Cars On July 9, 2026, Volkswagen announced the unthinkable: its lineup cut in half, options slashed by 75 percent, four German plants under threat, and up to 100,000 jobs on the line. Days earlier, news broke that BYD had twice tried to take control of Renault, rebuffed by a French state playing the hero while Geely was already inside the house. The prevailing narrative blames China; it has the wrong culprit. Entrenched codetermination, an EV calendar set by decree, capital locked up by the Florange law: Europe’s auto industry isn’t dying of competition, it’s dying of fifty years of protection that excused it from adapting. Creative destruction deferred doesn’t disappear, it accumulates until the break, and the wolf never had to force the door: we sold it the keys.
Philosophy When a carmaker discovers a defective part, it issues a recall notice. France has never done so for its intellectual products. Yet Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze supplied the mechanisms that American campuses assembled into an identitarian war machine, with no manual and no safeguards, while their authors looked on, flattered. Forty years later the product is coming back to us by the containerload, and indictments are no longer enough. Here is the recall notice, and the warranty work starts now.
Artificial Intelligence Anthropic just published the strangest discovery of the year: an internal structure in Claude, essential to reasoning, that nobody designed and that emerged on its own during training. A company valued at nearly a trillion dollars had to invent an entire science, interpretability, to understand its own product after the fact. That’s not a confession. It’s the cleanest experimental demonstration ever produced of a Hayekian theorem: you can write the rules of a system without being able to know the order that will emerge from them. And while the tech press marvels at finally being able to read the machine’s thoughts, nobody is asking the two questions that matter: what will the AI Act’s explainability requirement be worth against knowledge the creator itself can only obtain through research, and who will hold the lens that can not only read those thoughts, but edit them without leaving a trace?
Justice Four years of investigation, search after search, and still no resolution: the McKinsey affair is no longer merely a suspicion of irregular financing of the Macron campaigns, it has become a revealing X-ray of how French justice works. The 2022 Senate report established the inconvenient facts: over one billion euros spent on consultants in 2021 alone, and a firm that paid zero corporate income tax in France for ten years. Against that backdrop, comparing judicial tempos is a cruel exercise: an inquiry opened the very day of the revelations for Fillon, immediate enforcement for Le Pen, eight years and a quiet closure for Mélenchon, perpetual suspension for the party in power. One clock, though, is ticking unwatched: Article 67 of the Constitution, which will make Macron an ordinary citizen before the law in June 2027. Seen from that angle, the next presidential election will also be an election about the judicial fate of the previous one.
Politics Every year in France, nearly 50 billion euros in public funding flows into the nonprofit sector. Behind the legitimate delivery of public services hides a major democratic drift: the funding of organizations whose sole activity is manufacturing rules and influencing policy. Subsidized by the very State they claim to watch, these groups use taxpayer money to wage permanent legal warfare, paralyzing projects and replacing the voters’ ballot with litigation. By losing their financial independence, these precious countervailing powers have changed in nature. Our democracy’s watchdog has become the administration’s lapdog.
Economy A few days ago, I woke up firmly resolved to go do a little shopping. Those who know me will appreciate the scale of the sacrifice: wandering strip malls under fluorescent lights appears nowhere on my list of earthly pleasures. But sometimes you have to force yourself, if only to replace a pair of shoes […]
Politics Eric Zemmour’s debate with François Bayrou is the best France has seen in a long while: two speakers who listen, argue, and summon French history without demonizing each other. But debating well is not the same as debating the right thing. Behind one man’s civilizational hierarchy and the other’s fiscal alarm lies a shared blind spot: the 1.7-trillion-euro state machine that produces both crises at once, and that neither proposes to dismantle. With every figure checked, from the foreign holders of French debt to the wealth gap with the Netherlands, this article shows why the face-off replays Marc Bloch’s strange defeat in miniature. And why 1958, which Zemmour invokes, was saved not by an orator but by an economist.
Softwares Most PHP developers never chose GD, it was simply there, compiled in by default, and the question of the image engine ended there. That is a mistake, because this invisible component decides the speed of your back office, the memory bill of your server, and the quality of the images you serve, especially once a media library has to absorb batches of heavy photos. Against GD and ImageMagick, libvips changes the game through its streaming architecture: where the others load the whole image into memory, it works in strips, which makes it several times faster and far more frugal on large sources. The numbers bear this out, from the official benchmark to production reports, with one honest caveat: on very small images, its advantage disappears. This article compares the three engines, explains why libvips stayed invisible to the PHP world for so long, and why the official Intervention Image v3 driver is finally establishing it as the deliberate default for the hot path.
Artificial Intelligence The standard line is that local AI costs you twice, the machine and then the watts, and that’s true. But there’s a third bill, the only one not denominated in euros: the bill for sovereignty, which you sign silently the moment you decide to “ride it out on APIs” for two years while waiting for prices to fall. On top of that, the French watt is among the cleanest on the continent, and the memory spike you’re advised to wait out isn’t weather but a perfectly rational eviction, with no reason to correct itself on its own. A companion to tazmenworld’s buying guide, adding the line the spreadsheet forgets and a reminder that, in a world where memory goes first to wherever the margin is fattest, owning your own is already an act of resistance.
Economy For two years now, my Logitech PRO X 2 headset, connected over Lightspeed to an Apple Silicon Mac mini, has been dropping out without warning, in total silence, taking the machine’s entire audio subsystem hostage along the way. Cross-referencing other users’ reports, the conclusion is beyond dispute: it is neither my bad luck nor my setup, but the collision of two fragilities, Logitech’s proprietary wireless and the macOS USB audio stack, made worse by its G Hub software layer. The January 2026 expired-certificate fiasco, which paralyzed G Hub on macOS alone, is the glaring proof. The Bluetooth fallback offers relative stability, but at the cost of latency and quality, which is to say a confession of failure dressed up as a feature. At 300 dollars, that is a disappointment that has cured me of the Astro A50 X and made me hesitate over my future MX Master 4.