Not so sure though, I was just reading the case right now, there's this dude studying the French Revolution -> doesn't sound like an IT/computer person at all, so no Github account makes sense
I'm not especially defending AI, but isn't this information like that one time a professor changed the content on Wikipedia to play a big 'gotcha' on his students?
Instead of proving that Wikipedia is "bad", that professor didn't realize he proved that Wikipedia is working as intended: if you write something wrong in Wikipedia, over a certain period of time (yes, it can be long, I know), it will be corrected.
About this article in Nature, if you feed AI incorrect information, it's gonna spit it back at you. When you think about it, when did we say that AI was self correcting?
In a broader logic, imagine we teach kids something false, as an experiment of course. And then we wait a little bit, and we watch some years later how much of this people still repeat the false information they were taught. And then we'd write a paper to say "oh look at those people they're dumb", wouldn't that be a little unfair? even unscientific?
There's been some 'back and forth' or "progress and regress' about this.
Adoption of Free Software:
2012 Prime Minister circular — the most important formal turning point: Orientations pour l'usage des logiciels libres dans l'administration, signed on 19 September 2012. It explicitly gave guidance to public administrations on free software use.
2016 Digital Republic Law — reinforced the direction by encouraging public administrations to use free software and open formats.
2021 action plan for Free Software and Digital Commons — launched after the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 April 2021, with goals to increase awareness, use, publication of source code, and reuse across administrations.
2024–2026 LaSuite / Suite Numérique — current state-led open-source collaboration suite, presented by DINUM as a coherent set of open-source tools for public agents and positioned as part of the state’s sovereignty strategy
Rollbacks and proprietary deals
Microsoft “Open Bar” contract with the Ministry of Defence / Armed Forces — a major counterexample. The Senate records say the framework agreement started in 2009 and was renewed for 2013–2017 and 2017–2021, without publicity or competition, giving the ministry broad access to Microsoft’s catalog.
Criticism and replacement with UGAP purchasing — later reporting says the open-bar arrangement ended in February 2021 and was replaced by a convention via UGAP, but the ministry still relied on broad Microsoft licensing and associated services.
2025 education procurement for Microsoft — a public tender worth 74 million euros for the Ministry of Education and higher education services was attributed to Microsoft, showing that proprietary dependence continued alongside open-source policy.
2025–2026 public-private partnerships in sovereignty language — France and Germany announced a partnership with Mistral AI and SAP for sovereign AI in public administration, which is not a free-software rollback in the strict sense, but it is a clear example of the state pursuing sovereignty through private-sector partnerships rather than purely internal open-source development.
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Conclusion:
Like anything in capitalism: it's a constant fight, permanent struggle. The big private companies will try to massively impact political life.
So, there IS in France this 'feeling', this consciousness, throughout the political landscape (mostly on the left and also a little bit on the right) that we need to have some sovereignty over our data, services, software, etc.
Every once in a while, a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president) has a sparkle of dignity, decency, logic, and honesty towards the best interests of the country and leans towards Free Software adoption. But...the lobbies are always there to rollback each decision, or part of each decision, and gradually gain back their influence.
>a right-side political figure, who are basically ruling since 2000, (except from 2012-2017 where France had a social-democratic government and president)
As a French citizen who spent almost a decade building an alternative to Dropbox that's libre software [1] I was very disappointed my own country decided to build a product competing with mine when French companies are about 1% of the existing customer base. I would have never thought my own government would be competing on my niche
It makes sense a government will want to take full charge of the strategically important software they will run on especially when they try to establish it as a new standard in a challenging transition. One day when it's fully established they could still spin it off and some other entity takes point.
In 2025, I tried to access my services using IPv6 with 4G phones and different subscriptions (different ISPs), fact is, many (most?) of them did not support IPv6 at all :(
I had to revert to IPv4. And really I have nothing against IPv6, but yeah, as a simple user, self hosting a bunch of services for friends and family: it was simply just not possible to use only IPv6 :(
(for context, the 4G providers are French, in metropolitan France)
My phone contract that does offer IPv6 is with Free, I could not work out whether it would disable IPv4 if I enabled IPv6 so have not tried changing it.
There is not a single ISP in my area that provides any IPv6 support whatsoever. This is also the case for many, many millions of others around the world.
So you're aware of accountability dilution AND the opacity of LLMs making them not responsible for anything, therefore you agree with the point that was made.
I guess your point could be:
LLMs are just another level of capitalistic opacity to maximize opacity and dilution of accountability.
Because it's actually about adult stuff that happens in the real world, outside of the little bubble of entitled tech-bros with the ambition of a shonen character while having the brain of Disney villain's sidekick
I'm no German speaker, but I'm French, and without invalidating your initial claim (about the AI generated stuff), in France we do translate "good morning" by "Bonjour", which literally means good (bon) day (jour).
Any other translation would be weird:
if you'd translate "good morning" by "Bonne journée" -> that would be super weird, because this is something one could say in France to say "Goodbye" xD
I lived in Germany for a short time back in 2022, and notice that saying "Hallo" is used a little bit everywhere. However I can tell you that you are NOT supposed to say "salut" in France ANYWHERE except with your friends.
Like, imagine, you're in Germany you enter a bakery, you can say "Hallo" -> no problem.
Same situation in France and you say "Salut" -> either people will react badly or assume that you don't know French or maybe they'll think you're impolite for no reasons
Thanks for your input neighbor!
That's interesting because other sources actually start with "Salut", without going into the usage too much. Good to know.
Bonjour for good morning is correct. The problem is that the app introduced it to me like this:
"A in German means Z in French. B in German also means Z in French. Here is the word Z without any context. What's the correct word in German? You can choose between A, B, C and D. B is wrong, I wanted A".
I can imagine that they have direct mappings between the words, without checking for collisions. Even that could be fine, if the frontpage didn't claim this was "curated by experts" and it didn't happen literally in the first lesson haha.
Switching to Cloudflare DNS solves archive.today problems? That's strange. archive.today is known for having problems with Cloudflare DNS[1]. Switching to Google DNS should solve it. (This isn't because of a bug in Cloudflare DNS, but rather that archive.today dislikes that Cloudflare DNS doesn't support EDNS.)
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on the DNS team.
Archive blocks VPNs. If you're on one, that could be why.
I've also found that archive.ph is significantly less accessible than archive.is despite hosting the same content. Pausing my VPN for a few minutes and then changing the .ph to .is fixed a similar captcha loop for me, though I still did need to solve a captcha for it.
are you using a VPN? that happens often to me. might be a combo of that and ublock origin. I'm guessing archive gets a ton of attacks from VPN so they probably just have rules to captcha any VPN address. I have a local proxy on rpi setup and then a container in firefox that lets me use that to quickly swap to a proxy that uses my real IP. very handy for shit like this.
:3
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