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 by email.