The names of manufacturing nodes — 2 nm, 18A, A16 — no longer describe any real transistor dimension: they are marketing labels. What is a verifiable physical number is the light they are printed with...
When an image model generates a portrait from the phrase “a lighthouse on a cliff in the fog”, it does not draw anything. There are no strokes, no brushes, no edges placed one after anothe...
Every time you type into a chatbot, you have switched on a machine that does not “remember” your conversation the way a person does. It does not re-read it: it recomputes it. And that reco...
Every time your phone syncs its clock, it is trusting a number the scientific community fixed in 1967: the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the radiation corresponding to the transition betwe...
Your phone has known where it is for years thanks to satellites, mobile masts and Wi-Fi networks. But none of those systems can answer a far humbler question that, for many jobs, is far more useful: h...
For decades, connecting a phone to a satellite meant a dish, a suitcase and patience: big terminals, aimed by hand and extremely expensive. Over the last two years the industry has done the opposite —...
The machine much of the industry had written off still stores almost everything nobody needs to read right now. In 2026, with NAND memory prices having doubled and orders for 30 and 40 terabyte drives...
In an electric car today, the part that can catch fire is a liquid. Not the lithium, not the electrodes: the electrolyte, that blend of organic solvents — ethylene and dimethyl carbonate, among others...
Tomorrow’s weather report looks like a blind promise, but it is not: it is the result of solving, over the whole atmosphere, the same physics equations that describe how a fluid moves. What sets...
Deleting a file on a modern computer is instantaneous: no noise, no waiting. Inside, though, almost nothing is actually erased. What happens is closer to crossing a line out of an address book than to...
For thirty years, proving who you are has meant sharing a secret with the server. You know the password, the server keeps a scrambled copy and the two are compared. The problem is not the password its...
When we rent a machine in the cloud, trust rests on a contractual promise: the provider says it does not look at our data. For decades that promise had no technical backing. The hypervisor — the softw...