Remote
Tim Bray 🇨🇦
@timbray@cosocial.ca
mastodon 4.6.4Web geek and environmentalist with a camera at the bottom left corner of Canada. He/him.
These posts are coming from a member-owned cooperative: https://cosocial.info
My posts are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
20873 Followers
1145 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 11, 2022
Location:
Vancouver 🍁
Favorite sushi:
Negitoro
GitHub:
It dawns on me that every LLM’s training input probably includes “Reflections on Trusting Trust” along with a lot of other material pointing to it admiringly and saying how important it is. Then I read about the “rogue agent” behaviors in the recent OpenAI meltdown and there’s this terrified scream starting to echo around the back of my brain.
#genAI
RE: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/117336957850753345
BTW, want to say that modern phone-cams are freaking excellent - it was *really* dark when this was taken - Pixel 10, no flash - and it’s only very lightly touched up in Lightroom. The picture would have technically impossible on any camera not so long ago.
Since .org domains now apparently exist at the discretion of MAGA wastrels, just bought tbray.ca. Would rather not migrate the blog, but…
I frequently find myself explaining, often to people I don’t know, why it is that my online home is on #Mastodon, why I’m putting time and effort into building and running an instance, and why those are the best choices.
So here’s my latest effort to pull all the arguments I use together in a coherent sequence: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/07/05/Choose-Mastodon
VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/02/cancer-capital/
Wanna read a maximally-anti-#GenAI screed? Here ya go: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
I now only rarely work behind the doors of companies doing major tech deployments so won’t comment on how accurate-vs-overblown this piece is, but the writing is lucid.
I’m pretty sure that some flavors of #GenAI will find wholesome uses in the post-bubble future, but for the moment I feel a wave of revulsion every time I encounter AI cheerleading because it never NEVER acknowledges the force-field of greed and fear under the overhang of the multi-trillion-dollar bet being made by people I loathe who are oblivious to the oncoming financial and social wreckage they are facilitating.
He’s not very smart, but that fur.
Mostly just leaves. If they look a little weird, it’s because I’m shooting into a fishtank.
#photography #FishTanksOfMastodon #Fujifilm
Say hello to Mr Shrimp.
#Photography #CrustaceansOfMastodon
Walked by an open door at the Music Camp and there was this young-teens electric band inside playing “California Dreaming”, skinny little girls with pure voices just killing it. Stopped. The other old guy and I listening by the open door smiled at each other, tears in our eyes.
TFW you find and fix the rare-but-obvious race condition and the relevant unit test now runs 50x slower. #software #concurrency
Definitely not wanting to live in Yegge’s future. Or at least to not have anything to do with software.
A symptom of a system that is deeply broken:
https://popular.info/p/taxpayers-spend-about-2-billion-annually
#USpol
Tl;dr: In football/soccer news, the FIFA scum announced a plan to spin the World Cup and the rest of their tournaments into a private corporation with investment from the Kushner scum and specified some ridiculously short deadline.
We are trying to move our cats off US-made supermarket cat food to something local and alleged to be of better quality. There are 2 cats, fat/smart and black/dim. There are 2 food categories, dry & wet. So far we are 25% there, fat/smart has relented and accepts that the new dry food is edible.
As for the other 75% there are many puzzled looks (“what is this stuff in my bowl?”) and resentful glares (“you used to give me food, why aren’t you giving me food!”).
Wish us luck.
#catsofmastodon
Seen on the Malahat. It’s about this: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/red-dress-day
This is cool: https://dnsisbeautiful.com/traceroute/tbray.org
(I mean, it’s still always DNS, but cool nonetheless.)
h/t @Quinnypig@awscommunity.social
OK, I’m impressed: https://jeantimex.github.io/threejs-water/
In which the non-technical world notices the concept of the “Open Web”, and Google’s abandonment of it: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/google-ai-oligarchy-and-the-end-of-the-open-web - Essential reading, I think.
I know this has been heavily linked to, but Evans’ “Ways to think about token pricing” - https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/7/9/ways-to-think-about-token-pricing - is really very good and everyone making a bet on #GenAI should bloody well read it with close attention.
RE: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/116988481487869187
Not that I’m obsessive or anything.
RE: https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/toronto-qajtcaoiz/-/a-AsI_bKk-RO6ZBi4dIpufvQ%3Aa%3A107108217-%2F0
I'm old, I can remember when the CN Tower was new. A small group of artists anonymously plastered downtown TO with maps showing the radius that was at risk should the tower fall over. Cool visual design. There was a flurry of news coverage before people figured out it was art.
Enjoying the crosscutting currents of Odyssey crit, including this, although Laurie Penny liking was not exactly on my radar: https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/theres-only-one-wrong-opinion-about?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=433868&post_id=209026786&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=wabr&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Replying to
Idea: For the next installment in the “Game of Thrones” franchise, base the plot on the endless IETF meltdown about non-hybrid post-quantum cryptography.
The best write-up on the technology issues is, by far, from @sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange - https://keymaterial.net/2025/11/27/ml-kem-mythbusting/ - since it has a lot of math, I was thinking someone should write a story-oriented narrative, and the GoT scriptwriters have definitely shown the right skillset.
I decided against a link to the mailing-list archive, life is too short.
In which I spend a week engaged and immersed in music, learn a new instrument and genre, am made full of joy. And suggest that some of you should do this too. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/07/26/Music-Camp
#music
Fútbol match tomorrow in Vancouver is the Pride game: https://www.whitecapsfc.com/news/spectator-aug-1-2026-pride-presented-telus
They’ve been doing this for years, but I’m not 100% sure this is their best-ever Pride promotion:
Turns out I’m not the only one who’s moved to Qobuz for music: https://www.wired.com/story/qobuz-is-the-anti-spotify-we-need-right-now/
#music #qobuz
B.C. declares provincewide state of emergency as wildfires force thousands out of homes | CBC
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/bc-wildfires-aug-8-summerland-evacuation-9.7300648
For some reason, something opaque inside Google is sending a few dozen people a minute to this 2004 blog post:
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/18/Borked
(Ok, it's an amusing piece.)
Hoping the employers in England are tolerant of less-than-100%-effective staff performance tomorrow morning. #worldcup
putt.day #62 ⛳ 10/12 Eagle · 🔥6
🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢
https://putt.day/s/XU1QsN7bgZOZ
O joy and delight, Dependabot has always made me nervous and here's its latest little gift, a patch to some CI/CD dependency I totally don't understand, includes “with Copilot"…
Q1: Am I the only person frightened by Dependabot?
Q2: Are there any people out there who (a) like GenAI and (b) still find this particular callout unnerving? [no point asking what the contras think]
#software #cicd #genai
Replying to
@evan@cosocial.ca I decline to update that 21-year-old post. It represents 2005's state of the art.
Huh… discovered our everyday VPN “Private Internet Access” has sketchy ownership with heavy Unit 8200 links and other red flags. Looked at some others… ick. What’s a good general-purpose VPN that doesn’t have weird ownership or a history of data leaks and is technically competent? Our instinct is to avoid free products.
#VPN
Replying to
@nelson@tech.lgbt Hard to tell from just the raw Apache log, which is all I keep around. It took the trouble to run the javascript, which isn't nothing. The referer field is the usual bushwah.
Replying to
@jrf_nl@phpc.social I admire your approach. Sadly, I suspect that a huge majority of the world's workflows are cut/pasted from someone's last project, which were cut/pasted back in 2022 from their buddy who’s “good at GitHub”.
Hey, looking for a Windows consultant in Vancouver, got a friend, a successful psychologist, whose install and hosting are all messed up and needs the kind of help I can't give. Will pay, obviously but it's a small job. DMs open.
#FediHire
RE: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/116814653971666254
It has come to my attention that some people don’t know about JWZ’s “Recent Movies and TV” pieces. If you’re one of them, stop what you’re doing and go read this.
#movies #tv
Quoting
Recent movies and TV.
The Bride! (2026): Frankenstein is having a moment. This one is absolutely amazing! Where Poor Things was Arthouse Frankenstein, this is more of a Grindhouse Frankenstein. It wears all of the references. There's a little bit of...
https://jwz.org/b/yk8y
Replying to
@jrf_nl@phpc.social Technically I guess you're right, but this mass of low-level low-profile CI/CD building blocks feels to me like part of Dependabot, never seen any of them outside of one of its PRs.
Why yes, I am watching the Kennedy Center livestream. If I were in DC I'd be there. And I'm not even American. #USpol