Digital sovereignty Dario Amodei proposes to slow the race for AI capabilities: third-party evaluators stationed inside the labs, coordination among companies in “democratic countries” under an antitrust waiver, negotiation with China. The word Europe never appears in the essay. Behind the vocabulary of caution, the three concrete measures, a chip embargo, a crackdown on distillation, and the securing of model weights, describe a regime in which frontier capability becomes a commodity rationed by Washington. There is still one idea worth taking whole, the embedded evaluators, and one question to ask before applauding it: who has their foot on the pedal.
Artificial Intelligence On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that a swarm of 10,000 agents had solved Navier-Stokes in 88 hours, an Anthropic researcher resigned accusing the labs of gambling with our lives, and the OECD published the worst PISA results in French history. The night before, on LCI, a presidential candidate had found nothing to say about Pompidou. One thread runs through all of it: everyone is speaking in the future tense, and no one is rereading the past. Some because they are manufacturing the future by the token, others because they no longer have a past to draw on. The question for France is not whether AI will kill us. It is who, here, will still be able to read the proof.
Cars Before long, driving a car by hand will be illegal as ordinary transportation, the way smoking on an airplane eventually became unthinkable. It won’t start with a decree but with an insurance premium. The Cybercab launch in Austin, Waymo’s 200 million driverless miles, and France’s six-week reversal on Tesla’s FSD all point the same way. This piece makes that case, states plainly what could prove it wrong, and ends with a confession: writing it mostly made me want to go driving.
Surveillance and civil liberties I rented a camera lens, and thirty minutes after delivery my phone warned me that an unknown AirTag was moving with me. Under the foam padding sat a tracker with an inventory number written in marker: AT 102. Protecting an asset handed to strangers is entirely legitimate, but a tracker that sleeps at my house for five days does not record a lens moving around, it records me. I only found out because of Apple’s anti-stalking alert, and not because of a line in the rental terms. The case does not turn on the principle of tracking. It turns on the silence around it.
Artificial Intelligence Napoleon, Cleopatra, or Josephine Baker telling you their life story to camera in thirty seconds: these AI-generated videos are everywhere on Instagram and TikTok, and as entertainment they work rather well. The trouble lies elsewhere. AI doesn’t know history; it assembles likely patterns, which is why historians keep flagging one anachronism after another. Watch them as fiction and there’s no harm done. The risk starts when the testimony format passes itself off as a source, especially on sensitive subjects. And when a synthetic Josephine Baker signs off with a question about which country we belong to, that isn’t history anymore, it’s ventriloquism.
Economy On August 19, 2026, the U.S. Treasury tore up its own schedule to double its long-end buybacks, a day after the 30-year yield hit its highest level since 2007. Behind a move framed as technical lies an unprecedented collision: the AI hyperscalers, carrying $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments, are borrowing along the same maturities and from the same lenders as the federal government. The pool of investors willing to lock up capital for thirty years is finite, and the sovereign has just lost that contest. The bill will not wait for an official crisis: it is already showing up in mortgage rates, in Europe as much as in America.
Softwares Recent iPhones shoot in HEIC, a format no browser displays except Safari. The result on my Invision Community forums: hundreds of photos arriving every day as unusable download links. Rather than explain to every member how to change a setting buried deep in their phone, I built HEIC Uploads, an application that converts those photos to AVIF in the background without ever blocking the post. AVIF turned out to be five times lighter than WebP and four times faster to encode, so there was no trade-off to weigh. The code is published under the MIT license.
Artificial Intelligence ComfyUI and n8n share the same visual grammar, nodes and connections, but they don’t do the same job: one manufactures media with AI models, the other orchestrates events, services, and business rules. Pitting them against each other is a false debate. The real question is where to draw the line between them, and how to combine them into a hybrid architecture in which n8n drives ComfyUI as an asynchronous render engine. From securing the API to decoupling GPU costs, this article lays out the design rules, illustrated by a concrete case: a video translation and lip-sync factory.
Technology The introduction of an invisible statistical watermark in Claude’s outputs marks a troubling shift for regular power users. Beyond this forced text tagging, restricting subscription tokens outside official interfaces and Anthropic’s hostile stance toward open-source AI create major daily friction. As agile competitors rapidly close the gap, Claude’s value proposition no longer makes it an obvious default choice for developers and writers. This article outlines the five key grievances making me seriously reconsider my Pro and Max subscriptions, from ethical concerns to pure economic pragmatism.
Artificial Intelligence Since the AI Act’s transparency obligations came into force, every text produced by Claude carries an invisible statistical signature, woven into the choice of words themselves. Anthropic has signed the European Code of Practice and applies the marking worldwide, including where no legislator ever asked for it. The mechanism is technically sound, unlike the detectors it replaces, but its own author concedes that a detected mark does not prove authorship, and that its absence proves nothing either. What remains is a signal institutions will treat as evidence, a language boundary that is enough to erase it, and a locally run open model that becomes the quiet privilege of producing text whose origin cannot be read.