Technology

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.

What You’ll Learn, and Why Most Explanations of RAG Miss the Point

Artificial Intelligence

If you’re using an LLM with your own documents (or thinking about it) you’ll run into RAG, Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The premise sounds simple: feed your files to the model so it answers better. In reality it’s a pipeline of seven technical decisions, where each link determines whether your AI answers from your data or invents with confidence. This guide covers the full mechanics with the 2026 benchmarks, the concrete tools (NotebookLM, ChromaDB, LangChain), and the traps I hit building my own pipelines. From theory to a working Python pipeline in 30 lines.

Proton: From Privacy’s White Knight to the New Centralized Empire?

Surveillance and civil liberties

Proton built a reputation as privacy’s white knight, but its current turn raises doubts. Between frantic expansion, service centralization, partial transparency, and the threat of Switzerland’s new surveillance law, the company seems to be drifting from the story it once told about itself. Privacy is becoming a captive product rather than a culture of autonomy. Questioning even your allies is essential if you want to avoid rebuilding Google under a privacy banner.