Softwares For twenty years, WordPress has let every plugin name its options and tables however it likes. The add_option() function sets autoload = ‘yes’ by default, with no warning, no documentation urging caution. The register_uninstall_hook() hook exists but is mandatory for no one. The uninstall.php file is optional. And the API provides no discovery mechanism letting the administrator find out, after the fact, which plugin a given option or table belonged to.
Democracy Three days without bank transfers, two years to renovate a five-million-euro rural bridge, eleven months to repair three escalators at Châtelet, two weeks without internet in Saint-Marcellin. These situations are no longer accidents: they have become the cruising speed of a country that has lost its ability to do things fast and at a reasonable cost. At the root of this paralysis, four structural causes that reinforce one another; cascading subcontracting, administrative layering, the asymmetry of privatisation, devouring bureaucracy. A million euros has become the minimum unit at municipal scale, a billion at national scale, and the citizen ends up taking out a Starlink subscription to get what the State, the operators and the local authorities no longer know how to guarantee. A methodical slide and a way out, on condition of shortening decision chains and rehabilitating local doing.
Economy The refrain is familiar: when the firm makes 200,000 euros in profit, it’s the workers’ labour that created the wealth. But when it loses 50,000 euros because the market turned, far fewer voices call for symmetry. The employee risks their job, their unpaid back wages, their pension. The shareholder risks their stake. Both take a risk, but not the same one, and it’s precisely this imbalance that has to be discussed honestly, figures in hand. A coherent answer does exist, by the way: the cooperative, where everyone is exposed. And when it breaks, as at Duralex, it’s the worker-shareholders who lose their savings. So, the real question: do you accept the symmetry, or do you just want the upsides of capitalism without the downsides?
Hardware For more than a decade on Sony A7R bodies, one observation has imposed itself with irritating regularity: skin tones drift towards green, and no amount of post-production correction really sets things right. This Sony green, as the photo community calls it, isn’t the whim of a Canon nostalgic. It’s a technical reality written into the colour matrix that Sony has been supplying to RAW-conversion software for years. The most paradoxical part? Sony bought Konica Minolta in 2006, inheriting along the way decades of expertise in the natural rendering of skin, a heritage Minolta had spent fifty years building, and that Sony seems to have filed away in a cupboard. While Fujifilm built its entire marketing around its Film Simulations and Canon kept flattering flesh tones by default, Sony was optimising its matrix for DxOMark test benches. Laboratory truth rather than human truth. Mathematical excellence comes at a price, and it’s your portraits that pay it.
Artificial Intelligence Converting a technical PDF into RAG-ready markdown isn’t just a matter of running LlamaParse over it. On a 51-page chapter of the Funktionsrahmen MSS60, the Siemens documentation for the engine control unit of the BMW M3 E92 and M5 E60, I discovered that the interesting work begins after the automatic parsing. The semantic decisions that really condition retrieval quality, preserving the source language rather than translating, breaking dense tables into individual subsections, supplementing diagrams with French prose and pseudo-code, no parser will make them for you. This LLM-assisted work is done only once per document, its marginal cost per query is zero, and its upfront investment pays for itself in user-hours from the very first week of use. Field notes from two evenings of conversion that turned my understanding of what really makes a RAG pipeline worthwhile on its head.
Culture The Alloncle report came out this morning; at 8:56 a.m., Sébastien Lecornu was already posting a reaction tweet on X. Nearly four hundred pages digested in two hours by a prime minister: the feat is such that it’s worth examining the mechanics of it. The tweet isn’t a reaction, it’s a prefabricated rebuttal, calibrated from the past weeks’ leaks to occupy the media space before anyone has opened the PDF. A sentence-by-sentence breakdown of a little masterpiece of political communication drained of all substance, in which we find the three tics of late-stage Macronism: the flight into vision, the outsourcing to independent authorities, the neutralization by co-optation. Spoiler: we already know how it ends.
E-invoicing FICOBA in January, ANTS in April, Mentor at the end of April, impots.gouv flagged in early May: four sovereign vaults gutted in ninety days. On 1 September 2026, the State will force ten million businesses to push the entirety of their invoicing flows through one hundred and fifteen private platforms it has accredited. Sold as a fight against fraud, the reform in reality builds a complete graph of the private French economy, hosted at around a hundred operators, over which the State decides everything and answers for nothing. It’s the French invention of an unprecedented mechanism: responsibility without culpability, in which political risk is transferred to private operational risk with no transfer of the decision. We haven’t multiplied the targets: we’ve merged them.
Artificial Intelligence We spent two years debating the model. GPT-5 versus Claude 4.5, Gemini versus Mistral, million-token context versus prefix cache. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room stayed invisible: 90% of production RAG pipelines are swallowing a mush of badly extracted pixels, then act surprised when the LLM hallucinates. The problem isn’t in the brain. It’s in […]
Artificial Intelligence In 2026, generating a photorealistic image costs a cent, indistinguishable from a real photograph. Four professional markets are collapsing in silence: stock photography, e-commerce packshots, editorial illustration, routine retouching. Beyond the markets, it’s the social institution of photographic proof, a hundred and eighty years old, that is cracking: courts, insurance, journalism, elections, privacy. A cold mapping of the models that matter, of copyright laundering act II, and of what regains value when every image becomes suspect by default.
Digital sovereignty A data leak every hour in France, 12.2 million people exposed in 2025, 36.8 million France Travail records on the dark web: this isn’t a fate, it’s an architecture choice. A family of cryptographic techniques, zero-knowledge proofs, makes it possible to prove your age, your residence or your income without transmitting a single piece of personal data. It has existed since 1985, it runs in production at Google, Apple and Cloudflare, it’s written into the eIDAS 2.0 regulation. It isn’t arriving in French administrations, and that isn’t a technical problem. When the State draws an advantage from a durably insecure environment to justify France Identité, the programmable digital euro and every new layer of centralization, the deployment of a cryptography that would render all of this useless isn’t an oversight: it’s a choice.