Technology is treated here as material to be taken apart, measured, and put back into service, not as a stream of announcements to comment on. This category holds both of the blog’s registers: the honest bench test, a keyboard, a vertical mouse, an OLED panel pressed into service as a monitor, a domesticated electricity meter, a server running FreeBSD rather than Debian, video encoding measured with VMAF rather than judged by eye; and the critique of what hardware and platforms do to their users, from the dongle that refuses to talk to its neighbor to the service you thought you owned that changes the rules mid-course. You will find pieces written after real, long-term use, often revisiting something that once seemed like a sound purchase, and a lasting interest in old ideas that still hold up, from the BGP protocol to the X Window System. Written by a practitioner who prefers a justified technical choice to a defended preference, and who provides the numbers when he has them.
There are two ways to read the announcement of dynamic workflows in Claude Code, published on May 28. The first, the one everyone will repeat, fits in the tagline: work you used to plan in quarters now wraps up in a matter of days. The second hides in a quiet note, repeated twice in the […]
At the corner newsstand, a front page catches my eye, I hand over a few coins, and I walk off with the paper, with no one asking me to commit for twelve months. Online, that instinct hits a wall: the article I want, I can’t buy, I’m offered only a subscription at “1 € for the first month,” an auto-renewal trap calibrated on my forgetfulness. Yet the willingness to pay is there, and so is the micropayment plumbing; if it isn’t offered to me, that’s not technical incapacity but commercial calculation. The rare platforms that tried pay-per-article didn’t die for want of readers: they were smothered by publishers bent on protecting their subscription funnel. So I take a pass, every time, and each locked paywall loses the euro it could have collected on the spot.
Ferrari has unveiled its first electric car, the Luce, designed by Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom: 1,050 horsepower, 550,000 euros, and the silhouette of an iPhone on wheels with nothing Italian left about it. The reception has been brutal. Montezemolo fears “the destruction of a myth,” Briatore piles on, and the stock has plunged six to eight percent in a matter of hours. Behind the car lies an entire Europe, one capable of regulating its decline but no longer of building its future, ready to sacrifice Scaglietti and Pininfarina on the altar of a transition nobody asked for. Which leaves the real question: does our civilization still have anything to offer, or must we now look to Cupertino for what Maranello once knew how to invent?
A phone maker just beat Audi and Porsche at the Nürburgring with the YU7 GT, and its electric motor already speaks our language: torque, efficiency, rpm, internal components. Mechanical fascination isn’t dying, it’s just changing addresses, and the very name of the unit, “V8S EVO,” gives away that the mystique of the combustion engine is still the most powerful selling point of all. But let’s distrust formulas that are too neat: this is neither an eternal recurrence nor a clean substitution. It’s a molt. The machinery persists and even hardens, the geek joins the mechanic rather than replacing him, and the sensual side reinvents itself in the whine of a rotor at 28,000 rpm. One question remains: will we know how to pass the old thrill on to those who will only ever have known the new?
Clients ask me to bolt an AI chatbot onto their sites all the time, and those sites run on everything: Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, sometimes abandoned custom builds. But “which plugin?” is never the right question: an AI chatbot is two layers people almost always conflate, the widget delivery and the brain that answers. The entire decision sorts onto a single scale, from locked-in turnkey where you control nothing, all the way to a pipeline you fully own. For a single client, turnkey is plenty; for an agency banking reusable knowledge across a whole fleet, owning the brain becomes an asset. Here’s the framework I use to decide, CMS by CMS, with Shopify leading the way.
I get asked constantly to bolt an AI chatbot onto client sites, and those sites run on everything: Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, sometimes some abandoned custom build. But “which plugin?” is never the right question. An AI chatbot is really two layers that almost everyone lumps together: the delivery of the widget and the brain that does the answering. The entire decision sits on a single scale, running from the locked-down turnkey solution where you control nothing, all the way to a pipeline you own outright. For a single client, turnkey is more than enough; for an agency looking to build up reusable knowledge across a whole fleet of sites, owning the brain becomes a real asset. Here’s the framework I use to settle it, CMS by CMS, starting with Shopify.
On May 19, 2026, Plex announces by email that its Lifetime Pass will jump from $249.99 to $749.99 on July 1, justifying the tripling with the software’s “real, ongoing value.” It’s the logical culmination of a drift that began on April 29, 2025, the day remote access, free since 2009, moved behind a monthly paywall. Between the “New Plex Experience” forced through despite the negative feedback, the advertising pushed right into your own library, and an openly claimed pivot toward AVOD streaming, Plex has methodically converted sixteen years of community trust into a monetization lever. Since early 2025, I’ve been running Jellyfin (remote access via Cloudflare Tunnel, iOS audio on Manet, video on Infuse) without a shred of regret. At $750 a promise, it was time to put technical sovereignty back where it should have stayed: at home.
A RAG PoC indexing 84,000 chunks, roughly 500 MB of vectors, fits without flinching in the RAM of an M1 MacBook; and yet French SMEs are still being sold a four-service stack (Pinecone + Elasticsearch + Postgres + LangChain) that costs between €150 and €400 a month in cloud infrastructure and mobilizes three distinct technical skill sets. DuckDB, the embedded analytical library maintained since 2019 by Amsterdam’s CWI, solves the equation with a single dependency: native vector search (the vss extension), BM25 full-text search (the fts extension), standard structured SQL filters, and hybrid re-ranking in one eight-line query, all of it inside a local .duckdb file. The bottom line: a factor of 10 on infrastructure cost, a factor of 10 on latency, a factor of 5 on time to production, and not a single embedding leaving your infrastructure to end up in an American datacenter. The four-service stack taught today in 90% of RAG tutorials doesn’t exist to solve a technical problem: it exists to sell recurring SaaS, to justify DevOps engagements, and to inflate project budgets on use cases that don’t warrant it. The real value of a senior engineer in 2026 is measured by the number of lines of infrastructure he knows how to remove to solve the exact same problem, not by the number of Kubernetes microservices he knows how to stack.
I changed my chunking from 800 to 1,200 tokens, my hit@1 jumped +12%, and for thirty seconds I thought I’d found the optimum. In reality, my questions about the MSS60 were now being evaluated against the MSS54 index. The routing between corpora had been broken from the start, without anything in the metrics flagging it. A rising metric produced by a broken eval pipeline looks exactly like a rising metric produced by a genuine improvement. Three silent traps, multi-corpus routing, the absence of versioned history, and hit@k and MRR with no LLM judge, mean that most RAG teams make their decisions on numbers that measure nothing.
Most AI SVG generators cheat: they hand you a base64-encoded PNG dressed up with a .svg extension. The test takes ten seconds, open the file in a text editor. In 2026, Recraft V4 is the only consumer tool that reliably produces real native SVG from a prompt, with Adobe Firefly Text-to-Vector as a legally better-protected alternative. Three trades collapse along the way: junior UI icon designer, low-end freelance logotype, vectorizer. What gains value is the upstream (brand design, design-system architecture) and the downstream, the technical integration.