Tu te fous de ma gueule là?
Recently stumbled upon the phrase Tu te fous de ma gueule là?.
Literally translated it means “Are you fucking my face right now?”
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. Your face. Being fucked. By someone who clearly thinks you’re an idiot.
There’s something almost beautiful about how French takes raw, unfiltered disbelief and wraps it in grammatical elegance. The reflexive verb, the possessive pronoun, the casual là tacked on at the end like a period that doubles as a middle finger. It’s aggression dressed up as a question. Purely Orgasmic.
I love it. I’m adopting it.
Which brings me to something else I’ve been chewing on lately. DJVU.
I have been meaning to write a post about it back a while and for some reason forgot, but was reminded of it again by a friend of mine.
Yeah. DjVu. Not a typo. Not a sneeze. An actual file format that exists and honestly deserves more attention than it gets.
First time I came across this thought was some kind of glitch honestly
Here’s the thing about DjVu it was developed at AT&T Labs in the mid-90s by a team that included Yann LeCun (yes, that Yann LeCun, the deep learning guy before he was famous for it). The whole premise was radical for its time: separate the foreground text from the background image, compress each layer using different techniques, and stitch them back together on render.
The result? Scanned documents at a fraction of the file size of PDFs. We’re talking 5-10x smaller for the same visual quality. A 200-page scanned book that would balloon to 80MB in PDF sits comfortably at 8MB in DjVu. That’s not marginal improvement. That’s a different philosophy.
The technical architecture is genuinely clever. It uses something called JB2 compression for bi-level images (think: black text on white page), which works by finding similar shapes across the entire document and storing only the differences. It’s basically deduplication at the glyph level. Then for the background layer the paper texture, the photographs, the marginalia it uses wavelet-based compression (IW44 codec) that’s more forgiving of the kind of noise you get from scanning physical pages.
Foreground and background separated. Text crisp. Images preserved. File size laughable by PDF standards.
So why isn’t everyone using it?
Adobe happened. That’s the short answer.
The longer answer is that PDF won because Adobe weaponized it. They gave away Acrobat Reader for free, hooked institutions, governments, and enterprises on the format, and then charged for everything else creation tools, editing suites, enterprise licenses, digital signatures, form handling. It’s the razor-and-blades model applied to documents.
PDF became the standard not because it was technically superior. It was often bloated, slow, and absurdly over engineered for what it needed to do. PDF won because Adobe had the marketing machine, the legal muscle, and the patience to embed themselves into every workflow on earth. They made PDF synonymous with “document” the way Kleenex is synonymous with tissue.
Capitalism doesn’t reward the best technology. It rewards the technology that best serves the machinery of capital. PDF became a revenue stream. DjVu remained a curiosity academically interesting, technically elegant, commercially irrelevant.
AT&T eventually open sourced DjVu, but by then the war was already over. Browser support never materialized. No corporate champion picked up the banner. Libraries and archives that had invested in DjVu slowly migrated to PDF because that’s what people expected. The inertia of a monopolized format is its own kind of gravity.
But here’s the thing about DjVu it can still fail on its own terms too.
The format struggles with documents that don’t fit its model. Mixed content pages heavy graphics, complex layouts, colored text overlays don’t compress well because the foreground/background separation assumption breaks down. Modern documents aren’t just scanned pages anymore. They’re interactive, they’re layered, they contain forms and scripts and multimedia. DjVu was designed for a world where “digitizing a document” meant pointing a scanner at paper. That world is shrinking.
And then there’s the human factor. Nobody wants to maintain a format that requires explaining. Every time you send someone a .djvu file, you’re signing up for a conversation: “What’s this?” “You need what program?” “Why can’t I just open it in Chrome?” (idk why people still use browsers to read pdf docs but who am I to say) Friction is a killer. No matter how elegant the compression, if the user experience is a speed bump, people will choose the bloated alternative.
DjVu also never solved the problem of native searchability. OCR has to be applied as a separate hidden text layer, whereas modern PDFs can embed searchable text from the start. In an age where Ctrl+F is a basic expectation, this is a real handicap.
So yeah, DjVu can fail. It might already be failing. It exists in that uncomfortable space between “technically brilliant” and “practically dead” the graveyard of formats that were better but lost anyway.
Tu te fous de ma gueule là? feels like the right response to all of this.
To a world where the worse format won because the company behind it was better at extraction. To DjVu sitting in archives and library servers, quietly doing its job at a tenth of the size, invisible because nobody bothered to build the ecosystem around it. To all the technologies that were objectively superior but lost to the machinery of convenience and capital.
Are you fucking my face right now?
Yes. Yes you are.
But I’ll keep my DjVu files. I’ll keep the phrase too.
Dave screams at capitalism once again.