Links. Tweets. Photos (2025-W14)
Links
Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? For one example, modern ePub readers make basic pagination mistakes. Most published research papers are borderline unreadable on the Web version because the publishers charge us US$3,600 to mess up the figures, so you cannot read text (and printing the PDF version doesn’t always help).
One of my predictions is that China will transition to a more phonetic writing system in the 21st century. It’s the logical conclusion of reports like these (and the dominance of Mandarin over the other dialects). The system may even be based on characters, but they will be increasingly used phonetically.
Substacks
Tweets
I’ve said before that we’d be good to distinguish ethical as the output of the ethics-industrial complex and ethical in the normal sense in the same way we do not think that the Justice system always leads to outcomes that are just.
Photo of the Week
