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I want to be clear about something before we start. I do not hate Americans. I have never met an American in person. I am not qualified to comment on what they are like as individuals, in their homes, with their families. I am sure many of them are perfectly decent people. This article is about the American economic system, American companies, and the American government. It is about the practical reality of what happens when you, as a European consumer, hand your money over to an American corporation. Or when you, as a European company, try to work with American infrastructure. I have arrived at a simple conclusion after years of personal experience and observation: I will not buy American if I can avoid it. Here is why. ...

Hideous Destructor is what happens when someone looks at DOOM’s breakneck pacing, its comical disregard for physics, and its protagonist who runs faster than most cars, and decides to burn it all to the ground. In its place rises something closer to ArmA than anything id Software ever shipped: a tactical realism mod where every fight is dangerous, every wound stacks up, and everything you carry has weight you will feel in your bones. ...

To make it clear right out of the gate, I am not in the business of getting outraged over the culture war, or even commenting on it. I do observe it, but mostly as amusement, because it is a fleeting, passing thing that comes and goes in the world faster than most people these days have attention span for. Maybe at one point the culture war was organic, but these days it is an obvious weapon of the state used to fry people’s brains; get the men to waste their vital energy on nonsense, screaming at smartphones and TVs. Generally, it is just bread and circus to get you to not think about important topics. ...

Before we get to the meat, let me state plainly that I am not talking about enterprise-scale deployments. If you are managing hundreds of microservices across a Kubernetes cluster at a company with more employees than your home town has residents, Docker is probably the right tool. I have never pretended to be an enterprise sysadmin, and I am not about to start. What I am talking about is what you and I do: running a personal website, hosting a blog, deploying a small game server, setting up a fediverse instance. The kind of casual sysadmin work that normal people do on a box in their living room or a five-euro VPS that has been running for three years without a reboot. For this, Docker is not just unnecessary. It is actively harmful. ...

DeepSeek V4 is here. Not a press release, not a carefully curated blog post with cherry-picked benchmarks, but a 58-page research paper with nothing held back. And the conclusion it forces is uncomfortable for anyone paying twenty dollars a month for a premium AI subscription: Claude is a waste of money. This is not hyperbole. The numbers are public, and they are absurd. Depending on whether there is a discount or not, DeepSeek-V4 can be 30 times cheaper than Anthropic’s Claude. Even without a discount, you are looking at 8 to 20 times less. That is not a small difference. That is the kind of difference that makes you stop and ask what exactly you are paying for. ...

Copyright is a concept that most software developers interact with on a daily basis, whether they are conscious of it or not. Every repository, every library, every framework… they all come with a licence that dictates what you can and cannot do with them. This is so baked into modern software development that few stop to question the underlying premise: should code be copyrightable at all? For a primer on what copyright is and how software licensing works in practice, see my earlier article: Licensing for Beginners. The short version is this: the moment you create a work, all rights are automatically reserved to you under the Berne Convention. You then use a licence to grant others permission to use, modify, or distribute that work. But this entire framework rests on an assumption that deserves scrutiny, meaning the assumption that code is a creative work deserving of copyright protection in the first place. ...

If you have ever set up a web server from scratch, you know the ritual. You install nginx or Apache, you write a configuration file that looks like a legal contract written by someone who hates you, you generate a TLS certificate using Certbot, you set up a cron job to renew it, you hope the renewal works, and then you discover that your configuration has a subtle syntax error that requires you to understand five layers of mechanics in order to fix. This is no exaggeration. ...

Ask any software engineer with a decade of experience what it feels like to work in 2026, and you will hear the same tremor in the voice. It is not the fear of a machine becoming sentient. It is the quieter, more corrosive dread of becoming obsolete while still sitting at the keyboard. The technological cassandras will tell you to rejoice or to panic, depending on which cult they have sworn allegiance to. The pro-AI congregation preaches a gospel of frictionless creation where you whisper a wish to the machine and a fully formed application tumbles out. The anti-AI cult, meanwhile, is busy declaring a psychic death of craft, insisting that every line of generated code is a little soul-murder. Both are tedious. Both miss the geometry of the actual crisis. ...

If you have read anything I’ve written about artificial intelligence, you already know I don’t belong to either of the warring cults that dominate the conversation. I’m not a pro-AI cultist who believes a prompt box will think for him, code his dating app, and balance his chequebook while he vibe-codes his way to a yacht. I’m also not an anti-AI cultist who treats a statistical pattern-matcher as a soul-sucking digital monster birthed from theft. Both positions substitute hysteria for reasoned debate, and they both make it impossible to talk honestly about what these tools actually are. ...

Jesus of Nazareth stands before Pontius Pilatus. “What charges are you bringing against this man?” Pilatus asks of the Pharisees who hold Jesus for trial. “If he were not a criminal, we would not have brought him before you,” the Pharisees explain to the Roman Prefect. Pilatus sighs, but nobody, not even his servants, can hear it over the stormy noise of chatter, whispers, and rumours unfolding all over Jerusalem. “Take him yourselves! Judge him according to your own law,” Pilatus commands, dismissively. The head of Pharisees looks at his colleagues. They nod back at him. “We are not allowed to put anyone to death. Such is your law.” ...