It sounds actually nutts that governments are allowed to run unknown and uncheckable binaries as their(our?) infrastructure.

France has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?

still growing, you mean. France is, however significant, just one country. and then there is broader push to FOSS inside Europe, as well as Europe's own sovereign solutions. some attempts were failed, some were successful, but everything is still in progress

EDIT: on a second read, this sounded too diminishing of this achievement than I intended. the point is that it's not fully done yet, although it is remarkable that there is, finally, a political will for such actions

They have a committee to decide whether to plan to grow one. Maybe once they're done funding the war in Ukraine, they'll make a decision.

Not all AI uses LLM, and for some common LLM applications like summarization and translation you can already use CPU only models. The government, or even your average employer, is not going to need a lot of AI video generation or other really GPU intensive tasks. Prompt processing is currently more GPU oriented, but I don't see it as an impossible challenge given, say, 10-15 years.

Also, CPU-only doesn't necessarily mean "on your own computer". You can easily have 100 TB RAM in a couple of racks.

The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.

Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.

But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.

Do you people have to squeeze a comment about AI into every post?

Europe as a whole doesn't have or not have a spine.. it'a a huge, complicated accumulation of interests with an insane bureaucratic apparatus behind it.

Less so against China or Iran, presumably Europe will find itself on the "right side of history" yet again soon enough

Also GendBuntu, a custom version of Ubuntu used by 100 000 stations (almost all) of the national gendarmerie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

"As a French" ne veut rien dire en anglais. Il faut rajouter man, person ou quelquechose. Frenchman, French person, French citizen.

Sadly back in the day the city of Munich caved in (hosting Germany's MS headquarter). They had a good good run with their Linux. But the state of Schleswig-Holstein is pushing for more open source and switching to Libre Office (80% or so done). They talk about that on their Open Source Initiative page [1].

[1]: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (German only)

At least so against Israel and other countries actively engaging in open warfare against sovereign nations, as a European I'm very happy we're not getting pulled into those senseless conflicts.

The bureaucratic apparatus in the EU has a reputation for being complex, but a lot of that seems to be bullshit stories written by people like Johnson in the 20 years leading up to Brexit. I've yet to see much evidence it's more complex or corrupt than Federal government in the US, for example.

Europe does not need to join war of the Trumps whim just because king demands it.

"Quelquechose" doesn't mean anything in French. It's written "quelque chose".

I think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).

The demonym for France is "French," so it's not wrong (even if it doesn't sound right.)

Pedantry attracts dislike. One may be right to state something, yet wrong to call it out in public.

?

No-one needs LLMs.

AI has no value.

> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

Nah, linux and "$curreant_year is the year of the linux desktop" is just something the hacker / maker / nerd scene is passionate about.

No, and no?

...what?

Good on France for doing that work.

More countries and/or EU involvement could bring economies of scale: apart from translation, a lot of work on fixing bugs and adding features to the relevant open source projects can be done once and benefit all. So either get the same results faster, more cheaply per country, or both. Sure, that adds some bureaucracy and coordination cost too, but should be worth it overall.

Linus Torvalds created Linux as a student in Helsinki, Finnland. He later took U.S. citizenship and lives in Portland, Oregon, TTBOMK.

Now on some level, the question makes less sense, because Linux as we know it now is an international proejct that thousands of developers from dozens of countries collaborated on. But perhaps most would agree that Torvalds, who serves as main integrator, has more say than others regarding the directions of Linux, as long as he is alive.

The open source property of Linux is more important to the question which OS a country's government should adopt: corporate systems are hard to scrutinize, whereas open source systems you can inspect and compile yourself, and it is a wise move of the French government to go in that direction. It will also save a lot of money, but that should not be the primary motive.

Just Wiki Linus Torvalds my friend:

> Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland

> In 2004, Torvalds moved with his family from Silicon Valley to Portland, Oregon.

I remember similar articles being posted 20+ years ago on Slashdot. And as we’ve seen, it’s often less of a “use Linux” and more of a “we have an alternate vendor” and there’s often suspicious lock-in (see the case in the EU or some similar country where the vendor was reading emails).

The “main guy” is Finnish. He also got American citizenship recently, but given the US has increased attacks on naturalised citizens [0] and has a history of this [1] it’s not a solid foundation.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/16/nx-s1-5677685/as-focus-shifts...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

> Astroturfing around this is getting suspicious.

It's perfectly possible for people to be passionate about the subject.

It is open source. Many companies which contribute to it are American, but nobody from America can tell you what you can or cannot do with it - unlike Microsoft or Apple with their proprietary OS being forced by US government.

Yeah, he became American, just like Einstein, Fermi, Von Neumann, etc.

There's a big lesson for Europe there, everyone super productive and able to move to the US does so at the first opportunity.

I am talking about actively hindering the war effort while getting closer to Iran, a country that repeatedly kidnapped europeans, or caving in for China again and again.

Europe has always managed to make the wrong choice historically, and that's how it still continues

Nor "Frenchie" while we're on the topic. It sounds really weird. It's also commonly used to refer to a french bulldog !

No.

"French" is adjective or a collective noun, but don't use it as a countable noun.

Trying to say "as a French" makes about as much sense as thinking "as a American" is correct.

As has already been said ... "a French (wo)man","a French person","a French citizen" is the correct way to go.

The reason you can say "an American" is because America starts with a vowel.

Same reason why you would not say "a British" but you could say "a Brit".

It's not completely wrong, it will be understood, but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order ('a big tasty sandwich' sounds more natural to a native speaker than 'a tasty big sandwich', even though the latter makes sense and will be understood).

Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.

Edit: A sibling comment pointed out that 'an American' is grammatical, and thinking about it, I think the suffix -an is what makes bare demonyms grammatical - you can say 'an Angolan', 'a Laotian', 'a Peruvian', 'a Moroccan', etc, but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese', etc.

Technically yes the demonym is "French", but "I'm a French" just doesn't work in English. The word 'French' is almost exclusively used in English as an adjective or the name of the language. It is never used as a noun for anything else. So in context, it reads as an adjective without a paired noun.

In English, you have to disambiguate be adding a noun: French person, French citizen, or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.

Similarly, we don't call people "a Chinese". That construction is considered derogatory, if not outright racist. Demonyms typically cannot be used as nouns alone without a suffix. "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.

As usual for English, the rules are vague and inconsistent.

> Pedantry attracts dislike. One may be right to state something, yet wrong to call it out in public.

Ironically most French people I know would be perfectly receptive and happy to receive corrections in grammar, English or otherwise.

The French tend to be particularly pedantic about the teaching of their own grammar. Most native French speakers are quite used to being swiftly and firmly corrected on grammar from an early age.

Im skeptical of the AGI claims but this is a bit too far in the toher direction. I use it to turn designs to code all the time

At this point in the broader dialogue your position is roughly as interesting as flat earth. Only bored people are going to bother replying and no one is taking you seriously. Don't do yourself a disservice by clinging to this.

The chariot was superior! Who needs them darn cars

At least in some cases, it's actually using Linux and open document format, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

When the US is being run by relatively sane people, it's great.

That is not the situation at the moment.

Yeah, um…

That might have changed somewhat, recently.

I would think of using 'Frenchie' to refer to a person as being affectionate banter. Like 'Yank' for Americans or 'Canuck' for Canadians. It's not incorrect, but would be inappropriate outside of an informal context.

French people have 'rosbif' to refer to the English and Australians have 'pom' or 'pommie'. You wouldn't call the prime minister that at a diplomatic event, but it's not offensive to call your friends that.

> but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese'

You also don't say 'a Japanese' but that is an extremely common error with Japanese English speakers when they are first learning.

I am looking for a citation, but I seem to recall the casual rule of thumb is something to do with the ending of the nationality (so '-ish', '-ese','-ch' etc. you can't put 'a' in front). I think the more formal explanation likely centers around rules relating to indefinite articles.

> and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order

I would think that if you say you are French, then everyone know you aren't native anyway. Maybe it's actually a good way, it can distinguish between true natives and false natives

There are some suffixed with "-i" which sound natural to my (American) ears too: "an Israeli", "a Somali", "a Pakistani", "an Omani", etc.

As a Welshman, I’d say North/South Walian are more common among the populace!

When speaking English, the French side of my family refers to themselves like that often, however, they're from Bretagne, so exactly how French they are is up for debate.

I've never met a real human that was passionate about what OS a government worker in some local French commune uses, but it's the hottest topic on HN behind AI

Funnily enough there is some level of control that can be exerted by the US gov via the distros (at least the major ones - see legalese restrictions on Redhat/Ubuntu etc when you want to download , stating the various US gov laws/sanctions that they follow) and also via the kernel - i think some time back Russian kernel maintainers were removed.

So Open source it may be , however there are still pressure points that can be used. I believe this is one of the main reasons RISCV foundation moved to Europe.

If Japanese internment worried you, you should see Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders [0] and get reallyyyy worried about the ongoing attacks [1] and rhetoric [2]. I would urge extreme caution to anyone in Europe that is at risk.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

[1] https://www.ein.org.uk/news/home-office-remove-euss-pre-sett...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/0e29224f-9d06-4315-a89f-e334ffbc6...

Also, what nationality do you say Elon Musk is, out of curiosity? Let's test your consistency :)

You might want to do a bit more reading on why European intellectuals migrated en masse to the US in the 1930s.

How has Europe actively hindered the war effort? Not volunteering for demining duties under fire in a very narrow straight, and preferring diplomatic solutions seems eminently sensible, and not at all the same as 'getting closer to Iran'. Why doesn't the US send frigates and destroyers into the straight to open it and escort ships out? The answer is that it's pretty high risk, and not one worth taking (unless you are Trump and looking to save face).

Demonyms don’t use the same rules as countable nouns. Both “French” and “British” are acceptable demonyms, they’re just not particularly idiomatic in American English (which likes to overcorrect with “person” like you’ve noted).

(There’s no particularly consistency with this, it’s just what sounds “good” to American ears. We’re perfectly fine with “as a German” or “as a Lithuanian.”)

a French; an American; a Brit, or a British

sounds casual but correct to me

> but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native

You mean a native speaker might be ungrammatical when using their non-native language? That makes sense to me.

> Spain has 'Spaniard'.

Even so, you'll hear a ton of native Spanish people saying "As a Spanish person" or "As person from Spain" instead of simply "As a Spaniard", I'm not sure this is very surprising. If anything, that mistake makes it more likely they're a native than not, in the case of Spain, as the level of English outside of metropolitan areas is lacking at best, compared to other European countries.

> "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.

Well, context is important on the Brazilian front. ;)

"I had a brazilian at my house" could have other connotations.

> or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.

Or talking about a man that is French. Neither of which would be considered 'old', or 'inconsiderate".

> I use it to turn designs to code all the time

A human can however do the same job. Turning designs into code isn't a fundamentally new capability unlocked by GenAI, it's just a shuffling of costs from employing humans -> renting GPUs

I'm not sure how happy they actually are about it though. I think most people have a bit of Stockholm-syndrome relationship with it, the highest tier of argument refutation in France might honestly be grammar-based :P

(And it did motivate me to go abroad.)

there is a time and place for everything. "Les règles de bienséance" matter more to me than the safekeeping of the exactness of English grammar, which as others have been keen to point out is hardly as strict as you seem to imply.

And no, no French person likes to receive corrections in grammar. Giving lectures on proper english grammar/pronounciation is generally a mark of (classist) pedantry since speaking proper english is generally the preserve of those lucky few that have had the opportunity of spending time in the Anglosphere, a tiny minority of the french population in fact, who are always eager to put their one upmanship on display, in a very crude, almost vulgar fashion.

I have been travelling through Japan for the past week, the grammatical and orthographical error would likely give you a nosebleed. Meanwhile, I just smile and move on, I got the meaning, it is what matters. Same for the OP.

Okay, give me one example of what AI might be useful for.

My grandpa was doing just fine before those newfangled chariots became all the rage. What's wrong with walking?

Right, what about FOSS developers who care about what guidelines the entire country has regarding OS usage? Maybe I'm living in a bubble, but everyone (mostly Europeans to be fair) seems excited about moving away from US technologies.

This move isn't just "Local French commune thinks about Linux", it's "French government agency that can mandate what others do, set hard guideline for agencies and magistrates to come up with a concrete plan for how to move to Linux", which is worlds beyond what we've seen before.

Most of the passion is around being felt exploited my american tech giants and feeling hopeful at seeing large respectable institutions divest from them. Thats legit, not astroturfed

I do care for them setting an example for my local government.

I don't believe we've met, but I've long been convinced that governments should not be reliant on commercial software and proprietary formats and protocols. It just seems obvious that relying on Microsoft this and that is a blinkered, short-term view.

I'm using the words 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' in a linguistic sense; human languages are subtle and fluid, and one doesn't have to be far along the sliding scale between 'doesn't speak a word' and 'well-educated native speaker' to be understood. We speak of 'broken' English when somebody is able to be understood but hasn't fully grasped the language yet; using demonyms incorrectly is a subtler flavor of the same thing. For example 'no come here' -> 'no entering' -> 'no entry'

How many did you have at your house?

"Frenchman" (one word) is always... "old and inconsiderate" is a good description. "French man" (two words) is at times still appropriate.

Europe has a major distro in the form of SUSE, so that’s not too worrying.

Even if upstream linux banned european contributors, there are enough european contributors that a fork would just emerge. So I’m really not too worried about that happening.

> Both “French” and “British” are acceptable demonyms

No they are not.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example makes it quite clear re. 'French':

    "With plural agreement, and frequently with 'the' French people regarded collectively ..."

I draw your attention to the first three words ... "with plural agreement".

It is explicitly telling you that "French" is a collective plural noun and hence cannot be used as a singular countable noun.

> sounds casual but correct to me

I don't care if it "sounds ok to me".

If you're going to make statements like that to go against what I've written then at least come up with some viable citations to grammar literature.

Honestly, in all my years on this earth I have never, ever heard anybody in any English speaking country I've spent time in say "a French" "a American" "a British".

And that amounts to a lot of time surrounded by people speaking VERY "casual" English.

P.S. I said "an American" was ok if you re-read.. an NOT a

I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been in France and had people correct my pronunciation (which btw, it’s really not so bad — the best complement I got was that they could tell I was foreign, but not sure where from).

Musk collects citizenships like they’re going out of fashion. He fled South’s Africa due to not wanting to be drafted.

Lieutenant Torvalds on the other hand fulfilled his service duties.

Should the US and South Africa go to war it seems clear where musks loyalties would lie. Should the US and Finland go to war I suspect that Torvalds wouldn’t be as clear cut.

How will we cope when all of your precious knife-wielding savages are deported?

Oh, the terror.

> Expulsion of Jews from Spain [...] On 31 March 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all unconverted Jews to leave their kingdoms and territories by the end of July that year, unless they converted to Christianity

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but we (I live in Spain) have come a long way since 1492 (534 years ago) and if that's the most recent example you can find of "Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders" I think you yourself know that stuff like that doesn't happen today, in Europe.

Didn't have "Europe is antisemitic because of the Spanish Inquisition" on my bingo card today. No one expects it, indeed.

Generally speaking: Spain, Italy, Austria, France and Switzerland prevented the US from using its airbases or airspaces to transit their planes to the Middle East.

The UK at times also blocked use of its air bases.

France probably cut a separate deal with Iran, evident from the release of the French hostages, the call Macron had with the Iranian FM and the fact Iran lets their ship cross

Definitely. And then one could start wondering if the direction might reverse.

I, for one, have never needed AI for anything ever in my life.

AI has, however, made my life noticably worse. Especially when dealing with braindead robot driven customer "support". But also in making it financially impossible to buy more RAM or upgrade a GPU.

I think we'd be better off without yet another bubble.

As a learning tool to quiz you.

Two if you mean Europe more generally, as Ubuntu is British.

The reason you can say "an American" has nothing to do with a vowel or not, there are just some demonyms that for some reason can be used like this, and some that can't.

For example:

* German is countable: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... * French is uncountable: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... * American is countable: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... * Spanish is uncountable: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

But your explanation about why it is correct is bullshit, has nothing to do with "an" vs "a", the English language is just inconsistent as fuck and some demonyms can be used like this and some can't.

I think we’re past OED being a normative arbiter of what does or doesn’t pass for acceptable English usage.

Tbf theres a much more recent example of legitimate antisemitism in europe. One around the same time as us interment of japanese people

In the UK two decades ago (admittedly not the shortest time) I heard plenty of terrible words and treatment of Pakistanis (which seemed to be used as a good enough bucket for all brown skinned people) and people with red hair. A general disdain for Continentals was a little more subdued. When I was younger France was famous for it's poor treatment of foreigners and non-francophiles. Consider all the politics and anger towards those that continue to try to cross the Mediterranean on makeshift boats or the constant complaints about "benefit thieves" who emigrate from the Eastern bloc. There are many examples and some of them are not without basis but while things have gotten less stabby-stabby there's some fairly brutal attitudes and behaviors.

A more relevant recent example would be the shameful stripping of British citizenship from a girl who had been trafficked to the Middle East

At the beginning it was fairly clear to everyone outside the US that this was an illegal war of aggression. That we waited until Iran had struck Israel and gulf countries was at least a fig leaf for the pretence we were doing something reasonable.

What source do you have for French ships being allowed to pass?

The other two are ok-ish (though notably Reform is not in government and the elections are 4 years away) but yeah leading with a source from the 15th century really doesn’t support the argument.

I have more evidence of European xenophobia if that isn't sufficient for you

It would take something miraculous for the direction to reverse towards Europe. People have been complaining about European tech, economy, and freedoms (as in free speech) for decades now. Things have become worse on all of these fronts.

I think the AI act is a great example here. The EU came up with regulation for an emerging technology that basically killed the chance for Europe to compete. Lots of people disagreed with this criticism when the act was debated, but it turns out the critics were right. Europe will be buying AI services from elsewhere because Europe wasn't able to compete.

This entire way of thinking in Europe would need to reverse for there to be a chance that the brain drain changes course.

Were you born yesterday? Phone AIs being dumb didn't take LLMs at all. They were always stupid and frustrating to deal with substitutes for customer support.

to europe? hardly. maybe to east asia ...

Okay, and what value would that provide?

I'm not interested in games.

Of the over 400 distros listed on DistroWatch.com, 79 are based in the United States.

I'm not defending racism against immigrants to Europe, but let's get this in proportion. It wasn't long ago that the US had _state mandated segregation_ and regular lynchings. All racism is abhorrent, but I really don't see Europe a specifically problematic in this regard.

They got radicalized and went there voluntarly

> There are many examples and some of them are not without basis but while things have gotten less stabby-stabby there's some fairly brutal attitudes and behaviors.

Yeah, I won't claim that everyone is treated equally or even fairly in Europe, and some places are absolutely worse than others, in many different ways.

I'd still claim we no longer do "expulsions" of entire ethnoreligious groups anymore in the 21st century though, which was the initial example of why Europe today is terrible.

The UK Home Office decision about settled status is the fault of the UK, not the EU.

The FT piece is paywalled. But two prominent members of Reform are currently in jail - one for domestic abuse, and one for treason (!) - so the party is not famous for a steely dedication to the moral high ground.

I dont think you travel much, it would help you get more... objective opinions. But yes please show us that mighty evidence

Really not many people outside far right proponents of hate speech (and more recently MAGA shills) have been complaining about free speech in Europe. Yes, there are laws against holocaust denial for specific historical reasons. The UK also had regulations on some Irish republican organisations access to TV, but not other forms of expression. And yes most European jurisdictions accept that speech can cause harm and try to balance this against free speech. But there is really no case that nonviolent political speech is -- in practice -- discriminated against in EU and UK.

On the IT and AI services: Europe hasn't really failed to compete in innovation, as much as scale of operation. That might change if we have a security imperative to protect our own markets for these things against an increasingly hostile US.

Except now they also pretend to respond to email. Basically email support became /dev/null with cream and icing on top.

On the flip side, with the US cutting funding for scientific research, and increasing persecution of minorities within the US, I know a whole bunch of qualified scientists/researchers who are either moving to or actively hunting for a position in the EU

The value is that you can have an effective tool to learn something new. I'm not quite sure I understand your question.

I didn't make the claim that Europe is specifically problematic. I was noting that between extremes the GP was talking about

> Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders

Who'd've thunk it, people be tribal?

I agree things have improved but the GP to my first post set context to:

> Europe's treatment of perceived outsiders

You seemed to be picking a rather narrow slice of the scope.

In a civilised society, we don't typically regard 15 year olds as responsible for their own radicalisation at the hands of adults

I think your wasting your time arguing with him bro

Okay, I don't think it would be all that effective and I don't see how it could be.

I learn things by doing them, not by playing guessing games.

Well, to be fair, GP did use the "Expulsion of Jews from Spain" as the example for that, so I don't think they were trying to say "Some people in Europe have bad thoughts about perceived outsiders" but rather hinting to some larger events still happening today.

There is no civilized society that treats 15 years old not responsible for joining terrorist groups and for actively working with them.

Oh I know :)

That's fine. We all learn different. But it's still effective for other people :) So it's useful for them.

That's fair. To continue being fair, there's a lot of rough behavior happening throughout the world these days. We've forgotten how bad we can make things.

I'd suggest that in Europe also there's more than just bad thoughts for outsiders but bad words, bad treatment, and exclusion from thriving. Extreme cases include bodily harm and I'm fairly certain death but these extreme occur at a lower scale.

15 year old being radicalised into terrorism is a societal and parental failure, not the moral failure of an individual child. We don’t treat 15 year olds as adults in other legal proceedings, we should not do here either

Fair enough I guess. Everything I've seen that's presented as something great about AI just looks like something I'd pay quite a lot of money to avoid.