Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)

@anildash We can learn that it is probably not useful to compare technology that has billions in desperate investor cash behind it to something that's trying to build its way up from grassroots in a way that might produce a pretty good outcome while not being remotely investable.

Sad stuff: https://aphyr.com/posts/387-the-future-of-customer-support-is-lies-i-guess

#genAI

Good on Signal! https://signal.org/blog/signal-doesnt-recall/

Not only are they doing the right thing, they’re publishing a clear, forceful, and occasionally amusing write-up on how and why:

For Example: <quote>“Take a screenshot every few seconds” legitimately sounds like a suggestion from a low-parameter LLM that was given a prompt like “How do I add an arbitrary AI feature to my operating system as quickly as possible in order to make investors happy?”

@evan
*snicker* do you not have more than one pair of jeans?

@tlariv @jszym

@jszym @evan @tlariv Me too.

@evan Also wondering what "hard" means in this context.

There was that story last month about the Turks demanding that certain opposition Bluesky accounts be silenced. They were (mostly, sort of, it’s complicated). I dug into it and came away with an essay on what we want and don’t want concerning censorship or no-censorship and how well #Bluesky and the #Fediverse might give us that: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/04/28/Censoring-Social-Media

#censorship

Hard at work on the back porch.

#caturday #photography

In which I claim that a few annoying #Fediverse problems (and ATproto too) could be solved by using URI schemes the way they’re designed to be used: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/04/16/Decentralized-Schemes

Today is the second anniversary of the launch of our member-owned co-op Mastodon instance, #CoSocialCa. My contributions to it are the most satisfying work I’ve done in years. Here’s a blog essay that goes further and argues that the future of social media looks a lot like CoSocial: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/04/05/The-CoSocialist-Future

CoSocial’s pillars: Decentralization, Non-profit-seeking, Legal registration, Non-zero onboarding friction, Transparency, and Advertising rejection.

@evan And also, no country in the world is offering to facilitate ethnic cleansing by being the expulsion target. And also, it's a fucking racist fucking genocidal outrage.

@evan The trouble is that the poll risks creating the impression that the Smotrich/Trump lethal racist ethnic-cleansing proposal are a thing that reasonable people can argue about the benefits/costs of. I decline to join such a discussion.

@evan I think you might want to reformulate that? Yes, many Palestinians have left Gaza for the same reasons my Norwegian ancestors left for the new world. Others leave in terror of Israeli butchery. What does “voluntary” mean? Are you asking in the specific context of the 2024/5 slaughter? Are you talking about individual movements or ethnic cleansing?

Israel killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers one by one, says UN: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/31/israel-killed-15-palestinian-paramedics-and-rescue-workers-one-by-one-says-un

Ouch, this sent a chill down my spine. [Tl;dr: GitHub locked a repo apparently because one of its contributors was in a US-sanctioned region]:

1. https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370
2. https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114233788700982882

I’m a paying customer of 404 Media, but I can’t bring myself to read more than the first couple of sentences of their recent “AI Slop” and “Brainrot” stories: https://www.404media.co/tag/ai/

It is beyond belief how terrible people can be. And how eager Big Tech is to facilitate them.

Very hard to avoid burn-it-all-down-and-sow-the-ruins-with-salt thinking.

#genAI

It has been said that the Fediverse in general is a progressive bubble and I think that assertion is fair-ish. Certainly true of me and I think somewhat true of our coop-owned #CoSocialCa instance.

So, let me introduce our own @mpjgregoire , an actual Canadian Conservative on CoSocial who, unlike certain other of our Tories, has never emitted the slightest stench of MAGA, at least that I’ve noticed: https://cosocial.ca/@mpjgregoire/114213512761645455

#CDNpoli

There are a lot of Canadians who don’t want to visit the US just now. But if you have to, I would strongly advise going by air, because US CBP is in the airport in Canada. So they can still arbitrarily refuse entry because you voted Liberal or your name is Nadia or whatever, but they can’t throw you into detention without recourse, which they definitely can at the highway crossings, and seem to be doing more of.

#USpol

From a scholarships person at a well-known US University: “They’re telling me to take down the minority scholarships. I’m trying to resist.” Someone notes that in these situations, if left with no alternative, HTTP status code 451 (Unavailable for legal reasons) may be appropriate.

#USpol

In which an unpaid open-source maintainer gets help from companies using the software to attack a particularly complex and ugly bug: https://blog.hartwork.org/posts/expat-2-7-0-released/

Good on Sebastian and on the companies that stepped up!

Also, recursion is often bad.

#oss