurich is probably in a league of its own. London next. But then it is quite similiar in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Frankfurt, ...

The taxation is not though. It may be better working from Warsaw or Prague due to tax rules. In Czechia it's a sort of fake, but tolerated consultancy and self employment and I have heard there is a similiar status in Poland.

The biggest drivers for tech employment in the CEE aren't those consultancies but American and non-European FDI.

Edit: can't reply

> Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate

At the employer end, if we offer enough FDI Western European governments do try to match support and subsidies that we could get in CEE.

Additionally, when investing in USD and used to American prices, it's a rounding error.

The drive to the CEE was partially government driven, but is now entirely due to the domestic ecosystem - you aren't going to find talent with the right attitude (business minded and independent) in Western Europe anymore.


Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate.

Yea. In Poland everyone is a contractor even if they are not in reality. This year Poland had started to indicate they will crack down on it though so a lot of companies are now turning their contractors into employees instead.

Wow, that sucks. Here in Czechia the politicians talk about cracking it down all the time, but in reality it is now more common than ever with no signs of stopping. Only higher execs at banks or in other regulated industries needs to have a normal employment contract.

They have been indicating it constantly for last 12 years, regardless of who is in power...

Difference is now companies are taking it seriously. Have some insights into hiring in Polish market and more than one IT company are changing who can be a contractor now

Source?

A friend working in HR/Recruitment in Poland. Many tech companies are changing who can now be a contractor.

And even more an icon of european irrelevance. In Prague almost all EVs are Teslas. I see a BYD time to time. Škoda or Volkswagen almost never.

No wonder, VAG has only produced overpriced cars for a while...

I recently helped a friend looking for a brand new SUV in the 70-80,000 euro range (taxes included) and the audi Q5 was both the most expensive and the worst built one in that price range.

We checked loads of cars and agreed that the volvo XC60 was arguably the best value for money, the BMW X3 was the one which drove the best (but also the most uncomfortable), the Lexus NX450h was the most comfortable and the best built, the Mercedes GLC was probably the most balanced one (although the value for money wasn't great).

The Audi Q5 only stood out for poor build quality and being overpriced. It's literally the only car which we didn't see an upside for, we didn't even bother to test-drive it... Also it seems they aren't very reliable anymore...


As a counterpoint, around 1/3 of EVs I see in France are Renaults. SImilar story, but a bit less evident, in Spain.

Both have decent amounts of Hyundai Ioniqs, Teslas, and some BYDs and Dacias. But especially in France, Renault Meganes, 5s and now the 4 is everywhere.

Don't forget that "Europe" is actually 30ish (if you count EU) or even more countries (if you count the continent), with wildly different markets and players on them.


Sure, it could be that in Czechia most EVs owners are still tech fans and they choose Tesla. BYD expands to the EU from the east, so it may overrepresentated here. Škoda apparently has decent electric sales in the Vokswagen group. Just anecdotally something like 80% EVs I see are Teslas.

In the Netherlands I see plenty of Renault 5s or VW IDs, many Teslas, too. And almost no BYD

And what cross platform code editor does that nowadays? vscode is electron, jetbrains has swing, ...

Maybe what I'm saying is that people shouldn't use cross-platform UI solutions. (write-once-suck-everywhere)

The old ones, and the ones that use Qt.

I hope someone will create a lightweight version without AI and code editing stuff. The terminal experience is the best, but I don't have any use for the agentic stuff while having claude code, opencode, codex and plenty other options.

It's good feedback. We've tried to make it so there is a single "turn off all the AI stuff" button (and you can opt into plain old terminal during onboarding as well, with no login, etc). Curious if this does the trick?

~And where is it? I am a long time signed in user, so no onboarding for me.~ How would you make money from users like me?

edit: nevermind, it was quite discoverable...


Hey Zach - one thing I'm really missing is the ability for this to be toggled on/off per device - whilst I love it on my personal devices and want to use AI there, I also want to be able to use and log into warp at work without having to toggle it off, as I can't use AI there.

From other comments in the thread, login is no longer required so you should be able to just not login on your work machine

https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp


the rpm available for download (warp-terminal-0:v0.2026.04.27.15.32.stable_03-1) doesn't seem to work without login. after going through all the setup i got stuck at a prompt asking me to log in with no option to skip it.

I originally got into Warp because they made a terminal where my normal text input keyboard shortcuts work.

As they've been scrambling to find a way to monetize and riding the AI train, it feels more bloated than ever and the constant pushing for me to use "agents" and whatnot really put my off using it. Plus with all the privacy concerns I can't with good conscience use it on my work machine.

So yes, I'd like a non-tracking, no-AI version of Warp too.


This is a pretty good used case for vibecoding. “Claude, take this project and rip out all the obnoxious monetization and vendor lock in.” It just might do the trick. I’ve been to get rid of a fair bit of paid software by just cloning the parts I want with little more than a high-level description.

I don’t think the approach of open source as a substitute for a quality program is going to last.


100,000% I loved it when it was JUST good at terminal rendering. Ghostty alternative. Not a crazy bloatware AI play.

can you share more about what makes it so great. this is the first i am hearing about it , so i am curious.

i currently use tmux and ghostty for my workflow


The way it goes beyond just emulating terminal. Multiline input that works like text editor, separated input and output blocks, wrapped shells that keeps the same ux with local and remote shells, the polish.

You could probably few-shot this yourself by pointing at the repo. I'm 95% sure it can be done in a day end-to-end.

Even more so, questions and user answers from agents were not charged as separate requests.


And when you make your harness ask you for next steps in a tool call, the journey continues forever, yeehaa


I would say all benchmarks are inherently subjective. How is yours better? It seems to produce a little bit strange results. Opus 4.6 being worse than 4.5 for example. Or chinese models being rated too high. Kimi, Deepseek or GLM are all great in open source world, but I don't believe they are ahead of SOTA models from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google.


No, some benchmarks are definitely objective, but most can be easily gamed. For example, most of the benchmarks on the model cards: they have measurable answers that don't rely on a human judge (a human made the question, but the answers are measuring some uncontroversial knowledge or capability). But because there is a single, correct answer, and those answer leak (or are randomly discovered and optimized for in training), they lose value over time, and regardless, they have a ceiling on the intelligence they can measure.

Others are purely subjective, like LMArena, which really only measures the personality and style preferences of the masses at this point, because frontier LLM technical answers are too hard for the average person to judge.

Then there are some interesting one-off benchmarks, but they lack enough rigor, breadth, and samples to draw larger conclusions from.

So we designed our benchmark with 3 goals: objective measurements (individual submissions not dependent on a human or LLM judge), no known correct answer (so simulations can scale to much higher levels of intelligence), and enough variety over important aspects of intelligence. We do this by running multiple models in cooperative/competitive environments with very complex action spaces and objective scoring, where model performance is relative and affected by the actions of other participants.

And yeah, there are some interesting results when you have a more objective benchmark. It should raise eyebrows when every single sub-release of every company's model is better across the board than its predecessor -- that isn't reality.


The word "objective" just seems too authoritative to me.


I agree that benchmarks are inherently subjective.

but the fact that you cite your brief as your main argument is funny - you don't even have any inherently subjective numbers to justify what you believe, you only have "I don't believe".


Sure, I have mixed up two things together. I don't think this benchmark is bad, I just did not like it is presented as the ultimate objective truth. The other thing I have mentioned is that it delivers different results from other benchmarks, so the "believe" stems from other benchmarks.


you are arguing with your belief instead of an objective truth. benchmark is more objective, if you don't agree with it, come up with a better one. but what you believe doesn't matter.


It was not a confrontational take. But all benchmarks are designed by humans, we are not that great at measuring intelligence. So it is somewhat subjective. I was just arguing with the word "objective". Not with the results per se.


If the benchmark has a correct answer, the benchmark itself is an objective measure (but of what?). The "of what" may well be subjective


Only if the benchmark is private and done properly on relevant tasks, which is rarely the case. I can guarantee that you have a ton of blind spots if you look at it through the lens of a ranking ladder in some generic tasks.


The rumor was that the 5.5 is a brand new pretrain. But who knows, it's 2x as expensive as 5.4, so it would check out.


If so that would be big, they haven’t been able to successfully pretrain in close to two years (since 4o).


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