weekly reel October 31, 2021

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

Dave Grohl - Smells Like Teen Spirit (youtube-nocookie.com)

News

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 noxious, morally bankrupt, irresponsible, monopolistic places beyond repair, please rock the boat, be it by shouting internally, or by leaving.

Comments and feedback welcome @ronjouch or by email.