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GPT-5.6 Sol, the sun that throws shade at Fable

2026-07-11T00:00:00Z

On Thursday, July 9, OpenAI opened GPT-5.6 to the public after two weeks of restricted access for a handful of hand-picked partners^[1]. I don't cover every model release, there's one a week and this blog would not survive the pace, but I do follow Anthropic and OpenAI more closely than the rest, since each still leads its side of the field. This time the calendar deserves a look of its own, because on July 12, three days later, Anthropic is due to pull Fable 5, its best model, out of its subscription plans. OpenAI is aiming at the king, and it's aiming at the wallet.

The solar system according to OpenAI (image OpenAI).

Sol, Terra, and Luna, OpenAI discovers astronomy

The GPT-5.6 family comes in three models named after celestial bodies, and the company promises the names now mark durable product lines rather than disposable versions^[1:1]. Sol, the flagship, targets advanced reasoning, software development, scientific research, and complex agents. Terra aims at everyday work with GPT-5.5 performance at half the cost, while Luna competes on speed and rock-bottom pricing. For a company that spent years naming its models like motherboard part numbers, the sudden turn to poetry is a welcome development.

Money is where it gets interesting. On the API, a million input tokens^[2] on Sol runs $5 and a million output $30, with Terra at half those rates and Luna at a fifth^[3]. More to the point, Sol is available in ChatGPT starting with the $20 Plus plan, with the Sol Pro variant reserved for the pricier tiers^[4], and all three models landed in GitHub Copilot the same day^[5]. Keep those numbers in mind, they make the rest of this story considerably funnier.

One detail of the launch deserves a pause, because it continues a story told on this very blog. The late-June restricted preview happened at the US government's request, a June executive order now requires labs to submit their most powerful models thirty days before release, and the Commerce Department tested GPT-5.6 before clearing the wide rollout^[3:1]. OpenAI clearly took notes during Anthropic's misadventure, when Washington pulled the plug by decree in June, and the government-in-the-loop arrangement I wrote about last week took barely a week to become standard procedure. Launching a model now looks a lot like launching a rocket, government safety review included, which is fitting given the names.

The benchmarks are a tie, for whatever that's worth

On paper, the duel with Fable 5 ends in a draw. Artificial Analysis, the only neutral evaluator to have measured both models, scores Fable at 60 and Sol at 59 on its composite index, a gap that lives comfortably inside the margin of error^[6]. Beyond that, each side waves the numbers that flatter it. Sol claims 88.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 against Fable's 83.4%, while Fable rules SWE-Bench Pro at 80.3% on a test where OpenAI has prudently declined to publish a score^[6:1]. Two vendors, two measuring tables, and almost no shared benchmark^[7], which makes the comparison about as rigorous as a fishing contest where everyone brings their own scale.

Which is a good moment to repeat a conviction of mine, the numbers don't settle it. A few years back, when ChatGPT was widely considered far ahead of Claude, I never warmed to OpenAI's model, which hallucinated more and followed instructions the way a teenager follows curfew. Benchmarks measure test performance, not the feeling of working with a tool that understands what you asked for, and that feeling, for me, has always sat on Claude's side. A statistical tie on the charts can hide a clear winner in daily use, in either direction.

Meanwhile, on planet Anthropic

The real battlefield is elsewhere, in how each company charges for access to its best model. Anthropic plans to remove Fable 5 from its subscriptions and gate it behind prepaid credits at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, double Sol's price. The deadline, originally July 7, has already slipped to July 12, and the company swears the retreat is a temporary capacity measure, with the model returning to subscriptions once the hardware catches up^[8]. I believe the intention. I just don't see what world the plan survives in. Pulling your best model from subscriptions at the exact moment your competitor slides its own into a $20 plan hands them a ready-made sales pitch, and once you've extended the deadline once, it gets awkward not to extend it forever. Competition, it turns out, has its perks, mostly for us.

The economics tilt the same way. OpenAI's tokens cost half as much and the model reportedly burns fewer of them per task^[6:2], while on Anthropic's side you need a Claude Max plan at roughly a hundred euros a month, minimum, to avoid hitting the usage limits within the hour, especially if you vibecode^[9] a little too enthusiastically, as I do. I love these models and I keep coming back to them, but the bill does raise my eyebrow now and then.

So I'm keeping my Anthropic subscription, out of attachment as much as habit, but OpenAI just landed a punch that puts it squarely back in the race. I should make time for a little infidelity and test Sol with my own hands, on my own projects, my fussy instructions, and my marathon coding sessions, instead of everyone else's benchmarks. If the experiment teaches me anything, you'll read about it here. Sol may be throwing shade at the fable, but it remains to be seen which of the two ends up lighting my desk.

OpenAI, "GPT-5.6", July 9, 2026, and "Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol", June 26, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
The token is the unit language models count in, a fragment worth about three quarters of a word on average. APIs bill per million tokens read (input) and produced (output). ↩︎
Engadget, "OpenAI gets permission to roll out GPT-5.6 to the public on July 9", July 2026, and CNBC, "OpenAI to publicly release GPT-5.6", July 8, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
9to5Mac, "OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Work agent, GPT-5.6 models now available", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
GitHub, "OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna are now available in GitHub Copilot", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
Drawpie, "GPT-5.6 Sol vs Claude Fable 5: Cost, Benchmarks and What the Tests Actually Show", July 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Benchmarks are the standardized test batteries that grade models on code, reasoning, or general knowledge. Each lab mostly publishes the ones it shines on. ↩︎
The New Stack, "Anthropic gives Claude subscribers five more days with Fable 5", July 2026. ↩︎
Vibecoding is programming by describing what you want to an AI that writes the code, iterating by conversation rather than by hand. Excellent for productivity, ruinous for the token meter. ↩︎

Xbox cuts jobs, the Fed hires its CEO to study jobs

2026-07-10T00:00:00Z

On Monday, July 6, Asha Sharma signed the internal memo Xbox employees had been dreading for months. "Our business today is not healthy," the head of the brand wrote, before announcing 1,600 immediate job cuts, the first installment of 3,200 spread over the coming year^[1]. Three days later, the Federal Reserve named her to lead a task force on productivity and jobs^[2]. The calendar has comedic timing I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Asha Sharma, head of Xbox since February 2026 (photo Microsoft).

The biggest restructure in Xbox history

The announcement deserves a closer look, because the numbers are dizzying. Microsoft is cutting 4,800 positions overall, about 2.1% of its workforce, including 1,600 at Xbox right now and another 1,600 by next summer, in what Sharma herself calls "the most significant restructure in Xbox history"^[1:1]. Her memo doesn't sugarcoat much. In a typical year, we learn, the division lost "64 cents for every dollar we invested"^[3]. Four studios are leaving the ship while it turns. Double Fine and Compulsion Games get their independence back, IP tucked under their arms, while Undead Labs and Ninja Theory move to new owners with enough funding to finish their current games, which adds up to roughly 350 people changing employers overnight^[3:1].

If this gives you déjà vu, that's because it is one. Since acquiring Activision Blizzard in late 2023, Microsoft has laid off nearly 1,900 studio employees in January 2024, shut down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin that May, let 650 more people go in September, then cut around 9,000 positions in the summer of 2025 while canceling Everwild and Perfect Dark^[4]. At this point, restructuring isn't an event at Xbox. It's a season.

The sharpest detail is that Sharma has only held the job since February. She came from Microsoft's CoreAI division by way of Meta and Instacart, with zero experience in video games, and succeeded Phil Spencer, a fixture of the house for thirty-eight years, promising to "recommit to our core Xbox fans and players" and not to "chase short-term efficiency"^[5]. Five months later, short-term efficiency appears to have caught up with everyone.

A hemorrhage that doesn't spare France

Xbox is, sadly, just the latest chapter in a crisis that has been grinding through the industry for four years. Between 2022 and mid-2025, video games shed some 45,000 jobs worldwide, peaking at nearly 15,650 in 2024 alone^[4:1]. And 2026 had a head start well before Microsoft's announcement, with more than 3,700 cuts already on the books, including a thousand at Epic Games, some 400 at Bungie, and 680 at Ubisoft^[4:2]. The GDC's annual survey puts a human scale on the damage, with one in three American developers reporting a layoff within the past two years^[6]. One in three. In any other cultural industry, we would be talking about a national emergency.

France isn't watching the storm from a deck chair. Ubisoft, the national flagship, closed its 2025-2026 fiscal year with a record loss of a billion and a half euros, launched a restructuring in January that cost about 200 jobs at its Paris headquarters and set off several strikes, then announced in June another 380 layoffs and the closure of its Winnipeg and Belgrade studios, following Halifax and Stockholm^[7]. Behind every line of these balance sheets are the people who make the games we love, the ones we grind for years and the ones we hand to our kids. Forgive me if "streamlining" feels a little light for the occasion.

Meanwhile, in Washington

Which brings us to the irony promised in the title. On Thursday, July 9, Kevin Warsh, the new Federal Reserve chairman, announced five task forces charged with rethinking American monetary policy. One of them, named "Productivity and Jobs," is supposed to assess the economic impact of new technologies, artificial intelligence first among them, and deliver recommendations by the end of the year. Its three co-leads are venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, and one Asha Sharma^[2:1].

So within the same week, the same person eliminated 1,600 jobs and joined the body tasked with thinking about the future of employment, a coincidence Aftermath noted with its customary gentleness^[8]. To be fair, the pick has its own internal logic. Who better to brief the central bank on what new technologies do to employment than an AI executive currently automating and downsizing an entire division? Her dataset is extremely fresh. One just wishes the expertise had come at a price other than 3,200 households.

Now we can only hope this hemorrhage of bad news stops, or at least slows down, because the industry is running out of hands to stanch it. Analysts want to see a cycle nearing its end, and the early 2026 numbers did suggest a slight improvement before Microsoft weighed in^[9]. I'd like to believe them, out of optimism and out of a gamer's plain self-interest. In the meantime, a thought for Monday's 1,600, and for the 1,600 who already know their turn is coming. They won't need a task force to measure the impact of new technologies on employment.

Fortune, "'Our business today is not healthy', 1,600 Xbox employees among the 4,800 laid off by Microsoft", July 6, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Federal Reserve, official press release on the task force lineup, July 9, 2026, with details from CNBC. ↩︎ ↩︎
Aftermath, "Xbox Will Lay Off 3,200 Workers And Cut Four Studios Loose", July 6, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Wikipedia keeps a grim running tally on its "2022–2026 video game industry layoffs" page. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Microsoft, "Asha Sharma named EVP and CEO, Microsoft Gaming", February 20, 2026, and CNBC on Phil Spencer's retirement. ↩︎
Variety, "One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years", January 2026, based on GDC's State of the Game Industry 2026 survey of more than 2,300 professionals. ↩︎
RTBF, "Restructuration massive d'Ubisoft" (in French), and Gameblog, "Ubisoft licencie 380 personnes et ferme deux studios" (in French), June 2026. ↩︎
Aftermath, "Xbox Boss Asha Sharma Appointed To Federal Reserve 'Productivity And Jobs' Task Force The Same Week She Laid Off 1,600 People", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
Game Developer, "Data points to slowing layoffs, but doesn't capture true harm to game industry", 2026. ↩︎

SGDQ 2026, my speedrunning World Cup

2026-07-06T00:00:00Z

Summer Games Done Quick 2026 opened on Sunday in Minneapolis, where players from all over the world will take turns day and night until July 11, finishing video games as fast as humanly possible to raise money for Doctors Without Borders^[1]. I look forward to this event every summer with an impatience I grant to very few things, and certainly not to the soccer World Cup currently playing out on the same continent, even though my national team happens to be the bookmakers' favorite^[2]. We all worship somewhere.

The Summer Games Done Quick crowd, here in 2019, already in Minneapolis (photo Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Finishing a game fast, then faster

The idea fits in one sentence, since a speedrun is simply a playthrough against the clock. Everything interesting hides behind that sentence. Runners compete in categories with precise rulesets, like any%, where anything goes as long as the credits roll, 100%, which requires collecting everything, or glitchless, which bans exploiting bugs altogether. Bugs are the crown jewels of the discipline. Entire communities spend years dissecting a game frame by frame, forcing situations no developer ever imagined, discovering that a bomb placed on exactly the right pixel clips you through a wall and saves twenty minutes. Those findings get stitched into routes that runners then rehearse thousands of times, until their hands know the game better than their memory does.

I still can't decide whether speedrunning belongs with sports or with art. It demands the training discipline of the first and the creativity of the second, plus a collective research effort you won't find anywhere else, since every record stands on years of shared discoveries. Watching someone play a game may already sound odd, so I understand the confusion when the someone is methodically dismantling a game you spent forty hours finishing. Yet it delivers the pleasure of a magic trick performed with the curtain up, and the wonder survives, because the trick takes ten years of practice even after it's explained.

A week-long marathon for a good cause

Since 2010, the American organization Games Done Quick has run two big charity marathons a year, Awesome Games Done Quick in January and Summer Games Done Quick in the summer, streamed around the clock on Twitch and YouTube. Viewers donate during the runs, and donations unlock challenges, bonus runs, or the right to name the save file, which gives the evenings the feel of a telethon with controllers. The formula works beyond all reason. The organization has handed nearly 60 million dollars to charities since it started^[3], including 2.44 million raised this past January for cancer prevention^[4]. The edition that just opened kicked off with a 102% run of Donkey Kong Country 2, which sets the tone. The schedule covers seven days, and fair warning, it is unreasonable.

Link's Awakening, my pocket-sized Everest

My respect for runners is not theoretical, because I tried it myself. My proving ground was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a game I ground down for years and thought I knew screen by screen. The community has documented shortcuts of absurd elegance there, including a trip through the doghouse that teleports Link across the island^[5]. I figured I was starting with a head start, and instead I found the canyon between finishing a game blindfolded and finishing it fast. Every screen has an optimal path, every menu a maneuver that shaves off a second, and stringing it all together demands a precision my hands never agreed to provide. I walked away with a time I will not print and a lasting admiration for the people who hold that pace for an hour straight, live, in front of a full house.

Speedrunning speaks French too

Long the domain of American conventions, the charity marathon found a French standard-bearer in SpeeDons, hosted by streamer MisterMV, whose 2026 edition gathered more than 2.3 million euros for Doctors of the World in Lyon this May, a national record^[6]. The discipline is slowly outgrowing its niche, and I plan to keep writing about it, because nothing else gives me this particular blend of ingenuity, patience, and virtuosity.

So yes, the World Cup is in full swing and Les Bleus have a star to chase, and I will watch the matches. But if one evening this week you find yourself choosing between a match and a stranger walking through the walls of a game from your childhood in front of a roaring crowd, give the stranger five minutes. Don't blame me for the missing night of sleep.

July 5 through 11, 2026, at the Hilton in Minneapolis, streamed nonstop on Twitch and YouTube, as Engadget details. ↩︎
Bookmakers rank France first among the favorites of this 48-team World Cup, hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico through July 19, as Eurosport reports (in French). ↩︎
That's 59.8 million dollars since 2010, according to Game Developer. ↩︎
AGDQ 2026, held in Pittsburgh in January, raised 2.44 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, as GameSpot reports. ↩︎
The categories, the rules, and the famous doghouse are all documented on speedrun.com. Yes, the doghouse. Speedrunning is a hobby where that sentence counts as technical documentation. ↩︎
Exactly 2,344,688 euros collected from May 7 to 10, 2026, at the Amphithéâtre in Lyon, according to AFJV (in French). ↩︎

Fable 5 Is Back, the Government in the Loop

2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

The fable got a sequel, and a lot sooner than I'd have bet. Three weeks after pulling Fable 5 on Washington's orders, Anthropic has switched it back on. On the evening of June 30, the Commerce Department lifted the export controls that had hit Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and as of July 1 the consumer model is available worldwide again^[1]. I'd left the story on a question, how long a country can afford not to have a model of its own, and now the news answers first with a different one, trickier, about the terms of the return.

The official artwork for the Claude 5 family (image by Anthropic).

The story resumes, with strings attached

The comeback isn't a simple flip of the switch. Fable 5, the model open to everyone, returns worldwide, but Mythos 5, its guardrail-free version reserved for cybersecurity professionals, only reopens for a circle of approved US organizations, the government having signed off on June 26^[1:1]. Put plainly, the muzzled model goes global again while the unmuzzled one stays in American hands. The sovereignty I wrote about last month didn't wait long to make its point.

There's a subtler catch. To keep the incident from repeating, Anthropic redeployed Fable 5 with a fresh batch of classifiers meant to spot and block the cybersecurity requests it deems sensitive. The trouble is that the net is still coarse, coarse enough that chores as ordinary as writing or debugging code get bounced, for now, over to Opus 4.8, last generation's model^[1:2]. The company admits its own classifier snags plenty of perfectly legitimate requests along the way, and promises to sharpen it over the coming weeks so it can tell real misuse from a developer's ordinary curiosity. So Fable is back, just a notch more muzzled than before.

The accuser was Amazon

Last month I pieced the affair together from the little we had, a "rival company" that supposedly bypassed the model's protections. The veil has lifted, and, I'll admit, the name is worth a grin. The accuser was Amazon, whose researchers showed that feeding Fable 5 a codebase could get it to flag a string of software flaws and, in one case, to produce a rough bit of code to exploit them^[1:3]. It was Amazon's chief executive himself, Andy Jassy, who reportedly tipped off the White House^[2]. Washington's version is less flattering to Anthropic, mind you, since adviser David Sacks accuses the company of refusing to fix the flaw before the controls came down, while a Chinese group had reportedly already gotten hold of the model, against a backdrop of ongoing friction with Beijing^[3].

And Amazon is no ordinary rival. It's Anthropic's largest backer, the one that has poured billions into the company while raising its own house models on the side. Watching it trigger, with a quiet note to the authorities, the shutdown of the crown jewel it partly owns is quite the high-wire act. The punchline lands even better, since this same Amazon now sits among the partners drafting the framework meant to judge how serious a jailbreak is. The arsonist has picked up a fire hose.

Then comes the best part, the one that vindicates the suspicion I aired in June. Anthropic now says Amazon's demonstration was nothing special, since every model it tested produced the very same result, from little Haiku 4.5 up through the successive Opus releases, by way of OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and 5.5 or China's Kimi K2.7^[1:4]. The flaw wasn't in Fable, it was in the notion that a model able to read code could, by its very nature, spot flaws in it. They unplugged a tool for a knack every serious model on the market shares.

The state moves upstream

If the model came back, it wasn't for the price of a simple patch, but of a lasting rapprochement between the company and the government. Anthropic says it's expanding its collaboration with the US government on evaluating its models, which covers three concrete commitments: early access to models and their safeguards before public release, quick sharing of information on jailbreaks and misuse, and dedicated resources for joint research^[1:5].

What this arrangement sketches goes well beyond last month's incident. The state no longer steps in only after the fact, unplugging what worries it; it settles in upstream, in the engine room, where it's decided what a model will be allowed to know how to do. The "state secret" I described turns into co-management, quiet and permanent, between a private company and its government.

The move doesn't stop at Anthropic's door. With Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the company is sketching a shared framework for gauging how serious a jailbreak is, along four criteria running from the real capability it hands an attacker to how easily that capability can be put to use^[1:6]. In parallel it's opening a HackerOne program so security researchers can flag the next flaws. The intent is fair enough, and it would be churlish to sneer at an industry finally trying to give itself some rules. Except that these rules are written by the same handful of American companies, watched over by the same government, for models the rest of the world will simply get to use.

Sonnet 5, the lesson learned

One last detail, and not a trivial one. The day before the announcement, on June 30, Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5, a lighter model that aims at Opus 4.8's performance for a good deal less money^[4]. But the trait that catches the eye, given the moment, is that Sonnet 5 deliberately underperforms on cybersecurity tasks, its safeguards there switched on by default. June's lesson clearly stuck, and it turned into a product feature, a model built not to know how to do the very thing that might get it unplugged.

So Fable 5 is back, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad, because getting a good tool back is always a small pleasure. Only the fable changed its moral along the way. It no longer says merely that a government can switch a model off with the stroke of a pen; it says a government can now pull up a chair at the table where the model is built, and stay there. The power is back on. The real question is who's holding the switch now.

Anthropic, "Redeploying Claude Fable 5", June 30, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Fortune, "How a warning from Amazon led the White House to shut down Anthropic's Mythos model", June 14, 2026. ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "Trump adviser David Sacks says Anthropic refused to fix Fable 5 jailbreak before US export controls", June 2026. ↩︎
Anthropic, "Claude Sonnet 5", June 30, 2026. ↩︎

The Biter Bit, Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Copying Claude

2026-06-27T00:00:00Z

Anthropic is furious, and you can see why. In a letter to US lawmakers and the White House, the company behind Claude accuses Chinese giant Alibaba of running the largest campaign yet to strip-mine its models^[1]. The technique has a tidy name, distillation, which means hammering a strong model with questions, harvesting its answers, and training a cheaper rival to imitate them^[2]. From where Anthropic sits, that's years of research and billions of dollars evaporating in a few weeks. From a step back, it's the biter bit.

An illustration by Anthropic, taken from its official site.

Twenty-five thousand fake accounts to copy Claude

The numbers are dizzying. Between April 22 and June 5, operators tied to Alibaba and its Qwen lab allegedly spun up close to twenty-five thousand fake accounts to query Claude some 28.8 million times, hiding their tracks behind proxy networks^[3]. The queries went after the model's most valuable skills, coding and agentic reasoning, its knack for running long tasks on its own without anyone holding its hand^[1:1]. Alibaba then allegedly poured the haul into its own Qwen models, which in Anthropic's words turns "hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment" into "a massive subsidy for our geopolitical competitors"^[2:1].

When distillation becomes a matter of state

This is well past a business spat. Anthropic took its case to Congress and the White House, asking for penalties on Chinese labs, tighter chip export controls, and an antitrust carve-out so AI firms can pool intelligence on Chinese tactics^[3:1]. The timing isn't innocent, since the campaign allegedly ran in open defiance of the administration's warnings, days after Washington locked down access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models^[4]. Alibaba denies all of it, casting itself as a company run by an independent board with no military ties, and has separately sued to get off a US blacklist^[2:2]. It's also the first time Anthropic has named a Chinese heavyweight, after fingering smaller outfits like DeepSeek and Moonshot back in February^[1:2].

The biter, the bitten, and everyone else

Then comes the part that itches. Just as Anthropic decries theft that's "illicit, systematic, and at industrial scale," the company is fending off several suits accusing it of training Claude on copyrighted work without asking anyone. Three music publishers, Universal, Concord, and ABKCO, want some $3 billion for more than twenty thousand songs used without a license, while a fourth, BMG, argues that Anthropic's whole valuation rests on stolen work^[5]. Anthropic pleads fair use, the very argument Alibaba could hand right back, since distilling a model mostly amounts to reading very carefully whatever it's willing to say.

That's the whole discomfort. I get Anthropic's rage, because watching a rival vacuum up your work would sicken any maker. But the industry now howling about theft is the same one that swept up books, articles, and songs by the million to build its models, and keeps doing it while insisting it's all progress. You can't treat copying as a mortal sin when it's aimed at you and a footnote when it works in your favor.

So should we call it a wash and blame everyone alike? Not quite, since a state running an industrial heist isn't a poet borrowing a line. But the next time a big model plays the victim, we get to ask where exactly the data came from that made it so valuable. Distillation may have invented nothing, except a mirror.

Tom's Hardware, "Anthropic claims that China's Alibaba illicitly distilled its models from April to June 2026", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Dawn, "Anthropic accuses Alibaba of mass AI capability theft", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Slashdot, "Anthropic Says Alibaba Must Be Punished For Largest Claude Cloning Attack", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Ars Technica, "Anthropic claims Alibaba defied Trump to attack Claude and steal capabilities", June 2026. ↩︎
Music Business Worldwide, "Anthropic, fighting lawsuits over alleged copying of song lyrics, accuses Alibaba of copying Claude", June 2026. ↩︎

Midjourney Dreams of an MRI at Spa Speed

2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

Some career pivots leave you blinking. Midjourney, the image generator everyone files under glossy portraits and impossible landscapes, has announced it's moving into medical imaging. Not a filter, not a gallery of retouched X-rays, but an actual machine that claims to map the inside of your body in a minute, against the hour-plus a full MRI usually takes^[1]. The company is chasing something "as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa"^[2]. I read the announcement twice to make sure it wasn't, fittingly, a generated image.

The two torso views the Midjourney scanner produces, organs traced and labeled (still from the official Midjourney Medical video).

An image generator that comes for yours

None of this actually leans on image generation. You stand on a platform that sinks slowly into a shallow pool, passing through a ring of sensors, each one behaving like a dolphin feeling out its surroundings by echolocation^[2:1]. Half a million of these squares, each the size of a fine grain of sand and doubling as a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone, fire sound waves through you from every angle, and the flood of echoes is reassembled into a map of what's going on inside, no radiation and no magnets, in about sixty seconds^[2:2]. The hardware rides on Butterfly Network's chips, which Midjourney has backed with more than $74 million^[3], and the plan is to field fifty thousand scanners worldwide by 2031 and reach a billion scans a month^[2:3].

Founder David Holz isn't one for caution. He calls the machine "in many ways superior to even MRI machines"^[4], while the announcement itself floats that enough early imaging could let the world "avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs"^[2:4]. Modest stuff.

The spa that wants to be a hospital

Here's where it gets strange. The first machine won't open in a hospital but in a "Midjourney Spa," due near Union Square in San Francisco in late 2027, a roughly 25,000-square-foot space where nine or ten scanners will share the floor with saunas, hot tubs, and cold plunges^[4:1]. The company talks up "pools of golden light" that wash over you and frames the scan itself as a mere "side-effect" of the relaxation^[2:5]. The whole pitch lives in that claimed straddle between health and wellness, which sounds lovely on paper and turns genuinely odd the moment you sit with it, because you can no longer tell whether you're buying a checkup or a day at the sauna. There is something vertiginous about finding a tumor between two trips to the steam room.

An MRI with no AI, and not quite an MRI

Which brings up the touchy part, the hallucinations everyone braces for the moment an AI drifts near a diagnosis. The irony is that the scanner barely uses any. Holz says so himself, "we're not even using any AI in this yet, just really cool hardware and software"^[4:2], and for now the machine learning only traces and labels the organs on the reconstructed image, which is exactly what the screenshot above shows^[2:6]. So the fear of a machine inventing a lesion doesn't land on the imaging, at least while the diagnosis stays at arm's length.

The real unease sits in two other places. First, "full-body" flatters the ear and misleads, since ultrasound won't cross the skull and will never see the brain the way an MRI does^[4:3]. Second, running healthy people through a scanner on a loop is something medicine has frowned on for years, because it breeds false positives and incidental findings that send you off for anxious, sometimes invasive, usually pointless follow-ups^[4:4]. For now this first-generation prototype only draws body-composition maps, and it still has to win over the FDA before it can claim any diagnosis at all^[2:7].

So, excitement or dread? Both feel right. The engineering is a genuine feat, and swapping an hour in a loud, costly MRI for a minute in warm water is easy to want. But between a filmed demo and a device radiologists will actually trust sits a gap that neither "golden light" nor superlatives can close, and we've watched AI take its bow for a splashy announcement long before any product shipped. Until the regulators weigh in, what stays with me is the picture of a maker of synthetic dreams that now wants to show us, for real, what we have inside. Whether we want to look is another question.

Engadget, "Midjourney, the AI image generator, is developing a full-body ultrasonic scanner", June 2026. ↩︎
Midjourney, "A New Era of Midjourney", the official Midjourney Medical announcement, June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Radiology Business, "AI lab Midjourney investing over $74M to launch whole-body ultrasound screening business", June 2026. ↩︎
The Next Web, "Midjourney's full-body scanner, big claims, no track record", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

Keeping a cool head when France melts

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

As I write this, France has just lived through the hottest day it has ever recorded. On June 23, 2026, the national average temperature hit 29.8°C, the mercury brushed 44°C in the Landes, and the night before set its own record for the most stifling on file^[1]. So the subject is rather on my mind, especially since it's hot enough out there that you wouldn't put a parent in it.

Before we get going, one thing to clear up. This post isn't sponsored. Nobody pays me to talk up any of it. It does carry a few affiliate links to the gear I actually own and use, each flagged where it appears. Go through them and you buy me a coffee at no extra cost to you, and if that rubs you the wrong way, ignore them, the advice doesn't change.

Everything below comes down to one idea, that your body cools itself by evaporating its own sweat, and nearly every good summer trick boils down to making that evaporation easier.

The thermometer, summer's last word (photo by Immo Wegmann / Unsplash).

The pedestal fan, and the move that changes everything

The bladed fan is everyone's reflex, the one you haul out of the closet the moment the thermometer clears 30°C. Its job isn't to cool the air, contrary to what you might think, since all it does is move the air around. What it cools is you. By blowing across your skin, it speeds up the evaporation of your sweat, and that evaporation is what cools you down, because water turning from liquid to gas draws its energy from your body heat. The sweat leaves, takes a little of that heat with it, and clears the way for the cycle to start again.

For my part, I run a Rowenta Turbo Silence (affiliate link), and I have no complaints. The night mode earns its name, plenty of airflow for what you need and quiet enough to leave you sleeping, which is no small thing when sleep is the whole point.

One caveat, though, because a fan is no miracle worker. Past roughly 35°C, it just pushes scorching air at you, which can speed up dehydration instead of relieving it, unless you pair it with a little water on the skin, a damp cloth on the back of the neck for instance. The warning comes around with every heat wave, and it's worth heeding^[2].

The trap of ice cubes and passive coolers

That's also why I'm wary of misters and passive coolers built from ice cubes or damp towels. The relief is real, but brief, and it comes at a price. Keep topping them up and you load the room's air with moisture, all the more so during a heat wave, when you keep the place shut all day with little fresh air coming in. Air that's already saturated with moisture slows the evaporation of your sweat, to the point where the heat turns unbearable fast^[3]. Once your body can no longer shed its sweat, the risk of collapse climbs sharply. By the same logic, I'd keep the wet rooms shut too, the bathroom and the kitchen first of all.

There's one exception, the ice pack. Sealed shut, it keeps its water or gel locked inside, releasing not a single molecule of water into the room. The condensation that beads on its surface is drawn from the air already in your home, and it will evaporate back to where it came from once the pack has given up the ghost.

Then comes the exception to the exception. In theory, the freezer that refreezes your pack dumps more heat into the home than the pack will later absorb, since the heat it pulls out has to go somewhere, plus the work of the compressor on top. So the apartment's heat balance ends up in the red. Even so, it stays the most acceptable passive option in my book, because the goal is to survive the heat wave, not to recreate the polar ice cap in your living room. Nobody here unplugs the freezer in summer, I assume, so go ahead and use the ice pack however you like, wrapped in a towel or parked behind the fan.

The turbine fan, king of the cooler nights

Different beast. The turbine fan, or cyclone, is usually a floor model built to blow hard, made for shifting big masses of air rather than fanning your face. People underrate it because it's clumsier than a pedestal fan, wrongly, because its job is something else entirely.

In a room where the air barely moves, the cool air, denser, settles at the floor while the warm air rises to the ceiling, which is what we call thermal stratification. A powerful floor fan, aimed at a wall or a corner, stirs the whole lot and breaks up those layers, so you claw back a degree or two of felt temperature. But my favorite use for these turbines is at night. The moment the air outside drops below the air inside, nothing beats them for driving the hot air out of your home and swapping it for something breathable.

The method, which I call the depressurization column, comes down to three moves. First, set the fan on the floor or at window height, about 1.5 meters back from it, blowing outward at full power, and pick one of the hottest rooms in the home to house it, window wide open. Then open your other windows, favoring, where you have them, the coolest rooms in the place, a garage or a cellar with a window. By driving the hot air out, the turbine creates a low-pressure zone that pulls outside air in through every opening left free, which is exactly why you want to open the cool rooms first.

That leaves the awkward question, why pull the fan 1.5 meters back instead of jamming it against the window. Because a fast jet of air doesn't push only its own volume. All along its edges, it grabs the still air of the room and drags it along, so giving it room before the window lets it move far more air than it would flush against the frame. People often chalk this feat up to Bernoulli's principle, but that's a shortcut, because the real culprit is air entrainment, the turbulent mixing at the edge of the jet^[4]. It's the same trick Dyson's bladeless fan uses to multiply its output, and a short video shows it better than any explanation.

The technique pays off most, of course, when the gap between day and night temperatures is wide. Right now in my part of the country, the night limps down to 26°C around 4 a.m., better than the daytime furnace, without exactly being a cold snap.

Portable air conditioners, a luxury that costs you

We've all seen those little air conditioners on casters, with the exhaust hose you have to seal into a window. I own one, and I'll admit it's saving my life this summer, even if it costs me a tidy sum in electricity for fairly modest results. Two reasons for that.

The first is insulation, because in a home that holds the cool poorly, a portable AC feels good while it runs and for a good half hour after you switch it off, then the heat creeps back in no hurry, at a cost that adds up. The second is depressurization, and it's worth pausing on. The most common models, the single-block kind, draw in the room's air, split the hot from the cold in their evaporator, hand you back the cold air, and vent the hot air outside through the hose. Now we've just seen, with the turbine, what happens when you drive air out of a room without replacing it. By pushing its hot air out through the hose, the AC slightly depressurizes the home and forces the scorching outdoor air to seep in through every other opening and vent^[5]. At night, when the air outside is cool, no harm done. In the middle of the afternoon, feeling 35°C air pour into the next rooms has a lot less charm.

There's a fix, an AC with two separate hoses to seal into the windows, whether you buy it that way or rig up the one you already have. One hose pulls outside air straight in to cool the system, the other vents the hot air out, so the home stops depressurizing and the only air coming into the room is the cold air the unit blows. I've also noticed mobile mini-split ACs turning up lately on the French market, cousins of the ones sold for RVs or across the Atlantic. I haven't lived with one long enough to speak to the install and the best practices, so look into that yourself, but the design is more efficient than the little wheeled units from the start, since the compression block, hot and noisy, sits outside, kept apart from the indoor airflow. That's the whole point of a split.

Dehumidifying, the other reason to love AC

I said it earlier, humidity is your worst enemy when you're counting on sweat. An air conditioner, through simple condensation on its frozen evaporator, mechanically dries the air it sends back to you, the room's water draining off through the condensate line. Even once you've switched the unit off, the air that slowly warms back up stays far more bearable, especially paired with a fan. Very dry air has its downsides, chapped lips and stinging eyes, but if you're still reading me at this point, I'm betting you'll make those small sacrifices, same as I do, to get through it.

And if money is truly tight

Then there's the case where you've got no AC, no real budget, not even the cash for a turbine fan, the baking studio under a Paris roof, the student room, the instant-ramen end of the month. There, you're going to have to improvise.

If you have shutters, keep them closed around the clock, because closed shutters block 60 to 80 percent of the solar gain and buy you several degrees^[6]. With no shutters, an emergency blanket taped over the glass, shiny side facing out, bounces back most of the radiation and limits the damage^[7]. It's a stopgap to put up before the room heats, not a way to claw back a furnace already in full swing, but it helps.

The blanc de Meudon trick

Another bit of magic, strictly for the outside of the glass, is blanc de Meudon, a kind of whiting sometimes sold as Spanish white. It's powdered chalk, near-pure calcium carbonate, and it costs next to nothing at the hardware store^[8]. Mix two parts powder to one part water until you've got pancake batter, a good runny paint. Brush it onto the outer face of the window with a big brush, a sponge, or a roller. As it dries, the mix turns opaque white and reflects the heat by sheer albedo, before it even gets in. It's the same recipe market gardeners paint over their greenhouses in summer. A swipe of a damp cloth takes it all off afterward, and as a bonus it cleans the glass. The only price is that your window goes opaque and the room dims, but you'll always take the gloom over the inferno.

When the home turns dangerous, your options

Living under the roof in a poorly insulated heat sink is misery in summer. Historically, French law comes down far harder on winter cold than on summer heat, and to this day there's no legal maximum temperature past which a rented home counts as unfit^[9]. Still, your landlord owes you a decent home, one that doesn't put your health at risk.

If you're cooking at 38°C through the night, document everything, daily temperature readings, photos, a doctor's note if you fall ill, then put the agency or the landlord on formal notice by registered letter. Be clear-eyed on one point, though, because the courts don't compensate a feeling of heat as such. They move only when the heat exposes an objective defect in the home, windows that don't seal, no ventilation, failing insulation. A few recent rulings have indeed granted damages for loss of enjoyment on that basis, but the trend is slow and cautious.

The one clean line in the sand concerns homes rated G on France's energy label, the DPE, which have been barred from new and renewed leases since January 1, 2025, while rents on F- and G-rated energy sieves have been frozen since the summer of 2022^[10]. Since 2021 the rating has also carried a summer-comfort indicator, sadly informational only, which weighs on neither the grade nor the ban on letting. And since the rating swings a lot from one assessor to the next, don't pin everything on it in the short term. If your home turns dangerous to your health, the priority is to get yourself somewhere safe, a friend's couch, an air-conditioned library, the public pool.

My setup, and a parent's confession

At home, I ended up swapping the bedroom ceiling lights for ceiling fans, the Wind Calm Rattan from CREATE (affiliate link), which I'm delighted with. Stirring the air nonstop, quietly and without cluttering the floor, changes everything on the heavy nights. I also invested in a 9,000 BTU portable air conditioner from Midea (affiliate link), one I switch on maybe ten days a year, like right now. BTUs, or British Thermal Units, measure cooling power, and 9,000 of them come to about 2.6 kW, enough to handle a room of 20 to 25 square meters.

When I come home to 30°C in the apartment, I can bring it down to 24°C, a world away from the 40°C outside. I cut the AC before bed and let the ventilation run all night, and it's perfectly livable.

I know air conditioning gets a bad rap, and the charges aren't groundless, the appetite for electricity, the heat dumped into the street, the refrigerant gases. But as the father of a four-year-old girl, doing without entirely is a feat some days. I make my peace with it in small doses, ten or so days a year, and I sleep fine with that compromise.

So there's my heat-wave kit, built up over muggy summers and nights cut short. None of it will cool the planet, I'm well aware, and that's the heart of the problem, because these record temperatures aren't the exception anymore. Until the next spike, I keep the Weawow app handy to watch for the hour when the air outside finally drops below the air inside, and Scilabus's video on staying cool in summer, which explains all this better than I can^[11]. Until then, hang in there, drink your water, and keep a cool head.

Météo-France, "Canicule, une vague de chaleur s'installe cette semaine" (in French), for the June 23, 2026 record and the temperatures recorded, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Futura Sciences, "Canicule, les ventilateurs sont-ils inutiles ?" (in French), on using a fan above 35°C, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
MSD Manuals, "Overview of Heat Disorders", on the role of humidity in thermoregulation, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Wikipedia, "Entrainment (hydrodynamics)", on air entrainment by a turbulent jet, the principle behind Dyson's bladeless fan, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Honeywell, "Single hose vs. dual hose portable air conditioners", on the depressurization caused by single-block models, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
ADEME, "Canicule, comment garder son logement frais" (in French), for the solar gain blocked by closed shutters, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Révolution Énergétique, "La couverture de survie, nouvelle arme anti-canicule ?" (in French), accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Wikipedia, "Blanc de Meudon" (in French), for its composition and its use against the heat, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Service-Public, "À quelle température doit être chauffé un logement ?" and ANIL, its case-law note on decent housing (both in French), on the absence of any legal heat threshold and the duty to provide a decent home, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
French Ministry for Ecological Transition, "Location et gel des loyers des passoires énergétiques" (in French), for the ban on G-rated homes and the rent freeze on F and G, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Scilabus, "Comment se rafraîchir en été ?" (in French), a popular-science video on the subject, accessed June 2026. ↩︎

Soundcore Sleep, and finally sound asleep

2026-06-20T00:00:00Z

Some fights you don't talk about much, because they happen in the dark and they usually end in defeat. Mine has a name every insomniac knows too well, hypervigilance, my brain's habit of standing guard right when the rest of me wants nothing more than to switch off. One scooter backfiring under my Paris windows, one neighbor slamming a door, and there I am, yanked back into the world with my ears on patrol. Add the charming reflex of replaying my entire day at the exact moment I should be letting it go, and you have the recipe for a night that never quite gets started.

For a long time I assumed silence was the only fix, and I was wrong. What follows isn't an ad. Nobody pays me to say nice things about it. It's just a report from a guy who sleeps badly and who, for once, found something that lived up to the box.

The soundcore Sleep A30, the current generation of the line (image by Anker / soundcore).

Fifteen years of half-measures

Before these earbuds, my whole arsenal fit inside a box of earplugs. For more than fifteen years I tried just about everything, the yellow foam you roll between your fingers and the wax you knead before pressing it over your ear, and each one came with a dealbreaker. The foam always let a thin trickle of noise through, just enough to wake a jumpy sleeper like me. The wax sealed better, but it traded that seal for greasy residue my ears would happily have done without come morning. Nobody warned me that signing up for silence also meant signing up for a daily cleanup.

None of it lasted, because none of it went after the real culprit. Plugging your ear canal solves the noise, but it leaves your brain alone with itself, which is a bit like locking the wolf and the lamb in one room and hoping for a quiet night.

How these earbuds smother the racket

Mine are the Sleep A20, two pairs I bought a few years back, when the line didn't yet have a fancier sibling^[1]. Two, out of pure caution, one living permanently on my nightstand while the other rides in my suitcase, so I never crush my only pair at the bottom of a bag and condemn myself to some very long nights far from home. Since then soundcore, Anker's in-house brand, has rolled out the A30, which add genuine active noise cancellation and memory-foam tips, for a price that climbs to match^[2]. My A20 settle for a simpler recipe, and it has been more than enough for me.

Because the trick isn't really about isolation, contrary to what you'd guess. The twin-seal tips already block part of the din, but the heavy lifting happens elsewhere, in the sound the earbuds pipe in continuously to paper over the rest, like white noise swallowing the night's rough edges^[3]. The ear, busy with that soft blanket of sound, stops listening for the neighbor's scooter. All of it inside a flat little shell built so you can sleep on your side without driving a pebble into your ear canal, with enough charge for a full night and a few in reserve thanks to the case^[3:1].

The real magic trick, keeping my brain busy

The best part is left, and it owes less to engineering than to sleight of hand. Silence, oddly enough, never put me under, because it hands my ruminations an open stage. What I needed was something to occupy the part of my brain that refuses to clock out. The answer turns out to be whatever I slip into my ear, a good documentary, a long, meandering political interview, any program interesting enough to hold my attention without revving it up.

I drop the YouTube volume to its lowest notch, I follow the voice, and the mental carousel finally winds down. Most of the time I never learn how the documentary ends, because I'm out before it does. Sleep within the hour, near enough to a sure thing, where it used to take me three times as long to go under. If you're the type who counts sheep and never reaches the end of the flock, you get the picture.

One mishap, and one customer service desk

It wasn't all blissful, though. At one point an unfortunate firmware update turned my earbuds into shadows of themselves, the battery suddenly refusing to charge past ten percent. For devices meant to last the night, an hour of runtime counts as sabotage. As far as I know, Anker never managed to fix it with a later update, which, for a purely software fault, is a head-scratcher.

Where the story redeems itself is in what came next. I wrote to customer service, and they shipped me brand-new pairs without even asking for the old ones back, those having become fairly expensive paperweights anyway. That kind of gesture says more about a company than any spec sheet ever could, and it's probably why I've stuck with them.

What a pair of earbuds put back

I won't lie to you and promise a miracle. These earbuds didn't rebuild my nights from the ground up, because I still wake at three in the morning for no defensible reason. But where I used to lose the battle to fall back asleep before it began, my brain spinning up at the first flutter of an eyelid, I can now put a voice back in my ear and set off for another lap of sleep. That alone is a win I'd long since stopped expecting.

I doubt this blog will ever turn into a gadget aisle, since objects rarely interest me enough to earn a whole article. These are the exception, because they didn't add one more device to my life, they handed me back a little sleep. And when you've gone without it long enough, you know that's beyond price. If your nights look anything like mine, you now know where to look.

soundcore, the official Sleep Earbuds page, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
CNN Underscored, "Soundcore Sleep A30 earbuds review", for the active noise cancellation, memory-foam tips, and A30 pricing, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
SoundGuys, "Anker Soundcore Sleep A20 review", for the noise masking, twin-seal tips, and battery life, accessed June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎

MapTap, guessing the world one tap at a time

2026-06-18T00:00:00Z

Some rituals you choose, and some adopt you without asking. Mine, this past week, fits into the minute after my coffee, just long enough to drop five pins on a globe and measure how badly the years have eroded my geography. The game is called MapTap, it runs in a browser or on your phone, and it has done what no atlas ever managed with me, which is to get me reviewing the map of the world first thing in the morning and enjoying it.

The globe, MapTap's daily playground (illustration by Qimono / Pixnio).

Five places, one globe, sixty seconds

The idea takes only a few taps. Every day, MapTap gives you five places to find, usually cities, occasionally the site of a battle or some other event worth remembering, all tied to a single date because the game draws on whatever happened on that day across the centuries^[1]. You spin the 3D globe and drop your finger, or your cursor, where you think the place is hiding. The game scores you from zero to a hundred on how far your pin lands from the right answer, so a miss of a few miles earns almost as much as a bullseye.

The difficulty climbs as you go. The first question usually hands you a capital anyone could place blindfolded, while the last one strands you in the middle of the Pacific on an island you didn't know existed a minute earlier^[2]. Since the closing rounds count double or triple, the final score lands out of a thousand, and clearing nine hundred already counts as a good day. You don't actually need the exact name of the place, since you can take a stab, plant a pin, and read the geography lesson you never asked for in the distance the game reports back.

The lesson that comes after

This is where MapTap pulls away from a plain quiz. Once your five pins are down, the game gives you a few paragraphs on each one, casual but well-informed, telling you about the spot, the event that unfolded there, or the figure who made it famous^[2:1]. Because the day's places all share a date in history, you come away with a thread running through them, a handful of facts that hang together. The TechCrunch reviewer describes one day built around Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler who roamed the known world long before anyone turned it into a game.

Without quite meaning to, you finish a round knowing something you didn't when you woke up, and you never cracked a textbook. That's what I like most about this corner of gaming, the way it teaches you without ever sounding like it's teaching, the same way Wordle slips a rare word into your day without taking a professor's tone. Knowledge comes in through the side door, the one marked play, which is often where it gets in best.

Guessing beats drawing a blank

The genre is crowded, between Worldle, Globle, and the parade of clones that have sprung up since Wordle hit. They share one flaw, the dead end, because the moment the answer escapes you, you're stuck, reaching for a search engine that spoils the fun on contact^[2:2]. MapTap sidesteps the trap with a simple idea, since you can always take a guess by dropping a pin roughly where you think it goes, then learn from the distance it shows you instead of sitting there clueless. The hunt turns into an expedition, and even a wrong answer ends up teaching you something.

The rest is Wordle's inheritance, worn openly. At the end of each round, MapTap hands you a little strip of symbols and your score for the day, ready to paste somewhere and lord over your friends or feed a running streak. The mechanic is familiar and ruthlessly effective, and you catch yourself comparing scores over breakfast the way other people argue about the crossword.

A weekend project that became a habit

No studio sits behind MapTap, no big gaming house, just one developer, John Donham, who put it together on his weekends a couple of years ago to knock the rust off his coding, taking his cue from Wordle, Waffle, and Framed^[3]. The game stays free, paid for by an optional tier called MapTap+ that unlocks finer zoom, access to past puzzles, private groups, and tailored practice for about three dollars a month^[1:1]. On the App Store, players give it 4.9 out of 5, which, for a pastime born of a weekend whim, is nothing to wave off^[1:2].

I clearly have a soft spot for games that don't try to wring me out, the kind where you photograph a seagull instead of shooting it, like the gentle little world of Alba. MapTap belongs to that same easygoing family, the pleasures that leave you a little smarter than they found you. So I'll leave you here, because I have five places to find before tomorrow and a strong hunch that Kiribati is going to cost me dearly all over again.

MapTap.gg on the App Store, description, pricing, and ratings accessed June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
TechCrunch, "MapTap, a daily geography game, is my new Wordle", June 18, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
John Donham, MapTap's announcement on LinkedIn, 2024. ↩︎

On the web, humans are already outnumbered

2026-06-17T00:00:00Z

We'd watched the tide rise for years and assumed it was still a way off. It isn't. On the web, machines now outnumber us, sending a little more than half of every request that reaches a web page and edging out the flesh-and-blood readers, according to Cloudflare^[1]. The fifty-percent line was crossed early this month, on an unremarkable day, without so much as a ripple.

The web increasingly runs for operators like this one (illustration by Malte Mueller / Getty Images).

More than half of all requests come from a machine

The figure has the cold precision of bad news. Some 57.5% of requests to web pages come from automated systems, against 42.5% from people. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, shared it in early June from Cloudflare Radar, the public dashboard where the company publishes its traffic figures^[1:1]. Since a large slice of the world's web traffic runs through Cloudflare's servers, which sit between sites and their visitors, the company is well placed to count who's knocking. Prince admits the data is "still rough, but the trend is unmistakable"^[2]. So let's not quibble over the decimal, because for the first time in the history of the internet, most traffic is no longer human^[3].

Assistants that browse in our place

What tipped the scales has a name, agentic AI, the semi-autonomous programs that crawl the web on behalf of assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini. The math is merciless. Shopping for a camera, you might open five tabs before you commit, while an agent running the same errand hits thousands of pages in seconds and never breaks a sweat. Multiply that by the millions of people now handing their digital chores to a machine, and the traffic mix tips toward the bots on its own^[4].

The dizzying part isn't the crossover, it's the date. In March, on stage at SXSW, the same Matthew Prince put the tipping point at the end of 2027^[5]. He beat his own forecast by eighteen months, which, in an industry that usually errs by calling things too early, is genuinely staggering.

What the number leaves out

Before we declare the web emptied of humans, one honest caveat. Cloudflare counts requests, not presence or time spent, and the two are nothing alike. A reader who lingers ten minutes over an article fires off a handful of requests, while a bot fires thousands in the same span. By volume, the machines win in a landslide; by actual attention, people still hold a comfortable lead, busy scrolling their feeds, bingeing one more episode, and thumbing past the bottom of every page. We haven't been replaced, only outvoted by sheer headcount. The distinction matters, because the trouble isn't that humans left, it's that the web's plumbing now carries mostly something else.

A web that never planned for this

And that's exactly where it pinches, because the web was never built to run this way. Its whole economy rests on an unspoken bargain, where a publisher posts something for free, a human shows up to read it, sees an ad or subscribes, and the content gets paid for in the end^[4:1]. A bot reads without clicking, burns bandwidth without buying anything, and, worse, scrapes whole pages to train models that will answer in your place tomorrow without ever pointing back to the source. The publisher foots the hosting bill, watches it swell with every machine visit, and gets next to nothing in return.

Cloudflare's CEO draws a blunt conclusion. For Matthew Prince, the future is "pay to crawl" for bots^[2:1]. For the occasion the company has dusted off a forgotten corner of the HTTP protocol, the 402 "Payment Required" code, drafted back in the 1990s to bill for access and left idle for three decades for want of a use. It has now been promoted to tollbooth for the automated web, a status code that waited thirty years for a job. The open question is what becomes of a web where every page barricades itself behind a turnstile, where the humble robots.txt becomes a customs post, and where the original promise of a commons open to all hardens into an archipelago of fortresses charging admission. The "dead internet," that old fever dream of a web populated mostly by machines talking to machines, has never looked less far-fetched. By a different road, the question meets the one raised by an AI reclassified as a state secret. Who, exactly, owns what we put online?

I don't have a moral to pull from any of this, just a strange feeling. The sense of having crossed, without noticing, a line everyone placed much further out, and of crossing it with no visible sign at all, since the pages still load, the sites still run, and nothing looks any different. That may be the most unsettling part. For what it's worth, the very blog you're reading rolls out the welcome mat for these bots and openly invites them to index it^[6]. So I'll leave you with the question I've been turning over for days. If the web fills up with visitors who aren't here to read, who are we writing for?

Cloudflare Radar, "Bot vs Human", real-time dashboard accessed June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Decoder, "Cloudflare CEO says the web's future is 'pay to crawl' as bots overtake human traffic", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
NBC News, "Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows", June 2026. ↩︎
Forbes, Josipa Majic, "Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online, And The Internet Was Never Built For This", June 4, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
TechCrunch, "Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says", March 19, 2026. ↩︎
True to its word, this site's robots.txt explicitly welcomes indexing bots, AI included, and a /llms.txt even hands them a map. Might as well receive them politely. ↩︎

Le Chaton Fat, the model too fat to be true

2026-06-16T00:00:00Z

If you spent the weekend on Reddit or X, you ran into Le Chaton Fat. Billed as Mistral AI's new frontier model, it crushed Claude Mythos on the opening benchmarks, posted scores no model has ever claimed, and promised single-handedly to put Europe back on the AI map^[1]. There was just one problem. It never existed.

Le Chaton Fat himself, an imaginary tubby tomcat and the toast of one weekend (illustration from lechatonfat.com).

A kitten born from a renamed cat

The creature has an origin story, and it starts with a funeral. At Mistral's first-ever summit in Paris last month, Arthur Mensch announced that the company's assistant, Le Chat, would become Vibe^[2]. On Reddit, some of the faithful mourned what they called one of the best product names in the business, and grief being what it is, they began inventing ever more elaborate feline successors. Le Chaton Fat pounced out of that thread, a name that splices French and English for the pure joy of contradiction, since a chaton is a kitten and fat says the opposite^[1:1].

It broke out of Reddit on a Saturday and tore across X within hours, climbing to one of the most-discussed topics at home and abroad. Better still, Mistral's own CEO joined the bit, posting a deadpan "It's actually le gros chaton"^[1:2] and leaving everyone to guess whether he was correcting a typo or blessing the joke. The meme soon leaked past the AI crowd, so much so that Ethan Mollick, who co-directs a generative AI lab at Wharton, said he expected to field questions in meetings about "Mistral's new ginormous cat model with infinite benchmark scores"^[2:1].

Benchmarks worth a laugh

The hoax works because it keeps a straight face. The fake spec sheets borrow the exact vocabulary of real launches, so you read about a thirty-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 256 experts, a one-million-token context window, and native multimodal skills, all crowned with a 90.6 on the MMLU-Pro benchmark while the genuinely real Claude Fable 5 tops out at 88.9^[1:3]. Tucked between the believable numbers sit the giveaways, a throughput of "1,000 meows per second" and a glorious "maximum chonk" listed as a feature^[2:2].

Two fake websites push the gag further with impressive composure^[3]. The French one boasts twenty-four trillion parameters, a candid throughput of "0 tok/s," and access "reserved for French citizens," before confessing in the footer that it's a "satirical site." The English one keeps a flawless product-page voice, the better to pretend it beats Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, comparison table included.

Under the laughs runs a critique the AI community was glad to adopt, since benchmarks barely mean anything. A model can top a leaderboard nobody can name, on tasks nobody ever ships, and the announcement still lands like a geopolitical event. Le Chaton Fat only pushes that theater to its breaking point, and the hunger behind it is real, because everyone is waiting for a model that's open, cheap, and strong enough to matter^[2:3].

When the joke turns on Europe

The joke stops being innocent when it takes aim at Europe. Fake press releases claimed the European Union had suspended Le Chaton Fat on security grounds, judging it simply "too heavy to regulate," while others swore Mistral had pushed it live by accident and pulled it in a panic^[1:4]. The reference was plain to anyone following the news, because it mirrors almost word for word what happened to Claude, switched off by Washington a few days earlier. Set against an America locking down its strongest models, Europe got handed a kitten so fearsome it had to be contained.

The barb also aimed, more directly, at the politics. Emmanuel Macron's line about "the only model able to rival the American and Chinese giants" made the rounds, repurposed by people who see in Le Chaton Fat the dream model of a Europe still well short of the mark^[1:5]. The mockery is easy, sometimes made in bad faith, but it presses on a sore spot.

The laugh and the lag

It isn't all bleak. Mistral doesn't need to flatten Claude Mythos to exist, since the company has chosen to polish smaller models like Mistral 3 and Ministral and to stack up contracts with European players, where its means actually carry^[1:6]. Its quiet stretch over the past few weeks is feeding the speculation, and a real announcement may well be coming, one with no cat in sight.

What strikes me here is less the joke than what it exposes. If Le Chaton Fat got so many laughs, it's because it scratches a real wish, the wish for a European champion that can play with the big kids, a wish so sharp that part of the web nearly fell for a cat. You can smile at that, as long as you remember the lag is no joke, and that Europe would do well to fund its models with the energy it spends meme-ing their absence. For now, I'll confess a guilty fondness for this imaginary fat tabby. Did you fall for him, even for a second?

Numerama, Nicolas Lellouche, "C'est quoi Le Chaton Fat, le « modèle » de Mistral AI qui affole les réseaux sociaux ?" (in French), June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Business Insider, Thibault Spirlet, "The 'Le Chaton Fat' meme techies can't stop talking about", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
The parody sites lechatonfat.com (in French) and lechatonfat.net, accessed June 2026. ↩︎

Guild Wars 3, the MMORPG I won't have time to love

2026-06-15T00:00:00Z

MMORPGs and I are a great love story, though these past few years the relationship status has read "it's complicated," since a four-year-old daughter leaves little room for guild nights that end at two in the morning. I cope through denial, telling myself it's only a pause while suspecting it will last years, but hope keeps a man going. And now ArenaNet has gone and relit the whole thing by announcing Guild Wars 3 at Summer Game Fest^[1], and the veteran I thought had retired caught himself drawing up battle plans before the trailer even ended.

Orr, green and peaceful, a far cry from the sunken necropolis Guild Wars 2 players got to know (artwork ArenaNet, official site).

Twenty-five years of parallel lives

It all started about twenty-five years ago with Ragnarok Online, its adorable sprites, and its too-short nights. Then World of Warcraft launched in France and swallowed me whole from day one, to the point where my studies spent some time on the bench^[2]. I played at a very high level in a competitive guild that ran for a while in the European progression race, roughly from Vanilla through Burning Crusade, an era when "raid at eight" was the load-bearing sentence of my calendar.

My guild and I grew older together, scouts of a genre still finding itself. We roamed through Star Wars The Old Republic, whose class storylines remain some of the best writing the genre has produced, then AION and its wings, then ArcheAge, where I fell hard for the trade runs you haul yourself, the player housing, and the piracy, because every cargo convoy naturally summons its pirate. We finally settled down in Guild Wars 2, even though I had hated the original Guild Wars and its instanced zones^[3], being the kind of player who swears by open worlds where you bump into actual strangers.

World vs. World, nostalgia with siege weapons

That's where I discovered World vs. World, a player-versus-player mode in which three servers spend a week fighting to capture and hold fortresses with siege weapons^[4]. You defended your server's honor and, since the European servers were largely national, your country's too, which gave the battles the flavor of a permanent World Cup. France held its rank remarkably well, and I still remember our clashes with the Spanish and Russian servers, ferocious opponents we met again week after week like old neighborhood rivals.

Building a trebuchet at four in the morning to retake an outnumbered keep serves no purpose whatsoever in a life, which is probably why I remember nothing but the good parts.

What we know about Guild Wars 3

ArenaNet is keeping details scarce, but the menu is mouthwatering. Guild Wars 3 takes place in Orr, about a thousand years before the first game^[5], an Orr green and very much alive that Guild Wars 2 veterans mostly knew as a sunken kingdom crawling with undead. You'll play a Vaelwarden, a guardian of the land, in an action MMORPG promising a momentum-based movement system with gliding, riding, and wall-running, playable solo or in co-op^[1:1]. The game is coming to PC and, a first for the franchise, to PlayStation 5, with a beta announced for fall 2027^[1:2].

Above all, the studio confirmed there will be no subscription and no battle pass, with studio head Colin Johanson promising to stick to the franchise's model: buy the game once, then fund it through expansions and a cosmetic shop^[6]. He says he wants to avoid mechanics that trap players, and I find the stance all the more commendable because it finally fits me. With my playtime shrunk to almost nothing, a subscription is rent on an apartment I never sleep in, whereas I'll happily pay for a skin nobody will ever look at, to support the developers and to treat myself, in that order on my better days.

See you in fall 2027 for the beta, then, where I fully intend to start an adventure I will never have time to finish. But let's dream a little: my daughter will be six by then, and word is the good guilds recruit early.

The announcement and first details come from the official site and the press release published for Summer Game Fest 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
If I could travel back in time, I'd tell my younger self to be a little more reasonable. He wouldn't listen; he has a raid at eight. ↩︎
The original Guild Wars (2005) instanced not just the dungeons but every exploration zone, so you never ran into anyone outside the cities. Its defenders called that comfort; I called it a ghost world. ↩︎
World vs. World on the official Guild Wars 2 wiki. The French server Vizunah Square built a Europe-wide reputation in the game's first months. ↩︎
PC Gamer, "ArenaNet announces Guild Wars 3" and MMORPG.com, "Guild Wars 3 officially announced, set 1,000 years before original GW", June 2026. ↩︎
Massively Overpowered, "Guild Wars 3 won't feature a subscription or battle passes, Colin Johanson reassures fans", June 8, 2026. ↩︎

Fable and Mythos, the day AI got classified

2026-06-13T00:00:00Z

Three days. That's how long Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5^[1] lasted, the two most powerful models Anthropic has ever put online. They launched on June 9, 2026^[2] and went dark on the evening of the 12th^[3]. The cause was a US government export-control directive, issued at 5:21 p.m. Eastern, that ordered Anthropic to suspend access on national security grounds. By the time most of us had found our footing with the most advanced AI on the market, it had already been reclassified as sensitive equipment.

The official artwork for the Claude 5 family (image by Anthropic).

The models that lasted three days

Start with what Anthropic had just shipped. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 share one brain, a model from the new Mythos class that the company billed as state of the art on most benchmarks, as comfortable writing code as it is assisting molecular biology research^[2:1]. Fable, open to everyone, keeps guardrails that screen sensitive requests; Mythos, limited to approved organizations, drops them, meant for the security professionals who need the model without a muzzle. That raw capability is what eventually spooked Washington.

The directive targets a narrow group: any foreign national, whether or not they're on US soil, down to Anthropic's own non-American staff^[4]. On paper, the point is to keep the technology from leaving the country. In practice, Anthropic couldn't sort its users by nationality in real time, so it shut everything down, for American customers as much as for everyone else. A model deemed too dangerous for foreign hands ended up out of everyone's hands, Americans included.

The reasoning is thin. By Anthropic's account, the Commerce Department acted after a rival company claimed it had jailbroken Mythos^[3:1]. Anthropic says it has seen only verbal evidence of a narrow, non-universal jailbreak, produced by asking the model to analyze code. The company is complying without fighting the order, calls it a likely misunderstanding, and points out that no provider can promise perfect resistance to that kind of exploit, all while saying it's working to restore access.

Counter-proliferation finds a new target

Export controls are Cold War vocabulary. We built them for fissile material, centrifuges, and missile guidance, the kinds of things whose movement is measured in strategic balances. Watching them apply to neural network weights, files you can copy in seconds, says a lot about the shift underway. After space and quantum computing, AI joins the list of technologies a great power keeps to itself, on the theory that letting one copy out the door would arm a rival.

The discomfort starts here. The same model accused of helping design a weapon is the one that promised to speed up drug research and molecule discovery^[2:2]. Frontier AI is dual-use by nature, and the response on the table is to lock it away rather than govern it. Once again, political and military interests won out over human ones, as if caution could only be spelled with a lock.

A two-speed world

The incident itself may be sorted out within days. What unsettles me is the logic it sets in motion. If the most powerful models stay the preserve of a few states, the gap will widen between the countries that build them and the ones that watch them go by. The first group pulls further ahead, the second loses years, and you get, transposed to nations, the same hoarding you already see among private fortunes. Technological sovereignty, national or carried by a union of countries, stops being conference-panel filler and becomes a question of survival.

Europe, sovereign on paper

The European Union, as it happens, just woke up to this. On June 3, the Commission unveiled its technological sovereignty package: a Chips Act 2.0 for semiconductors, a Cloud and AI Development Act meant to triple data center capacity, an open-source strategy, and an energy roadmap tied to sovereign AI models^[5]. Ursula von der Leyen wants to make Europe "an AI continent," a line that would land better if it hadn't arrived after the battle.

The figures floated in the trade press show the size of the hill to climb: 120 billion euros for semiconductors, 200 billion for data centers by 2036, 100 billion for cloud and AI, 2 billion for open source^[6]. The trouble is that the most advanced chips are still dominated by America's Nvidia and Asia's foundries, TSMC and Samsung, and no plan, however large, builds the factories, the talent, and the supply chains overnight. By the analysts' own reckoning, the package shifts the long-term trajectory without touching American dominance before 2030.

That leaves the question of what you do with the money. Backing a champion like France's Mistral AI takes more than announcements and summits. It means putting in enough public money, actually disbursed, for the company to even think about competing. As long as it stays at the level of speeches, these firms do what they can to survive and go raise their billions wherever they can find them, often across the Atlantic, and we'll have little standing to act surprised afterward. I'll own the bias here, I'm French, and I hold to the idea that a continent able to write its own rules should also be able to write its own models.

There's something dizzying about a signature dropped on a Friday at 5:21 p.m. wiping out, across the entire planet, the tool thousands of people had discovered that same morning. Fable and Mythos, true to their names, got the shelf life of a bedtime story. I don't know whether access comes back next week or never, but the next breakthrough will meet the same fate, and the countries without a model of their own will watch it go dark with no say in the matter. Which leaves one question, and it isn't a technical one: how long can a country afford not to have its own? So, how does it sit with you, an AI switched off with the stroke of a pen?

Fable and Mythos, a fable and a myth. Anthropic had a knack for foreshadowing: it named two models after kinds of stories, and the public life of both already reads like one. ↩︎
Anthropic, "Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5", June 9, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Anthropic, "Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5", June 12, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
CNBC, "Anthropic disables access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to comply with government directive", June 12, 2026; see also the New York Times coverage of the same episode. ↩︎
European Commission, "Strengthening Europe's tech sovereignty", June 3, 2026. ↩︎
European Business Magazine, analysis of the EU sovereignty package, June 2026. ↩︎

Elon Musk, a trillionaire despite it all

2026-06-13T00:00:00Z

On Friday, June 12, Elon Musk rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely from Starbase, his company town in South Texas, because a stock market launch apparently deserves an actual launch pad. By the close, SpaceX shares had gained 19% and his fortune had crossed a line no human being had ever approached, one trillion dollars^[1]. The world now has its first trillionaire^[2], and it happens to be the man half the planet loves to hate.

Elon Musk at a SpaceX presentation (photo AP, Jae C. Hong).

An IPO for the history books

The numbers are dizzying even by space industry standards. SpaceX sold 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece and raised $75 billion, more than double the record Saudi Aramco had held since 2019 with $29.4 billion^[3]. The company landed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at a valuation of around $1.75 trillion^[4], instantly one of the most expensive companies on Earth, ahead of plenty of businesses that have the quaint habit of making money.

Because that's the delicious part: SpaceX lost $8.7 billion between early 2025 and March 2026, and Morningstar's analysts put its fair value at $780 billion, less than half the offering price^[5]. The market didn't buy a balance sheet, it bought a promise, namely a million-person Martian colony and data centers in orbit. Musk, meanwhile, keeps more than 80% of the voting power^[1:1], which lets him run his public company much like a private one. New shareholders are kindly asked to fasten their seat belts and enjoy the ride.

Hated, mocked, and yet

Consider the paradox. Few executives have been reviled like Musk, who poured some $300 million into Donald Trump's campaign and then took a chainsaw to entire branches of the federal government, including the aid agency USAID, with a human toll that Harvard researchers measure in hundreds of thousands of lives^[1:2]. The mockery hasn't been in short supply either, and I've passed along my share of it. All the while, the man kept stacking stages. In the summer of 2024 he was still trading the title of world's richest person with Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault, each hovering around $200 billion. By October 2025 he became the first to clear half a trillion. Today his fortune outweighs Bezos's and Arnault's combined, twice over^[3:1].

Laugh at the Mars obsession and the tantrums all you want, but honesty requires looking at the scoreboard: PayPal, Tesla and its 20,000% return since the 2010 IPO^[5:1], rockets that land upright when the whole industry swore it couldn't be done, Starlink beaming internet down from low orbit. One successful project can be luck, the right place at the right time. A dozen winning bets across twenty years and three industries is competence, whether you like the man or not. Hating someone has never been a reason to underestimate him; it's usually how you end up surprised.

Meanwhile, at the base of the rocket

The discomfort remains, and it isn't really about Musk; it's about what his trajectory tells us. According to Oxfam, billionaire wealth swelled 16% in 2025 to a record $18.3 trillion, up 81% since 2020, and the $2.5 trillion gained in a single year would be enough to end extreme poverty twenty-six times over^[6]. The twelve richest people on the planet own more than the poorest half of humanity, four billion human beings, and the average member of the top 1% holds 8,251 times the wealth of someone in that bottom half. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the gap has never been this wide or widened this fast.

Oxfam titled its report "Resisting the rule of the rich," because a fortune this size no longer buys just rockets. It buys political influence, media, and attention. When the first trillionaire in history also bankrolled the election of the president who let him carve up the state, the line between entrepreneurial success and democratic capture gets hard to draw, and that's a gentle slope you always walk down in good company.

So yes, hats off, sincerely. I admire the feat the way you admire fireworks, mouth open and head tilted back, while wondering who paid for the gunpowder. What about you, how does your first trillionaire make you feel?

TechCrunch, "Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX's historic IPO", June 12, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
A trillion is a thousand billions. Counting to it out loud, one number per second, would take you about 31,700 years, which is longer than the Mars colonization timeline, though at SpaceX's usual pace of schedule revisions, maybe not by much. ↩︎
Bloomberg, "SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk world's first trillionaire" and "SpaceX raises $75 billion in record-breaking IPO", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
CNBC, "SpaceX IPO explained, the price is set", June 9, 2026. ↩︎
PBS NewsHour, "Elon Musk could become the world's first trillionaire with SpaceX's IPO", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Oxfam, "Resisting the rule of the rich", January 2026, released for the Davos forum. ↩︎

The Wave, or how to build a dictatorship in five days

2026-06-12T00:00:00Z

All it took was lunch with a friend, somewhere between a bò bún and a round of good yakitori skewers, for the conversation to drift toward social experiments, the kind of slope long lunches slide down on their own. One thing led to another and I remembered a film that had stuck with me since its release, The Wave, along with a question harder to digest than the meal. Why does a 2008 movie read so much like the 2026 news?

The Wave salute, adopted by a classroom in under a week (Constantin Film still).

One week of class and everything tips over

The Wave (Die Welle in the original German), directed by Dennis Gansel, follows Rainer Wenger, a likable high school teacher played by Jürgen Vogel, who gets stuck running a project week on autocracy^[1]. His students shrug it off. A dictatorship could never take hold in Germany again, they've learned that lesson. So he tries a hands-on demonstration. Some discipline, white shirts for everyone, a salute, a name to rally around, and there it is, the Wave, a classroom movement that stops being a classroom movement.

The film earns its keep through the banality of its levers. No one wakes up dreaming of fascism. Each student finds something in the group they were missing, belonging for one, social payback for another, a substitute family for the most fragile of them. The trap closes over five days of class, and I'll stop there to keep the rest intact, except to say the film follows its logic all the way down, and the final scene is no school dance. German audiences took notice: 2.5 million tickets sold and a German Film Award to show for it^[1:1].

The real Third Wave

The uncomfortable part is how little Gansel had to invent. In April 1967, at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, history teacher Ron Jones found himself stumped by a student's question, how could ordinary Germans have let it happen, and decided to answer it in practice^[2]. Monday, discipline ("strength through discipline"). Tuesday, community, a name, the Third Wave, and a salute. Wednesday, membership cards, while a class of thirty swelled past two hundred volunteers from across the school. Thursday, Jones announced a national movement, with its presidential candidate to be revealed the next day.

On Friday, the assembled students stared at a blank television screen, then watched a documentary about the Third Reich. The demonstration lasted five days, the same span the film would borrow four decades later, by way of Todd Strasser's 1981 novel that spread the story^[2:1]. You could object that a classroom is no scientific protocol, and you would be right. Which is exactly why others took the question into the lab.

Three experiments worth your time

On conformity, Solomon Asch showed back in 1951 that you don't even need uniforms. Faced with a trivial task, comparing line lengths, participants tested alone erred in less than 1% of cases, yet once seated in a group of confederates answering wrong with full confidence, 74% of them denied what their own eyes showed them at least once^[3].

On obedience, Stanley Milgram built his famous fake-shock apparatus at Yale in 1961, where 65% of participants agreed to deliver the maximum 450-volt jolt to a stranger because a man in a lab coat asked them to^[4]. Gina Perry's archival work has since complicated the picture, as a share of participants doubted the setup was real, which makes the result less spectacular without making it comforting^[4:1].

As for the celebrated 1971 Stanford prison experiment, guards versus prisoners drawn by lot, it deserves a mention as much for itself as for its demolition. French researcher Thibault Le Texier dug through the archives and showed that the guards had been coached on the expected behavior and that the conclusions were largely written in advance^[5]. A lesson with a double edge: we bend to the roles we're handed, and we have a weakness for stories that fit too well, even when a university professor signs them.

When a myth dresses up as science

That same appetite for a good story also manufactures fake experiments, beliefs that travel with the confidence of established fact without a shred of solid data behind them. Menstrual synchrony is the textbook case, and I'll plead guilty, since I served it to my friend that afternoon as settled truth before I bothered to look it up. The idea traces back to a 1971 Martha McClintock study in Nature, claiming that the cycles of women living together drift into alignment. Yet cycles of roughly twenty-eight days that last about five will overlap now and then by pure mathematical chance, and later reanalyses flagged the methodological errors in the original work, to the point that no serious research confirms the effect^[6].

Human pheromones sit on the same shelf, another thread from our lunch. Perfumes promise to switch on attraction, people happily cite Claus Wedekind's t-shirt study, where women preferred the smell of men whose immune system complemented their own, yet the result holds up poorly under replication, and the vomeronasal organ meant to pick up these signals is atrophied and nonfunctional in humans. To this day no human pheromone has been formally identified, as zoologist Tristram Wyatt keeps reminding us, having spent years tracking the molecules sold to us as such^[7]. Social experiments tell us a great deal, even when they don't exist, and I wish I had more time to sort the real from the legendary. If you're sitting on a fascinating one, true or mythical, my inbox is wide open.

Where to watch The Wave

In the US, The Wave is available to rent or buy on Amazon Video^[8], and it shows up in Apple TV's catalog as well. Streaming lineups shift often enough that a quick stop at JustWatch will give you the current picture.

Sixty years after Palo Alto, democracies we thought were anchored for good are sliding toward authoritarianism in plain sight, driven by the same mechanisms this high school film was already taking apart, the need to belong, the comfort of discipline, the convenient scapegoat. The lessons of the past hold less firmly than we hoped. A hundred and seven minutes with The Wave won't fix that, but they are a reminder of how gentle the slope feels, and of how much company you have on the way down.

The film's page on Wikipedia. ↩︎ ↩︎
The day-by-day account of Ron Jones's experiment is documented on Wikipedia, along with Todd Strasser's novel The Wave that made the story famous. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Asch conformity experiments, run from 1951 at Swarthmore College. ↩︎
The Milgram experiment, including Gina Perry's criticism based on her work in the Yale archives. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Stanford prison experiment and Thibault Le Texier, Histoire d'un mensonge. Enquête sur l'expérience de Stanford (in French), La Découverte, 2018. ↩︎
Quebec's Chief Scientist, "Des menstruations synchronisées ? Probablement pas" (in French). ↩︎
Green Condom Club's feature on pheromones and attraction (in French); on the absence of any formally identified human pheromone, see Tristram Wyatt, The search for human pheromones, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2015. ↩︎
The Wave (Die Welle) on Amazon, digital rental and purchase. ↩︎

Alba, my daughter, and one controller for four hands

2026-06-11T00:00:00Z

Finding a video game you can play with a four-year-old is its own kind of wildlife expedition, which suits today's subject. Most of the medium runs on enemies that charge and pits that wait, two hazards a child still working out her motor skills will find every ten seconds, take it from a father who has tested this at scale. Then we started Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, and our weekends gained a standing appointment.

An island with no wolves and no cliffs

Released in late 2020 by ustwo Games, the studio behind Monument Valley^[1], Alba drops a little girl at her grandparents' house on a Mediterranean island modeled on the Spanish coast. A developer wants to bulldoze the nature reserve for a luxury hotel, so Alba and her friend Inés found a wildlife rescue league and put you to work. You roam the island, photograph animals with your phone to identify them, fix birdhouses, pick up trash, and patch up injured critters. No enemies, no holes to fall into, no way to fail. The studio calls its own game a "chillectathon"^[2], and for once the marketing portmanteau describes the product.

Alba's island, where the worst that can happen is bothering a seagull (official ustwo Games screenshot).

Ecology without the sermon

Every animal you photograph joins a field notebook, so the stroll doubles as a nature class that never announces itself. My daughter is learning to tell species apart and to aim calmly instead of mashing buttons, and the game's conservation message lands without a single character climbing into a pulpit. The commitment even spills past the screen: ustwo plants a real tree for every copy sold or downloaded, funding a mangrove restoration program in Madagascar through Ecologi^[3]. The whole thing is rated PEGI 3, meaning suitable for preschoolers^[4], and for once the label matches what you experience with the controller in hand.

The controller changes hands

We play on a PC projected onto the living room TV, controller in hand. At four, my daughter is still figuring out how to steer a character without driving it into the scenery, a learning curve most games punish with a game-over screen before she even understands what she did wrong. Here she runs wherever she pleases while I ride shotgun, and since the dialogue and cutscenes stay short, I read them to her out loud instead of skipping through them the way I would on my own.

Our sessions fit inside one weekend hour, a pace that turns any six-hour game into a full season of television and puts the usual playtime debates in perspective. So no, I haven't finished the adventure yet, but the completionist in me (he sleeps with one eye open) has already decided we're going for 100%^[5].

And the machine doesn't even break a sweat

One last point in its favor: the stylized graphics, which would look at home on a Switch, run on modest hardware. At a time when data center demand is sending RAM prices through the roof^[6], a game that runs without complaint on the computer you already own deserves some credit.

If you're looking for a game to share with a small child, a rarer find than an Iberian lynx, this one has my full recommendation. I'll surely cover other games in this spirit, especially since my daughter's progress will gradually unlock more demanding worlds. Unless, of course, she one day decides her dad is an obsolete gaming partner and that beauty-influencer videos beat an island full of birds. I have a few years left to make my case.

The game's Wikipedia page: released December 11, 2020 on PC, Mac, and iOS, ported to consoles in June 2021, and winner of a 2021 Apple Design Award in the Social Impact category. ↩︎
The word appears in plain sight on the Steam store page, where the game often sells for the price of a coffee. ↩︎
The "Alba's Forest" program, described on the official site, aims for one million trees planted with Ecologi and Eden Reforestation Projects. ↩︎
You can check the rating on the Family Gaming Database, which catalogs family-friendly games. ↩︎
I almost wrote "platinum it," but platinum trophies only exist on PlayStation. The compulsion ships on every platform. ↩︎
On the global memory shortage and the price surge that came with it, see IEEE Spectrum. ↩︎

Welcome to this blog

2026-06-10T00:00:00Z

For a while now, my digital business card has gathered my email address and my online profiles. Great for finding me, useless for reading me. What I was missing was a place of my own to dig into the subjects I care about, free from any platform, its algorithm, or its ads. This blog is that place, and as tradition demands, its first article is about... the blog itself^[1].

Why write here

Because social networks chop thoughts into confetti, because a thread vanishes as fast as it appeared, and because a text on your own domain will still be readable in ten years. Which cuts both ways, since my mistakes will age just as gracefully. I'll write about tech in the broad sense, the project management I practice for a living, video games, and a few less tidy confessions, hence the "(not so) private diary" on the home page. No editorial calendar either: I'll write when I have something to say, which conveniently doubles as the world's best excuse for going quiet. French comes first, English second, and every article exists in both languages.

Under the hood

The site is fully static, generated by Eleventy and dressed by Tailwind CSS, with no client-side framework whatsoever: your browser gets HTML, one stylesheet, and a handful of small comfort scripts, not an app with delusions of grandeur. Fonts are self-hosted, code highlighting is baked in at build time by Shiki, and search runs on Pagefind, whose index is also built ahead of time. Writing an article means dropping a Markdown file:

---
title: Welcome to this blog
description: Why this blog exists and how it's built.
date: 2026-06-10
tags:
  - blog
---

The content starts here.

Everything else takes care of itself, since the CI pipeline builds the site and ships it to my server on every push. A lot of engineering to, in the end, publish text. You get the idea^[2].

Creature comforts

I spent time on the small things that make reading pleasant, and this article doubles as the demo:

Feature	Where to see it
TL;DR and table of contents	At the top of the article
Reading progress bar	At the top of the screen
Footnotes	Along the way
Search and archives	In the footer

On top of that come the dark theme, the estimated reading time, per-language Atom feeds, a copy button on code blocks, and images served in several sizes, as AVIF whenever the browser cooperates:

The blog's share image, generated from the logo at every build.

And your privacy

Almost nothing to declare: no account, no cookie, no ad trackers, not one request to a third-party service. I only count visits with an anonymous tool hosted on my own server, the digital equivalent of a foot-traffic counter at a bookstore door, all spelled out in a privacy policy that takes itself admirably seriously for a document with almost nothing to regulate. Read here the way you'd read a book borrowed from a friend, no library card, nobody looking over your shoulder.

What comes next

New articles will land at their own pace. The Atom feed is there if you want them delivered, and if one of them makes you want to talk back, my business card lists every place where you can, praise and pushback equally welcome. The diary is open. Now I just have to keep writing in it.

The self-reference comes at no extra charge. ↩︎
Spending ten hours automating a two-hour task is the proudest tradition of this trade. The two hours, in my defense, are now ten minutes. ↩︎