Building Robots Is Not Enough

I keep coming back to the same question when writing about European technology: what exactly do we want to keep in Europe? The usual answer is something like: semiconductor production, cloud infrastructure, AI models and perhaps a few strategically important factories. But after reading about French robotics company Wandercraft (https://en.wandercraft.eu/) and its cooperation with Renault, I think there is another part of the story that deserves much more attention. Europe should not only build products. It should also build the machines that build those products.

That may sound slightly old-fashioned in a world where almost every discussion about technology quickly turns into a discussion about software and AI. But there is a very practical reason for it. If you build your own production machines, you learn from them. You discover that a certain component is unnecessarily expensive. That another part could be lighter. That a production step takes too long. That a tolerance does not need to be quite so precise. Or that changing some software, mechanics or electronics could make the entire production process better.

In other words, a factory is not simply a place where products come off a production line. It is also a rather large laboratory.

Robots building European industrial knowledge

Wandercraft is an interesting example. The French company originally developed robotic exoskeletons for people who have difficulty walking. More than ten years of developing balance systems, actuators, mechanics and control software eventually resulted in something else: Calvin, a humanoid robot designed for industrial work.

And importantly, this isn’t primarily a robot designed to dance on a stage or generate spectacular YouTube videos. It is designed to work in a factory. Renault is already testing Calvin in its factory in Douai, where the robot moves things such as car tyres. Renault plans to have around 350 humanoid robots working in its French and Spanish factories by the end of 2027.

But the really interesting part is the relationship between the two companies. Renault is not simply buying robots from Wandercraft. It is also helping the company figure out how to manufacture those robots at scale. Wandercraft brings robotics and AI knowledge. Renault brings decades of experience in mass production, supply chains, quality control and designing products that can actually be manufactured at an acceptable cost. That combination makes a lot of sense.

Keep the feedback loop close

There is another detail I particularly like. Wandercraft says the components in its current robot all come from Europe. That matters. Because if the robot is designed in Europe, manufactured using European components, deployed in European factories and improved based on what happens in those factories, you create a very useful feedback loop: engineers see what breaks, factories discover what works, production specialists improve how the robot itself is manufactured and developers adjust the software and control systems. And then you do it all over again. That is industrial knowledge being created continuously. Move too many parts of that chain elsewhere and eventually part of that knowledge moves with it.

Europe already has an enormous high-quality manufacturing base, many specialised machine builders and companies that know how to manufacture complicated products at scale. We sometimes seem strangely eager to underestimate how valuable that is.

Perhaps technological sovereignty is not only about owning an AI model or running a European cloud. Sometimes it is also about knowing how to build the machine that builds the machine.

Here is a video of Andreas Klinger from the European investment fund PROTOTYPE (https://www.prototypecap.com/) visiting Wandercraft.

School Directors Are Making the Wrong Choice Between Tech and Privacy

I came across an article by Privacy First about the digital student, and it touches on something that continues to bother me about the way we discuss technology in European education. The discussion is often framed as a choice: we can embrace digital technology in schools, or we can protect the privacy of our children.That is the wrong choice.

You can find the article here: https://privacyfirst.nl/artikelen/de-digitale-leerling/ (text in Dutch). Privacy First rightly points out that schools process enormous amounts of information about pupils, ranging from names and contact details to school results, behaviour and sometimes information about a child’s development. Children are particularly vulnerable because they usually have little choice about the software their school tells them to use.

But the conclusion shouldn’t be that schools therefore need less technology. They need different technology: technology that respects privacy and complies with privacy laws.

Digital does not automatically mean Google

There is absolutely no law of nature saying that digital education requires Chromebooks, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Windows laptops or MacBooks. A school can give students Linux laptops. It can use Nextcloud or similar open source platforms for storing and sharing files, working together on documents, calendars, video calls and all the other things schools nowadays expect from a digital workplace.

And before somebody says that this sounds nice in theory but could never work for hundreds of thousands of users: it already does. The French region Île-de-France has deployed a sovereign collaboration environment based on Nextcloud for around 550,000 pupils, teachers and administrative staff. The system is part of the regional monlycée.net environment and was explicitly designed as an alternative to Microsoft solutions. It includes document collaboration through Collabora Online, file storage and integration with the region’s existing systems. The infrastructure is operated in France.

You read that right: half a million users. So perhaps we can finally stop pretending that European and open source alternatives are lovely little hobby projects that might work for three enthusiasts and a Raspberry Pi. See https://nextcloud.com/fr/blog/cloud-souverain-plateforme-collaborative-ile-de-france/ for more information.

We became lazy buyers of IT

There is another part of this discussion that I think we don’t talk about enough. A Belgian CIO recently said something to me that stuck: we have forgotten that we actually have to make conscious choices ourselves.

For many years it was incredibly easy not to choose. Microsoft was already there, so you bought some more Microsoft. Your organisation was using AWS, so the next workload went to AWS as well. Google offered a complete education package, so schools bought Chromebooks and Google services.

You could call that standardisation. I increasingly call it convenience. Or perhaps there is a better word for it: laziness. And that is dangerous, because over time, that convenience has turned into dependency.

That dependency matters much more today than it did ten or fifteen years ago. Europe has become deeply dependent on a relatively small number of American technology companies for cloud computing, productivity software, communication and increasingly AI. In their article, Privacy First has made essentially the same broader point about Europe’s dependence on foreign technology providers and the consequences for autonomy and control over data. With today’s geopolitical uncertainty, treating that dependency as merely a procurement detail is becoming increasingly difficult.

Of course you cannot migrate an entire organisation in a day. Nobody sensible is suggesting that. Île-de-France didn’t do that either. But that argument is rapidly becoming an excuse. If you are responsible for IT in a sizeable European organisation and you are still not investigating alternatives, testing them, identifying dependencies and developing a realistic migration path, I think you have a problem. Migration takes years. Which is precisely why you need to start before circumstances force you to.

And then there are the children

There is something particularly uncomfortable about teaching children about privacy, data protection and digital literacy while at the same time making them use platforms built by some of the world’s largest data-driven technology companies. Privacy First argues that privacy should not simply be another compliance box for schools to tick. It should be a basic design principle of the digital environment children grow up in.

I couldn’t agree more with that conclusion. We have GDPR. We have endless discussions about children’s online safety. We teach pupils to think carefully about what they share online. And then institutions themselves make the fundamental technology choices on their behalf.

Schools deserve support from governments and IT specialists to make better choices. But eventually somebody also has to take responsibility. The technology exists. The alternatives exist. Large-scale examples exist. Île-de-France is already showing that hundreds of thousands of pupils and teachers can work digitally without simply handing the entire environment to Microsoft or Google.

So this really isn’t a discussion about digital versus privacy. It is about whether school directors are willing to do the homework required to have both.

You’re Not Just Publishing Posts. You’re Building a Habit for Your Readers

I only discovered Blaugust when August was almost over. Which is slightly unfortunate, because I like the idea.

Blaugust is one of those wonderfully IndieWeb-ish initiatives where people encourage each other to blog more. See for more here: https://tagn.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/. It originally started as a challenge to publish every day during August, although over the years it has become somewhat less strict. The idea now seems to be at least as much about participating, meeting other bloggers and keeping personal blogging alive.

Sebastian Malloy participated this year and wrote an interesting post about what the experience taught him (https://sebastianmalloy.bearblog.dev/what-blaugust-has-taught-me-about-my-blogging/). He managed 30 posts in 31 days, but discovered that producing something simply because today’s post still had to be produced wasn’t really for him. Some posts felt as if they existed mainly because there was a quota to meet. What he did enjoy was reading what everybody else had written.

I didn’t participate in Blaugust. There are several reasons for that. The most obvious one is that I already publish something on Just Me almost every day. So adding a challenge to make me write regularly would be slightly odd. The other reason is much simpler: I discovered Blaugust too late. Maybe next time.

There is a whole world of these things

What surprised me is that Blaugust isn’t some isolated event. There appears to be an entire world of challenges built around the simple idea of committing yourself to making things.

There is 100 Days To Offload, for example, where the challenge is to publish 100 posts on your personal blog within 365 days (https://100daystooffload.com/). And the rules explicitly say those posts don’t have to be long, profound or particularly polished. The important part is to write.

Then there is the IndieWeb Carnival (https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Carnival). Every month another blogger chooses a subject and other bloggers write their own posts about it. At the end of the month, the host collects the contributions. The IndieWeb wiki actually describes one of its purposes as motivating people to publish more on their personal websites and giving them inspiration for things to write about.

And there are many more. The DS106 Daily Create (https://daily.ds106.us/) offers small daily creative assignments involving photography, drawing, audio, video and writing. There are similar initiatives for musicians, pixel artists, zine makers and people building websites. There is even a site that collects these challenges.

And, of course, there is NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month (https://nanowrimo2.com/), probably the best-known variation on the general idea: commit to creating something, set yourself a target and do it together with other people.

In other languages we see the same (more or less). In Germany there are quite of few challenges as well. See for example here https://judithpeters.de/50-blogparaden-im-sommer-2026/. I found fewer direct French-language blogging equivalents. There are plenty of French community writing challenges, though. For example, Scribonautes (https://scribonautes.fr/a-propos/) runs ongoing “défis d’écriture” where participants respond to community-created prompts and read and vote on each other’s work. It is closer to creative writing than personal blogging, but the community/regular-creation principle is very similar.

I find all this fascinating. Not necessarily because I need somebody to tell me to write another blog post. At the moment, I have rather the opposite problem. There are far more things I want to write about than I have time for. But these challenges provide something else. They are a very nice way to discover people. You follow links to participants, encounter blogs you have never seen before and suddenly end up reading about someone’s record collection, Linux setup, garden, travels, books or strange little hobby you didn’t know existed. That might actually be the most interesting part.

But what if you have nothing to say?

There is another side to all this. Sebastian Malloy’s experience also points to an obvious problem with publishing challenges: what happens when you simply have nothing you consider interesting enough to publish? I recently came across this post, Why People Quit Blogging (see here: https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/27/why-people-quit-blogging/), which looks at some of the reasons people eventually stop.

It certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think the question itself is interesting. Starting a blog is easy. Continuing one for years is something else entirely. Perhaps you run out of subjects. Perhaps life changes. Perhaps writing starts feeling like an obligation. Or perhaps you begin wondering whether anybody is actually interested in what you have to say.

Challenges such as Blaugust, 100 Days To Offload and the IndieWeb Carnival can probably help with that. They provide a reason to sit down again. A subject. A small deadline. And, importantly, other people who are doing exactly the same thing.

Your readers notice when you disappear

But I think there is another reason to keep going that bloggers themselves may underestimate. What bloggers perhaps don’t always realise is that readers aren’t only interested in subjects. Over time, they also become interested in you. They want to know what you have discovered. What you are doing. What you think about something. Which book you are reading. Which piece of software you are experimenting with. Or why something completely ordinary suddenly caught your attention.

That creates a small social connection. It is very different from following a professional publication where another author can simply take over. A personal blog has a person attached to it. That person is part of the reason people return. And once you establish some kind of rhythm, people get used to that rhythm too. If it suddenly changes, I suspect some regular readers really do notice. Not necessarily in a dramatic way. Nobody will organise a search party because you haven’t published anything for four days. But perhaps there is a tiny moment of disappointment when they check your blog or their RSS reader and there is nothing new. Oh. You’re not here today.

I think that is rather nice. And perhaps that small relationship between writer and reader is something worth remembering whenever blogging starts to feel like talking into an empty room.

This is Why I Love Hackers So Much

Years ago I read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. It is one of those technology books that somehow sticks in your memory, probably because it hardly feels like a technology book at all. It is more like a detective story, except that the detective is an astronomer turned system administrator, the clues are hidden inside Unix systems and telephone networks, and the whole thing starts with an accounting discrepancy of just 75 cents.

That tiny discrepancy eventually led Stoll into a year-long hunt for cyber criminals who were breaking into American computer systems and passing information to the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB. This was 1986, long before cybersecurity became an industry filled with SOCs, SIEMs, threat intelligence platforms and impressive-looking dashboards.

I hadn’t thought about the book for a long time. Then I came across a recent video of Stoll speaking at DEF CON 34, forty years after that original 75-cent discovery. And yes, he is quite a remarkable presenter.

No cyber, just curiosity

Stoll describes how they had essentially none of the tools we now associate with cybersecurity. There was no budget, no roadmap and not even much of a vocabulary for what they were doing. Instead, they used soldering irons, shell scripts, printers, logbooks and lots of improvisation.

Watching him talk about it reminded me why I have always liked the world of developers and hackers so much. Not the criminal kind of hacker, obviously, but the original meaning of the word: people who are intensely curious about how things work. People who see something strange and immediately want to understand why. People who happily open things, connect things that were never supposed to be connected, write a little piece of software to solve a problem and then build something slightly ridiculous because it might just work. Stoll seems to embody that attitude almost perfectly.

Following the strange little clue

There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about the whole story. Today, a 75-cent discrepancy would probably generate a ticket somewhere. It might be assigned a severity level, automatically enriched with telemetry and eventually end up on somebody’s dashboard. Stoll simply wanted to know why the numbers didn’t add up. And that curiosity turned a tiny accounting error into an investigation that crossed networks and international borders.

Technology has changed enormously since then. The internet has changed. Cybersecurity has become a huge professional industry. Attackers have changed too. But perhaps one thing hasn’t changed at all. Someone still has to look at something slightly unusual and think: That’s strange. I wonder why that happened. And then keep digging.

Maybe that is why I enjoyed watching Stoll’s presentation so much. It isn’t only an interesting piece of computing history. It is also a reminder that some of the most interesting things in technology still start with curiosity, experimentation and somebody refusing to ignore a tiny detail. That wonderfully stubborn, slightly (very?) eccentric hacker mentality.

I hope we never professionalise it out of existence.