Hi nerds, and music with Grohl drumming along recording of Teen Spirit.

News

• [fr] Arnaud Hoedt et Jérôme Piron @ TEDxRennes - La faute de l'orthographe, merci Morgane. Wow, savais pas que la difformité de l'orthographe française est intentionnelle, et pas seulement un mille-feuilles historico-linguistique. Aussi, Académie Française - L’orthographe : Histoire d’une longue querelle, et Libé - Notre orthographe si compliquée ? « C’est un choix politique », et Le Point - Orthographe : pour la fin d'un tabou français, qui confirment.
• Le Tour de Pants with Ali Selim, via Kottke.
• Astro Anarchy: Grand mosaic of the Milky Way is grand-er. HN.
• Kottke: Epidemiologists analyzing health risks in Bond movies 😄.

Tech

• adn: NFTs, status and creativity. Meanwhile, Developers write open letter asking Valve to reverse Steam's NFT ban. Am very unsure of what to think of these things; in one hand it smells a lot like vaporous tech bullshit, in the other hand okay it may be an actual path to more decentralization. But can such a decentralization ever happen? With so much potential $, NFT “pioneers” and early operators will for sure inject their proprietary flavor to capture and walled-garden-ize it anyway. Feels like E.E.E. step 1. Embrace: “hey, $thing_standard is pretty cool, we’re on the path to $thing decentralization & interoperability!”, then comes step 2. Extend $thing_standard with proprietary “extensions” to “compensate for standards deficiencies”, then step 3. Extinguish and silently migrate users of $thing_standard to proprietary implementation.
• Financial Times’ 404 is full of economist dork jokes 😄. Via kottke.

Garbage tech

Lots of non-fun tech this week. Reminder: my “editorial policy” for this blog –especially the Tech section– is to share interesting / inspiring / fun stuff and cut sharing of angering news to the minimum. Big Tech manure happens continually, you probably already get exposed to it, and I see meager value in hammering turds. It splotches on our collective brainz, eclipsing the good stuff happening elsewhere.

But occasionally, a supremely shitty thing happens that I find worthwhile to share: as a reminder to stop blindly trusting Big Tech, and to stop using their products / services. Also, if you work at one of these socially-noxious places beyond repair, please rock the boat, be it by shouting internally, or by leaving.

• Google 💩: [PDF, 3MB] Google digital ads antitrust litigation (Sep 2021), with a few highlights by @fasterthanlime and comments by DF.
• Faceboook 💩: WaPo: Key takeaways from the Fb Papers, The Atlantic: ‘History will not judge us kindly’, Casey Newton: How Fb decides which countries need protection, The Verge: Fb’s lost generation, NYT: Inside the big Fb leak, other Fb Papers stories. All via waxy.
  • Meanwhile, disconnection.