Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca), page 2

Hey, I asked @douglascrockford and he confirmed my impression: This year (last month, actually) is JSON’s 25th birthday.

{ "greeting": "Happy birthday!"}

#json

@evan Turns out that this varies widely from sport to sport. I seem to recall that baseball has a relatively high level of randomness and tennis low, but they're the only ones I remember.

Spring comes. Feline guardian of the garden is fiercely alert!

#caturday

Spring storm on the prairie. Power out.

#skstorm

Idly wondering how badly it stresses the Fediverse fabric when someone with a lot of followers uploads a 75M video.

“Photographer Spends Night on Freezing Mountain to Capture Rare Triple Galaxy Arch” - astonishing photo and interesting how-it-was-done narrative.

https://petapixel.com/2026/05/08/photographer-spends-night-on-freezing-mountain-to-capture-rare-triple-galaxy-arch/

#Photography

“War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morphing into a hereditary aristocracy. So, what to do in a war one didn’t choose?”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/05/03/Life-During-Class-Wartime

#USpol #cdnpoli

This is the first litigation of this particular flavor that I remember seeing. Feels to me like Google might be in dangerous territory.

Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac sues Google over alleged defamation | CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/cape-breton-fiddler-ashley-macisaac-lawsuit-against-google-9.7187490

This is outrageous. Per Matt Levine “Musk saved about $143 million by illegally waiting to disclose his purchases [of Twitter shares] so he could buy more in secret.”https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/282521

But, who exactly did he illegally extract (let's just say “steal”) that money from? The stock market makes it difficult to identify victims.

If I stole 143 *thousand*, no matter from who, my ass would be in prison. Also, $143M is pocket change to this guy.

So, this calls for a prison sentence. No?

@cwebber What's a "slashdot", Grandmaw?

@evan Depends a *lot* on who they are and what our relationship is.

@evan I did and found it! In a "popular this week on Twitter" list

The software-dev community is many orders of magnitude too small to keep the bubble inflated.

And in fact #genAI works way better on code than on actual human language. Because the vocabulary is so much smaller and “doing the same as everyone else already has” is actually a good engineering practice.

So…

So those of you who are burning millions of tokens on Claude Code should probably be aware that you’re one of the few remaining forces inflating the bubble.

Whatever, it’ll pop anyhow, the #genAI space will become a tiny, mostly open-source, fraction of what it is today, and at that point. we devs can use it without feeling guilty.

@evan depends how many people are willing to pay, I guess.

So, more #genAI pain. By and large, the bubble's a bubble because the number of people out there in the business community who like it enough to be willing to pay for zillions of tokens, in aggregate trillions of dollars, is pretty small despite frantic pushing, and thus eventually it all pops.

There is an exception…

And, that's the software dev community, where (whether you like it or not) there are many people who are willing to spend, in aggregate, (a small number) of billions of dollars.

So, the investor community looks at that, gets dollar signs in their eyes, and says “Software is hard and GenAI is doing great there, so the rest of the world will pick it up, fer sure. Take my money, Sam!”

Except for…

https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/libre-opinion/969674/fedivers-lutter-contre-ingerence-etrangere-proteger-notre-democratie? (en français) Translated title: “The Fediverse resists foreign interference and protects our democracy”

#fediverse

Why those gorgeous shots from Artemis are courtesy of a 10-year-old Nikon camera, rather than anything shipped since then: https://petapixel.com/2026/04/06/the-10-year-old-nikon-d5-dslr-really-is-the-best-camera-for-artemis-ii/

#Photography #nikon

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116348093202515122

This piece is great and everything @cwebber says about it is true. I would add: If you feel like you mostly know what the author is saying about the development experience, maybe stay with it because it's really well-written. But if you don’t want to, skip down to where he takes up the ethics and humanities issues. Very deep and very intense stuff there. #genai