Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)

@trwnh @tchambers I really really don't think Fedi constructs are HTTP resources at all.

@trwnh @tchambers I suggest reading my blog post that Chambers linked to. The reliance on HTTP URLs is causing bad user experiences.

Here’s a person, Baldur Bjarnason, @baldur, who thinks I’m really wrong about LLMs and coding. I mostly don’t agree but the argument is well-presented: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/

2/2 If you’re not a business type and are wondering why the business types are so excited about genAI, here’s a sample of the kind of propaganda they’re getting: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Der8WWGeVxdOWx37bMV_nj9N1tUAVcvSSRa6qxKx75g/edit?slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1

Warning: If you are a person who loves books, this will probably be a very painful read.

1/2 “My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.”

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/06/My-AI-Angst

Wow, setting electric cars with 90kWh batteries on fire in the middle of a crowd is seriously fucking bad karma.

@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