Five Things Tech: Linux, Artemis, Autonomous Cars, Bifurcated Internet, OTA Computation
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Saturday is for Tech, welcome back!
This is great news to me: France is ditching Windows for Linux across its government by autumn 2026, driven by Trump's sanctions weaponized against critics and a broader EU push for sovereignty, with DINUM leading migrations that include collaboration tools, AI platforms, and databases; others like Austria, Denmark, and Schleswig-Holstein are already swapping Microsoft for open-source, proving it's doable and could redirect billions into building better alternatives.
NASA's Artemis II Orion capsule packs a radiation-hardened, fault-tolerant computer handling life support and comms 250k miles out where downtime kills, everything redundant except Outlook as usual.
Autonomous vehicles are going electric for high-utilization capex payback, sensors and GPUs guzzling power that combustion engince powered cars can't match efficiently; can't wait for my car to park itself.
The internet's bifurcating into agentic layers of structured data for bots negotiating at scale and human realms trading on trust and creativity, with wild economics splitting subscriptions from data markets we barely grasp.
Over-the-air computation flips radio interference from curse to feature, letting wireless networks sum or average data via superimposed signals before digital processing even kicks in, wild throwback to old interference woes now crunching numbers.
Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖
France Orders Windows-to-Linux Switch Across Government
The pressure runs deeper than preference. Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration has weaponized sanctions against critics including International Criminal Court judges, effectively cutting them off from U.S. tech services, closing their bank accounts, and blocking transactions with American companies. For European governments running their digital infrastructure on U.S. software, that is not an abstract risk. It is a demonstrated capability.
The European Parliament voted in January to direct the European Commission to identify areas of excessive foreign dependency. France is not alone in acting on it. Austria’s armed forces have switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Denmark’s government committed to the same. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein migrated 44,000 employee inboxes away from Microsoft to open-source alternatives. Germany mandated the Open Document Format for all government files, explicitly excluding Microsoft’s proprietary formats.
This makes so much sense and is long overdue. European governments pay billions each year for Microsoft Software and if the use only a fraction of that each year, they can build amazing open source software.
How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
This month’s Artemis II mission carrying a crew of four around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years is supported by one of the most fault-tolerant computer system built for spaceflight. Unlike Apollo, the Orion capsule’s computing architecture manages nearly all of the vessel’s safety-critical functions, from life support to communication routing.
When a mission is 250,000 miles from Earth, failure is unrecoverable. There are no runways for emergency landings and no technicians to swap out a fried motherboard. Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.
Everything worked, except for Outlook, of course.
Autonomy is real now
Autonomous vehicles are generally going to be high-utilization vehicles. That’s true because they can be, but also because they need to be in order to justify such high capex. This is an ideal scenario for the electric drivetrain, which has lower maintenance and lower energy costs than the internal combustion engine.1 The more a vehicle is utilized, the more these operational advantages matter when it comes to the total cost of ownership. Additionally, all of those expensive sensors and chips which need to be packed into an AV also need to be powered, which compounds the efficiency advantage of going electric. It’s just silly to contemplate running 13 cameras, 4 LiDAR units, 6 radar units and multiple GPUs on an internal combustion engine.
I am actually looking forward to letting my car find its parking spot somewhere nearby.
The New Internet is Coming
This bifurcation won’t just be philosophical, but will reshape value exchange online. The agentic internet will become the backbone of automation, powering decisions, transactions, and supply chains. Its value will lie in speed, scale, and interoperability.
The human internet, on the other hand, will trade in trust, context, creativity, and emotional intelligence, qualities agents can’t fully replicate.
This is where the economics get interesting. Value flows will diverge. Subscription models, creator economies, and premium content will likely skew toward human audiences, while data licensing and training-data markets grow around the agentic mode.
I don’t think we have even begun to understand what this change means.
Over-the-Air Computation Uses Radio Interference to Crunch Data
The idea takes advantage of a basic physical fact of electromagnetic radiation: When multiple devices transmit simultaneously, their wireless signals naturally combine in the air. Normally, such cross talk is seen as interference, which radios are designed to suppress—especially digital radios with their error-correcting schemes and inherent resistance to low-level noise.
But if we carefully design the transmissions, cross talk can enable a wireless network to directly perform some calculations, such as a sum or an average. Some prototypes today do this with analog-style signaling on otherwise digital radios—so that the superimposed waveforms represent numbers that have been added before digital signal processing takes place.
I remember radio interference from back in the day but I didn’t know it could be useful for data crunching.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico