With AI companies growing ever closer to the state and a barrage of headlines about labor automation and burst-ready bubbles carrying over from last year, I thought it’d be fitting to start 2026 off with a vision of one possible future stemming from such phenomena. A few years back, I edited a short story, Busy, by Omar El Akkad, for Terraform, a speculative fiction project I co-founded with the writer and musician Claire Evans. (Terraform was part of VICE, which has since gone bankrupt and has itself been turned into an AI slop farm.) When we published the print anthology, Busy opened the volume.
La nouvelle est très chouette !
Comme pour toute bonne entreprise de la tech qui se respecte, l’info avait leaké. On peut vous la confirmer aujourd’hui : Clubic rejoint le groupe EBRA et fait d’Humanoid (Numerama, Frandroid et Lemon) le leader de la presse tech en France !
J'ai du mal à voir ça comme une bonne nouvelle. Je suis en froid avec une partie de la ligne éditoriale et des pratiques de tracking/pub/putaclic de Numerama, je crains que ça déteigne un peu... Mais en toute honnêteté, ne lisant plus Clubic depuis quelques années, je reste curieux de l'évolution du média dans les temps à venir.
We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the "success culture." Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider "winning against the whole society" as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!
Yeah !
In this period of the computerization of everything, so many systems have lost the innate intuitiveness from their analog counterparts. Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t “interfaces” at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.
Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker
The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?
Quel texte ! Difficile d'en extraire un morceau en particulier, mais, sans pour autant que ce soit spécifique au sujet, j'aime celui-là :
Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.
Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.
La communauté du Libre a besoin des féministes pour ne pas se planter politiquement, mais les féministes doivent également s’emparer du sujet du Libre ! Pas pour faire plaisir aux libristes, mais parce que c’est juste pas possible de se désempouvoirer à ce point côté technique ! De se proclamer féministe en se faisant utiliser, surveiller, contrôler par les outils des techbros, en leur faisant complètement allégeance !
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Le 20 octobre 2025, l'hébergeur AWS1 a connu une panne sérieuse sur l'un de ses sites, panne qui a mené au dysfonctionnement ou à l'arrêt de nombreux services Internet, dont pas mal de sites Web très visibles, comme Snapchat. D'innombrables articles ont été écrits depuis sur cette panne, et la plupart sont déjà oubliés. Il y a pourtant des leçons à en tirer. Le Web est-il mortel ? Les pannes de deux autres gros acteurs, Azure le 29 octobre et Cloudflare le 18 novembre, ont relancé la question. Sur quoi repose le Web ?
You see, the E Ink Corporation has pretty much a monopoly on “electronic paper”. That means that every e-reader on the market, be it from Amazon or an unknown Chinese upstart, shares the same underlying technology. E Ink has developed five kinds of colour screens for various applications, but only two are widely used in e-readers: Kaleido and Gallery.
Cet ensemble d’éléments est tout simplement devenu inimaginable chez la majorité des constructeurs : parler à un ingénieur ? Impossible. Les envoyer présenter le produit et inviter en face d’eux des gens qui savent de quoi ils parlent ? Encore plus fou. Ne pas plier le genou face à l’IA et à l’immense vague de pognon qui pourrait venir vous submerger en prêtant allégeance à telle ou telle entreprise ? Simplement délirant.
Je ne dis pas que Valve est une boite parfaite avec une vision utopique du monde, mais son approche reste vraiment purement technique, et cela fait énormément de bien de le constater.
And there was another conundrum, thanks to results from Los Alamos’ LSND experiment and Fermilab’s MiniBooNE (MicroBooNE’s predecessor). Both found evidence of muon neutrinos oscillating into electron neutrinos in a way that shouldn’t be possible if there were just three neutrino flavors. So physicists suggested there might be a fourth flavor: the sterile neutrino, so named because unlike the other three, it does not couple to a charged counterpart via the electroweak force.
The color “ultrablack” – defined as reflecting less than 0.5% of the light that hits it – has a variety of uses, including in cameras, solar panels and telescopes, but it’s difficult to produce and can appear less black when viewed at an angle. Now, a Cornell lab has devised a simple method for making the elusive color.
Alarmes d’ascenseur, mobiles, téléassistance… Ces dispositifs pourraient devenir obsolètes avec l’arrêt du réseau 2G, qui débute en mars 2026.
Binder jetting builds parts layer by layer by selectively depositing a liquid binder onto powdered material, which is later sintered or infiltrated to achieve full strength. On the other hand, pulsed laser ablation uses intense, short laser pulses to vaporize material from a solid target, ejecting atoms or clusters that can redeposit as thin films or coatings. In short, binder jetting bonds powder with a liquid adhesive to create 3D structures, while pulsed laser ablation removes, or in the case of pulsed laser fusion deposits, material using concentrated laser energy.
Contrairement aux premières hypothèses — y compris en interne — l’incident n’a pas été provoqué par une attaque DDoS ou par une action malveillante. Tout est parti d’un changement de permissions au sein d’un cluster ClickHouse chargé de générer un fichier de configuration utilisé par le module de gestion des bots. Ce fichier, mis à jour toutes les cinq minutes, a soudainement doublé de taille en raison de données dupliquées. Propagé ensuite à l’ensemble du réseau mondial de Cloudflare, il a provoqué la défaillance des logiciels responsables du routage du trafic.
Les dominos…
Enfin, Jobs rappelle une conviction forte : la technologie vieillit, mais une grande histoire, elle, traverse les générations. Si Toy Story doit encore être regardé dans soixante ans, ce ne sera pas en raison de ses prouesses techniques, mais grâce à son récit et à ses personnages. « Aucune technologie ne peut transformer une mauvaise histoire en une bonne », résume-t-il.
No matter the reason, there is nothing good about the games industry's decades-long project of erasing its own past. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game developers, and it's bad for games. No art form can exist in a permanent, atemporal now, with its history erased as quickly as it's created.
Everything we thought would be a solar bottleneck turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Perhaps you've heard that solar is unsustainable because it competes for agricultural land, making starvation the price of clean energy. Wrong: solar provides shade for many crops that have been withering in the soaring heat of a climate-wracked world, and limits evaporation, reducing the amount of water needed to produce food crops. What's more, the cooling effect of that soil-retained moisture helps keep the shade-providing solar panels within their optimal operating temperature, increasing the efficiency of their power generation. And of course, every time someone switches from hydrocarbon fuels to solar, they reduce the demand for ethanol, and a third of America's corn goes into making this stupid, wasteful fuel additive (and corn is America's most prolific crop). That's land that can be given over to growing useful food crops. Solar is increasing our agricultural yields, not competing for farmland.
Then there's the material bill for solar: a recurring (and legitimate, and worthwhile) concern about electrification is that it comes with a vast material bill that will necessitate massive extraction projects. There's good reason to worry that the copper, lithium and conflict minerals needed for planetary solarization will come at the expense of the despoilation of habitat, the poisoning of indigenous people, and the ruination of miners.
Happily, this, too is turning out to be a tractable problem. First off, because the material bill for solarization just isn't that big when compared to the amount of fossil fuels we consume every year. To create the batteries we need to keep the whole world's lights on when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, we will need to extract one seventeenth of the amount of minerals we burn every year in the fossil fuel system.
La sulfureuse entreprise israélienne NSO, connue pour son célèbre logiciel espion étatique Pegasus, a annoncé des changements de taille en son sein. Ainsi, un groupe d’investisseurs dirigé par un producteur hollywoodien vient d’acquérir une participation majoritaire dans l’entreprise et un ancien proche de Donald Trump a été nommé à sa direction.
Comment les techno-fascistes ont pris le pouvoir
Belle (et effrayante) synthèse