Digital sovereignty 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.
Democracy Factual television news has vanished in France, crushed under the weight of permanent pundits, decorative special correspondents and ever-present political guests. This ousting owes nothing to an ideological conspiracy and everything to simple accounting: commentary costs a hundred times less than fieldwork. There’s no point mourning a golden age that never existed, though; the news broadcast of 1985 was no better, merely reverent toward power instead of chattering for the ratings. The public, for its part, isn’t innocent in this drift: it tunes out the moment you dig deeper, it flares up the moment people start trading insults. Institutional servitude yesterday, market servitude today, and in between, the viewer was never the point.
Cars There are passions that don’t merely occupy the mind: they colonize it. Mine has a name (the automobile) and a scent: burned fuel mingled with hot rubber. I wanted to capture what really happens when a man, a machine, and a road cease to be three separate things. A tribute to the internal combustion engine, to the precise gesture, and to the brief communion that no algorithm will ever be able to delegate. And, in the final line, a confession I couldn’t keep to myself.
Artificial Intelligence 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.
Artificial Intelligence 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.
Artificial Intelligence 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.
Economy On 6 February 2026, Stellantis shares lost 25% in a single session, taking with them an illusion carefully maintained for twenty years: these savers had not bought a “protected” investment; they had sold their bank a catastrophe insurance policy disguised as a coupon. Some buy-back valuations now show -99% on instruments stamped “with safety barrier”, and yet the French structured products market has tripled in four years to reach €60 billion in net inflows in 2025, because no other product generates as much revenue for banks. The mechanics are crystal clear once you strip away the marketing: you surrender the dividends, you cap your gains at the coupon, and you retain 100% of the downside risk beyond a barrier whose statistical robustness amounts to sophistry, while one in five CAC 40 stocks has experienced a drawdown exceeding -50% over the past twenty years. Belgium settled the matter as early as 2011 with an FSMA moratorium that eliminated single-stock barrier autocalls from the retail market, without any collapse of the savings market; France, meanwhile, is still publishing AMF/ACPR mapping reports calling for “more financial education”. At some point, we will have to stop pretending.
Economy I have been loyal to Levi’s for decades, and yet I have never owned the same pair of jeans twice. Every time I replace a pair, something has changed: cut, colour, fabric composition, weight. This is not disorder. It’s a strategy. By making product loyalty impossible, the brand exploits precisely the loyalty to the icon: the red tab, the Far West mythology, a carefully maintained heritage designed to conceal a denim that has gone from 14 to 15 oz in the 1980s to 10 to 12 oz today. What is the point of being loyal to a brand that makes loyalty to its product impossible?
Artificial Intelligence On 8 May 2026, Thariq Shihipar, an engineer on the Claude Code team at Anthropic, published a manifesto that’s been circulating ever since: drop markdown, switch to HTML for your specs, implementation plans and reports. The piece is clever, well written, and structurally an act of strategic marketing dressed up as personal experience. On a narrow subset (throwaway editors, interactive playgrounds, prototypes with sliders), the author is right; on everything else, his blanket enthusiasm conceals six blind spots. Token cost waved away, semantic HTML flipped into presentational HTML, loss of reviewability, the maintenance paradox that traps the user inside the production loop, reading that gets skimmed rather than scrutinised, an attack surface opened up by indirect prompt injection. An analysis of a poorly disguised strategic signal, plus a pragmatic decision matrix for sorting out where HTML deserves to be adopted and where markdown remains, by design, the right pivot format.
Artificial Intelligence Every session, Claude Code reopens your codebase like a visitor who has never set foot in it. It unfolds the README, fires off its greps, opens whole files to reconstruct an architecture it had already pieced together the day before. Understand-Anything, an open-source project released in March 2026, offers another path: index the codebase as a local knowledge graph, versioned like a lock-file, queried on demand by the agent instead of being re-read on every turn. This isn’t a token optimisation, it’s an architectural shift that extends the “RAG is dead, long live the Agent” thesis right into the code itself. Multi-agent pipeline, comparative economics, the limits of a project just six months old: what this break changes for Claude Code and for your workflow.