Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca), page 3

@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

RE: https://mastodon.social/@aboutsignal/116296187044136063

This is freaking awesome. The amount of work the global cryptographic community is putting into keeping our conversations out of the hands of our adversaries is monumental and under-appreciated. Respect. If you’re technical at all, scan through the paper summaries.

#privacy

@taylorlorenz I'd second the recommendation for @cwebber

I'd also recommend a glance at my essay on why Mastodon/Fedi is currently the best choice for social networking: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/11/03/Time-to-Migrate

Hmm, writing a thing and, without thinking about it, used the verb “enslopify”. I can’t be the first. I think it’ll catch on.

#GenAI

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116261526543583522

The reason I joined the Android team in 2010, and that since 2008 I’ve carried Android not iOS devices, was that I could just download software. And other people could download mine.

This new process is a massive breaking of faith with the community.

To be fair, every year or two Apple ratchets up the difficulty of downloading Mac apps.

The doors on every open platform are swinging closed, fast or slow. Capitalism is broken. Another reason we need to protect the Web.

Feaugh.

Super disappointed that this was left undisclosed: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b

I don’t see how you can build a VC-supported free product without slipping into the Torment Nexus which is to say AdTech.

I do believe the Bluesky people really do want to try to do this. But I still don’t see how.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/116251321191395352

Why not both?

@evan I said "no" but then remembered having seen one in a past life. It was kind of hard to understand and I was left with the impression that it was *really important* to know who paid for the construction of the inventory.

Not that I’m cynical or anything.

@evan @KimCrayton1 It was *so* expat. There was even the Beirut Softball League, teams included the AUB faculty, AUB students, local American High School, US Marines at the embassy, Japanese community, and "The Pilgrims", all the missionaries and other official Christians.

@KimCrayton1 I was an expat for 11 years, our family lived in Lebanon, my Dad was a professor at the American University of Beirut. I think the defining characteristic is that we, and all of Lebanon's tens of thousands of other expats, knew that one day we'd pull up stakes and head home. We were not really members of Lebanese society.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/115580076628853324

This was posted 4 months ago, i.e. forever in LLM time. I would really like to see a fully-worked through analysis of the actual GHG cost of #GenAI in general and for coding applications specifically. Including, obviously, training, data centre infrastructure, silicon fabrication, etc.

The reason: I have trouble reconciling these numbers with the insane volumes of investment capital going into the space.