The "Happy New Year" loot
| Published | |
| Reading time | 3 minutes |
| Licence |  |
| Tags | Tech - Society - Art |
Happy New Year 2026 folks!
I’m not sure I’ll still be able to do it next year given how the world is already going in 2026; And we’re only the 8th… With the USA doubling down on efforts to be one of the worst assholes (euphemism) in the world, it’s not looking good.
Society
I’m stunned that people thought it was relevant and okay to build datacenters that “consume” water to operate. Like, we’ve known how to do cooling without “just” evaporating water, in closed circuits, for ages. That’s actually what we do almost everywhere I think. We even have datacenters without AC that don’t consume water. I’m really angry by the lack of empathy from people making these kinds of decisions. American companies on foreign soil (for them), so it’s not surprising either…
- Logiciels libres en bibliothèque - BAM : Biodiversité Autour de Moi - Chronique de Gee (podcast) (fr)
(I’m sharing the episode but especially Gee’s segment in it). Another good take on the question of artistic originality and copyright. Added to the topic bucket ;-)
- CETTE RESSOURCE REND FOU LE MONDE ! (YouTube) (fr)
Funny to list it here now, having watched it before the USA did the USA thing again. But well, it remains relevant.
An attempt to detect LLM-generated writing. Since it’s Wikipedia it seems serious, but I’m not certain that anything of this kind will hold up very long against the evolution of LLMs. Unlike automatic solutions, this is more intended for human educations. A bit like the recommendations to look for inconsistencies in AI videos. But that only works as long as LLMs are imperfect (which is far from being an eternal guarantee), and doing it humanly will often be less effective than doing it automatically. Yet we know that automatic tools are not up to the task on that front. and will surly never be.
In short, a page to follow, as it’s an interesting community response nonetheless.
Well, I won’t recommend you listen to or watch BadMulch in general; to use his words, he’s often disastrous (désastreux en french). But his series from which this episode is taken is good. I really like that he tries to create words (in the sense of making them enter common vocabulary) for the phenomena he describes. It’s accessible, quite well done (hats off for the motion design and 3D). I highly recommend the previous episodes as well.
Tech
Funny to read. The question that nags me: “if we find the right words, does it even make sense?”
Get off Github. Please. Alternative forges haven’t been lacking for at least 5-8 years. And self-hosting your code has become trivial, even on a raspberry-pi at home. As usual with this kind of injunction, making yourself available elsewhere doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be accessible ONLY elsewhere. Our code can be on Github AND elsewhere. Videos can be on YouTube AND elsewhere. etc…
Art
I think it’s cool, and quite “fitting” at the start of this year.
Explore StarTrek ships as if you were there. At least that’s what a 2000s real estate agent who’s never experienced VR would say. But it’s cool anyway.
| Title | The "Happy New Year" loot | |
| Description | Happy New Year 2026 folks! I’m not sure I’ll still be able to do it next year given how the world is already going in 2026; And we’re only the 8th… With the USA doubling down on efforts to be one of the worst assholes (euphemism) in the world, it’s not looking good. | |
| Published | ||
| Updated | ||
| Type | ||
| Reading time | 3 minutes | |
| Words | 592 | |
| Translation | English | https://blog.ztec.fr/en/2026/01/08/loot/happy_new_year/ |
| Français | https://blog.ztec.fr/2026/01/08/loot/bonne_annee/ | |
| Tags | Tech - Society - Art | |
| Licence | Except for quoted materials, which retain their original rights and attributions, this post and its content are published under the Creative Commons(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) liscence | |
| OpenGraph | Image |  |
| Title | Happy New Year 2026 | |
| Subtitle | Well, at least we can hope | |
| Description | Happy New Year 2026 folks! I’m not sure I’ll still be able to do it next year given how the world is already going in 2026; And we’re only the 8th… With the USA doubling down on efforts to be one of the worst assholes (euphemism) in the world, it’s not looking good. | |
| Type | og:type = article twitter:card = summary_large_image | |
Found a typo, or something bigger that probably killed a grammar nazy ? suggest a fix via github.
You can subscribe via
RSS to get new articles as son as they are published