Weekly Notes, October 2, 2026

On the writing front #

The paperback edition of L’Enfant des Esprits is in production! About thirty copies will be available for sale by the end of October. I plan to present them at the upcoming events I’ll be attending, but you can of course contact me to get one.

The narration is a bit different from Suzuha, and the themes are slightly more young adult. Loving Suzuha doesn’t mean you’ll love L’Enfant des Esprits, and vice versa. I’d say L’Enfant des Esprits leans a bit more “mainstream” in young adult literature. The first digital releases got more ratings on Kobo, though both are well rated.

On the web front #

“I am tired of these people on my team who refuse to apply my feedback because they don’t want to question the AI results I’m contradicting!” That’s what a (exhausted) former colleague told me this week. His company has a Claude subscription for code.

Half-understood, approximate solutions aren’t new. Faced with a problem we barely understand, what developer of my generation has never copy-pasted a piece of code from StackOverflow to “see if it works”? But searching, digging around, reading comments, understanding whether we’re really facing the same error… that’s what ultimately allows us to learn a few things along the way and make progress. And then, when a more experienced developer who understands the subject better says, “this line is useless,” we have the wisdom to listen.

Ed Faulkner rightly pointed out in his EmberFest 2026 talk that a creative artifact (a document, a drawing, a song, or code) serves three purposes:

• Using the creation’s value—enjoying the book, admiring the drawing, running the code.
• Demonstrating effort and intention—the author took the time to do this work, so I’ll pay attention to it.
• Using the creative process to think—materializing these ideas allowed me to think through many details and learn new things.

Yet AI only preserves the first point of the creative artifact: the use of its value. The proof of effort and all the reasoning that led to the result are nonexistent.

It’s natural for usages to evolve, and for someone born in the 2010s to have a different relationship with digital technology and technology in general than someone born 20 years earlier, but I’m worried about how eagerly developers who entered the profession long before AI are willing to throw their own expertise out the window, going as far as refusing to listen to another competent human being telling them, “Claude got this and that wrong.”

In the garden #

Last week, I spoke for the first time as a representative of the LPO (French League for the Protection of Birds) in my city. The city hall organized an award ceremony for flowery homes. For the occasion, four of us spoke to the residents present: one of the city’s gardeners, the manager of the Maraîchers des Viennes (where I buy my vegetables), another LPO volunteer who presented several nest box models, and myself. My intervention was about sharing my experience as an LPO refuge owner. I talked about the importance of preserving biodiversity in the garden, touching on topics like wildlife passages, insect hotels, water conservation, and differentiated mowing. I was able to meet other residents concerned about garden biodiversity, and some came to ask me questions about ollas (terracotta irrigation pots) and worm composters. Quite a successful event.

On the culture front #

€95.2 billion per year (in France). That’s the cost of virility according to Lucile Peytavin. She estimates it in a short, quick-to-read book of public utility: Le coût de la virilité (the cost of virility), published in 2021, whose topics are still far too current for my taste.

The author starts by dismantling, point by point, the common belief that men aggressiveness is natural—an idea supported by no scientific fact. I found the data on humanity’s evolution from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic particularly interesting. She then demonstrates that virility is indeed a cultural construct that begins before the child’s birth and continues throughout their life. Some of the facts mentioned are rather obvious; others much less so, especially regarding parents’ attitudes toward infants. Finally, she presents the figures. While some details of the methodology could certainly be debated, the overall approach is relevant and helps grasp the scale of the phenomenon.

The conclusion lists even more problems than it offers solutions, and you can come out of the reading overwhelmed by the enormity of the work needed to change our cultural models. Still, getting this book circulating is a good first step.