French Guiana is not a colony, it is a region of France. People who live there have the same constitutional rights as anyone living in mainland France.
It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.
That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism.
French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed.
The same point applies elsewhere: Guinea became independent from French colonial rule in 1958, but independence didn't magically erase the economic structures, institutions, and inequalities inherited from colonialism. Today, a large share of Guinea's population still lives in poverty despite the country's enormous natural-resource wealth.
So "it's not a colony" is correct as a matter of constitutional law. But using that fact to imply that colonial history is irrelevant to present-day economic and social conditions is a much stronger claim, and one that's harder to defend.
While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
Guianans tend to get pissed off if outsiders suggest in any way that they are any different as a French region from l'Hexagone (the French mainland). Your banging on about colonies would not be well received there.
Why would you not use a server with webgl support if that's a requirement? I feel like the moment this would become an issue you are already at an scale that would make sense.
Our service is offered starting for free; the CPU server is much cheaper, and I wanted to see if it could be sufficient for most basic WebGL animations.
The GPU tier makes sense for paid users; that will be the next blog post!
Ah. That's in the reference to Wyoming Catholic University.[1]
"What exactly is our technology policy? It has three parts: (1) no televisions on campus; (2) dorm internet access limited to school email and selected websites for class (public spaces have full internet access); (3) no cell-phones or handheld devices with wireless or cellular data. Students may check their cellphones in with a prefect and check them out when travelling out of town."
"This is freedom for silence, where the soul meets God in deepest interiority."
There's a heavy prayer dosage. The Liturgy of the Hours (prayer 5x a day) is "encouraged". Plus lots of other prayer events, on daily, weekly, and seasonal schedules.[2]
Also, no alcohol, no drugs, no opposite-sex visitors in dorms, and a conservative dress code.
"Students who are openly gay and dating, active gay-rights supporters or transgender would be contravening church teaching just by being here".[3]
Idk which models you refer to, but I tested a bunch recently, and they performed well on Dutch. Only the smallest, such as qwen 3.6 27B, made up words and switched languages.
There's a large gap between making up words and an actually native text distribution. LLMs have a clear pattern, clear tells, a "feel" in English, and it's normally even more pronounced in non-English languages.
Lots of bias towards English sentence structure, idioms, etiquette, etc.
I didn't notice any of that. Such a bias would be strange, because certainly smaller models don't have the luxury of learning grammar independently: it's still word sequences, and languages are quite well separated.
There would be a bunch of value in having, say, a good 30B-class model that used my local language as well as it does English. There's lots of cases, especially in the government sphere, where local processing is a requirement and frontier-level capabilities aren't required. Making those cheap to run seems like a fine goal.
Yes, but what's the point of a support bot that writes good Dutch when it can't follow instructions, doesn't understand the questions or can't solve problems? I might be wrong, but I don't think atm these models have the cognitive ability to perform any task in a satisfactory manner.
As for accessing pii, I imagine the value here is in the fact they're local, which has nothing to do with the "sovereignty" of these models. If anything, a model is more likely to be tricked by a malicious prompt the farther it is from the sota.
A good harness and engineering is important no matter which model you use.
But Sovereignty of hosting is also important because without it all pii is being leaked.
I don't understand this. Even if that were true (and it isn't in my experience), a model that is trained on a Dutch corpus and arguably "knows Dutch well" but has the reasoning and comprehension abilities of a three year old is useless in any case. I'd rather use a model that can only speak English and put an automatic translator around it.
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