Technology

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

By now, almost everyone in the industrialised world is aware of something known as ‘AI,’ or artificial intelligence for short. They might not use it, they might not have an idea of what it even is, but they are certain to be aware of the term. Among those who don’t know the particulars, they are largely indifferent. Those who are more technologically literate and curious about the technology, however, might have a strong opinion about it. People who don’t have a strong opinion about AI are just regular people. People who are convinced that AI is not just an industrial revolution, but something that will change the entire fabric society as we know it, we call the pro-AI cult. On the opposite side, we have people who say that AI will not do any of that, but rather cause the psychic, economic and creative death of the world as we know it; the anti-AI cult. ...