It's real risk; Under oath before the French Senate, Microsoft France’s Head of Corporate, External & Legal Affairs Antoine Carniaux, said he cannot guarantee European data is safe from U.S. government access, even when stored in Europe. U.S. laws like the Patriot Act and Cloud Act require American tech firms to comply with U.S. authorities, regardless of data location. That means, especially with a current US administration acting against EU interests, that a US based AI solution is not safe.

The dataset is available in Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/criteo/CriteoPrivateAd

They are so terrible that they manage to get the 2nd place in arms export... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/13/france-challen...

Is it due to bringing software dev methodologies into very traditional industries ?

I thought our software dev methodologies come from the automotive industry:

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

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

Those are one concept of and one method to achieve Deming's ideas. [0]

0. https://www.uthsc.edu/its/business-productivity-solutions/le...

Recommended podcast episodes about Deming: https://smallbatches.fm/search?query=deming

Very cool, thanks for this

Glad to share--Small Batches podcast is excellent in general (I'm totally unaffiliated) and I found the Deming introduction contextualized in ways I could understand better than straight business texts. I'm going to do some relistening right now.

Interesting question but I wonder what would be the risks on the infrastructure in Europe ? IMO, apart from Eastern Europe (and still), the major risk would be on energy cuts. But in this case, that means that you would need to have an autonomous way of producing electricity for running these local ressources. Maybe physical books are more reliable ?

Things that cut energy far away can also potentially damage fibers.

yep, but I guess most people are ok with this, we have a lot of people saying that teachers are priviliged people having too much vacations and not working enough per week. It's a strong common belief. And with current government politics, it looks like we are witnessing the end of a public education in France, the unqualified contractuals teachers hired after a quick interview is more interesting financially than an official.

Why ubuntu would not be recommended today ?

Thanks, the temperatures in the article means nothing for those who don't speak Fahrenheit...

Because 12C ~ 21F there are some convenient temperatures to interpolate between.

of course 0C = 32F and -40C = -40F but also (within a degree F):

  04C =  40F
  16C =  61F
  28C =  82F
  40C = 104F

note that the last two digits are always reversed.

below 0C they get less useful

  -08C =  18F
  -19C =-1.9F
  -31C = -23F

Interesting strategy. I long ago memorized 20C = 68F and then adjust in increments of 5/9, which works well enough for the range of temperatures I consider habitable. I've gotten so good at this I once translated on the fly between some fellow American and European runners during a marathon. :-)

"When it's springtime in Alaska, it's forty below". That's all I have managed to memorize about temperature conversion so far in my life.

56.7F = 13.7C

As a french, I would like to see a governmental institution at national or European level which aims to develop open-source software for administrations, police, public hospitals, defence... This would reassure me more about technological sovereignty and the use of taxpayers' money, I am even convinced that it would be much more interesting economically. It could even help to catch up with our technological delay in terms of cloud infrastructure...

Well, then you'll be happy to learn about "state startups", ("startups d'État"), a government initiative dating from 2015, and managed by the DINUM (Direction Interministérielle du NUMérique), a cross-ministry state institution.

Administrative language aside, they're basically a public incubator, built from the ground up for starting software projects with a focus on user experience for individual citizens and civil servants. The projects have a very "tech startup" structure: agile development, lots of CI-CD, code is open-source and usually hosted on Github, etc.

From what little I've seen, they seem to be pretty competent. I've opened a few minor issues on Github (about typos and stuff) and they replied quickly. I've used one of their projects (the one for validating documents when looking for an apartment) and it worked fine. Some of the projects they're listing seem pretty exciting too.

More info there: https://beta.gouv.fr/en

Seriously, the French government hasn't always been great with IT, but it's getting there fast.

Are places I could find or idea what are the most popular ( I guess may be "used" would be a better word ) programming language that is being used in these government sector, and in Tech in France in general?

Re France in general: no idea. It's a big country. (The industrial sector uses a lot of C++, like everywhere else.)

Re the government: you can look at the Github pages of various projects. The article mentions this list:

https://code.gouv.fr/#/repos

From what I remember of the last time I browsed through state startup projects, there was a lot of Node.js and Python.