Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to figure out a way to write (and, more importantly, publish) more regularly. And as I’m trying to stay curious and read a little bit every day, an idea came to mind: why not start by trying to share some of that reading? I would at least get a history of interesting articles, which is probably nice anyway.

Centaurs and reverse centaurs

Over on Cory Doctorow’s blog (you know him at least as the enshitification guy), I learned about centaurs and reverse centaurs. Those are automation theory concepts; a centaur is a machine-assisted humain, while a reverse-centaur is a machine-assisting human, someone who isn’t served by but themselves serve the machine. You might think of Chaplin in Modern Times, but this is very much happening right now, especially with AI. And it’s unlikely to stop with how much of it is shoved down our throats, at least as long as the bubble lasts.

But the risks here do not limit to the psychosocial ones you might be thinking of: as Cory Doctorow explains, you could also just become an “accountability sink” for the machine (here, AI). You would be the “human in the loop”, responsible for every hallucination or error of a machine you supposedly should be able to correct. A very interesting article (and blog) to read through.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

On the dangers of centralization (especially with Big Tech)

Paris Buttfield-Addison is, as he puts it himself, a loyal Apple customer, and has been for at least 25 years. Not only did he probably buy every Apple hardware ever, he also wrote several books on Apple-related programming languages. A true believer if there are any.

What shock it must have been then to find his Apple account completely deactivated one day after redeeming an apparently fraudulous gift card (although he did buy it at a very legal big brand store)! All of a sudden, he had nothing: no mail, no pictures, no messages, no sync, and a bunch of mostly-unusable hardware.

Spoiler alert, he did manage to get his account back in the end. It took almost a week, multiple press outlets talking about it, and a lot of contacting people he knew who work for Apple to finally appease the tech giant. I think it’s safe to say that most people won’t manage all of that…

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Solar energy is progressing faster than one could think

Everything’s mostly in the title for this part. Now obviously I wasn’t very informed on this subject, and I’m not much more informed now, to be fair. But I’m simply happy to learn that the majority of EUs energy this summer came from renewable sources, and that China is going through a solar panel building frenzy. It’s the little things, y’know.

From this article, I also got to learn the economic observation “if it can’t go on forever it will stop”, a very basic but in a way surprisingly thoughtful fact. However, if you do decide to read the whole thing, do note that it’s not really about what I took away from it, and also that it is not, in fact, very optimistic about our near future.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html