Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)

Hm, @anildash has published WE ARE GOING TO KILL “UNALIVE” at https://www.anildash.com/2026/10/06/kill-unalive/ - you might enjoy it. Two things:

1. There’s a whole book on the subject called “Algospeak”, where the first chapter is entitled Why Your Kids Are Saying “Unalive”, read about it at https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/03/05/Because-Algospeak#p-2
2. Weirdly, Anil doesn't mention the Fediverse or Mastodon, which is currently the largest sustained effort to free online conversation from the tyranny of the advertisers’ algorithm. Disappointing.

@evan Us boomers are starting to fade pretty fast, too.

Hey, still more not-exactly-hippies casting side-eyes on the financial prospects for #GenAI, in this case the Wall Street Journal, in “Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It
To justify staggering investment sums, Americans will have to spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food”

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/will-america-spend-9-of-its-gdp-on-ai-the-industry-is-counting-on-it-3501bb4f?st=eJNL7P&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The #Fujifilm bandwagon is diverse: https://petapixel.com/2026/09/19/women-and-younger-photographers-are-behind-fujifilms-meteoric-rise/

Seems pretty obvious why: The cameras are smaller, lighter, and have really good ergonomics.

@anildash has written a few pieces about “cancer” capital recently, and his most recent, “Cancer Capital: It Sucks For Founders, Too!” gets specific about malfeasance: https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/09/cancer-capital-founders/

Also: Hey Anil, could you relax the kerning on that big-outline title font? It’s so tight it looks like it’s going to explode and shred my face.

#venturecapital

The human face of the Autistici/Inventati affair, “Canceling Emily”:
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/09/08/Emily-Got-Canceled

“The wastrels in Washington can reach across the ocean and silence a Canadian creator on an Italian website. With no prior legal process, nor any way to resist, and without fear of consequences.”

#art #USpol

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

Oh, for those that don’t recognize that title, here’s a link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/358198.358210

Read that and consider the volume of generated code in, increasingly, everything.

In which I argue that since happiness is harder to come by these days, you should bookmark it when it happens. With 10 pix of a local street fair.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/08/13/Happiness

#Vancouver #Photography

RE: https://mastodon.social/@KristopherWells/117137270954344025

Really no point in offering concessions to mercurial narcissist bullies.

From a review of a recent AC/DC concert randomly linked from my feed: “…the crowd exited smiling and, in many cases, well-juiced. Outside the arena exit gates, rows of teens were waiting to drive their parents home.”

#music

Codeberg is OK by me.

I’m not totally 100% sure that their calls (against #GenAI inputs and #Crypto related projects) will turn out in the rear-view mirror to have been correct, but at this point in history they’re hard to dislike.

@evan I decline to update that 21-year-old post. It represents 2005's state of the art.

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.)

Wikipedia entries for “Association Football”, “Football”, and other related articles, are a mess. Lousy (many broken) cites, dubious arm-wavey claims. Just did some basic top-down cleanup but much work is left. Keep your fingers and mind busy during hydration breaks and halftime!

#wikipedia #worldcup2026

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@ArtisanalPortents/116852226391726342

It’s on #CosocialCa so whatever it is, it must be Canadian. I was puzzled at the bold-face effect and (relatedly) why you can’t search for any of the “portents”. Sleazy #Unicode trickery FTW I guess.

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

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.

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

@evan Always Be Closing.