iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Tim Bray

Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

The human face of the Autistici/Inventati affair, “Canceling Emilyh”: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… “The wastrels in Washington can reach across the ocean and silence a Canadian creator on an Italian website. With no prior […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Canadian eco-social practice artist Emily van Lidth de Jeude in her studio, 2023, working on a series about wildfires. Beside her on the floor stands a portrait of her Ukrainian grandmother.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

Petition to block MAGA PE scum from owning crucial Canadian payment infrastructure, namely Moneris: www.ourcommons.ca/Petitions/en/Peti…

ourcommons.ca

Petition e-7712 - Petitions

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

In which I fix a straightforward concurrency problem in my Go code, with multiple side-trips: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #software #concurrency #Golang

I just landed a PR that fixed a nasty data race in Quamina. Which shouldn’t have been technically challenging, but I took side-trips into Erlang, unit test footguns, whether or not I should go on accepting LLM-generated PRs, and programming while aging.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

Hmm, the Linux Foundation has a thing at x402.org, payment infrastructure using the HTTP "402 PAYMENT REQUIRED" status code that: 1. Is said to "empower agentic payments at scale", 2. Specifically lists as an advantage that you can ignore Know-Your-Customer legislation, 3. Accomplishes […]

cosocial.ca

Original post on cosocial.ca

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

In which I try to clarify the issues around #GenAI watermarking its text output without requiring readers to be computer professionals: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the GenAI giants “watermarking” their output, which to say inserting data so you can tell that it’s been generated by ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever. The technology for watermarking images is as old as dirt, works as advertised, and doesn’t affect image quality. What’s new and controversial is a claim that they can watermark text output cheaply, simply, and without harming the quality of the text.
I was curious how they did this so I dug in a bit. I’m mostly convinced that it works and is pretty clever. However, all the explanations are full of Computer-Science jargon that you need to be a professional developer to understand. So here’s an attempt to explain to non-insiders and then, indirectly, opinions on whether it’s good and what it means and doesn’t mean.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

In which I spend a week engaged and immersed in music, learn a new instrument and genre, am made full of joy. And suggest that some of you should do this too. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #music

WCAMS 43rd Summer Music Camp 2026

A drawing of three sea creatures performing on musical instruments.

WCAMS

WEST COAST AMATEUR MUSICIANS SOCIETY

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

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 […]

cosocial.ca

Original post on cosocial.ca

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

In which I write about the costs & benefits of making automata deterministic, with graphs and tables, and assistance from bluesman Willie Dixon: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #automata #software

Bluesman WIllie Dixon (1915-1992), composer of "Built For Comfort."

Graph of the event-matching performance of a deterministic finite automaton. Events/second vs number of patterns. As the number increases, the E/s is initially disorderly but settles into a more or less horizontal shape.

Graph of the cost of adding a Pattern to an automaton in the case where the automata are nondeterministic. The increase in cost is unruly and jagged but more or less linear in the number of patterns.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

“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 […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Graph from Oxfam showing % of global wealth held by the richest 1% vs the other 99% between 2010 and 2015. In 2015 the lines cross.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/04/2026

I read the 2¼ novels making up the new series “The Captive’s War” by “James S.A. Corey” i.e. Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. They’re most famous for “The Expanse” and while so far I’m not enjoying this series as much, I think it’s on a good trajectory. More […]

cosocial.ca

Original post on cosocial.ca

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 16/04/2026

In which I grab a camera and go for a walk at dusk and try to convince you to do the same: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #photography

At dusk, a scattering of toys on grass next to a tree trunk

In a shop window, three mannequins are garishly dressed in bright colors.

Fruit-ptree blossoms (small and white with a touch of pink) on a branch (old and black with lichen)

A plant with glossy green leaves and intense yellow-orange stalks.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 10/04/2026

In which I think out loud about Password Managers and take a closer look at 1Password and Bitwarden: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #security

tbray.org

Password Manager Angst

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/03/2026

“Recently I read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel and fertilize its growth […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

The covers of "Because Internet" by Gretchen Mcculloch and "Algospeak" by Adam Aleksic.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/02/2026

1/2 Two new blog pieces. In which I have opinions about GenAI and open-source: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #GenAI #opensource

tbray.org

Open Source and GenAI?

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 15/02/2026

In which Claude Opus invades my open-source hobby project. The experience was… surprising. Fairly raw anecdata here, analysis and reactions still to come: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #GenAI #claude

tbray.org

Quamina + Claude, Case 1

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/02/2026

“Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day.” www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… This time out, featuring lots of […]

cosocial.ca

Original post on cosocial.ca

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 28/01/2026

I assume there are how-to-migrate-to-Blacksky docs somewhere? First step: Move PDS, right?

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/01/2026

It took a year, but Quamina now has a full regular-expression capability, so I released 2.0.0. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #Golang #automata #opensource

tbray.org

Quamina v2.0.0

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 17/01/2026

Huh, @icegov.bsky.social is an interesting case. In the Fediverse, most instances probably wouldn’t host that account, but some would. The account would be broadly blocked, and some instances would probably block the hosting instance. Some folks would migrate between servers based on these choices.

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 03/01/2026

January 3, 2025: Start of the Epstein Files War.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 20/12/2025

“What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling.” www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

tbray.org

Humanist Plumbing

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 10/12/2025

˚The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that. To me, the urgent and interesting questions are how widespread the damage will be and what the hangover will feel like.” www.tbray.org/ongoing/When...

tbray.org

After the Bubble

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/12/2025

Tracy Numbers: “Here’s a story about African rhythms and cancer and combinatorics.” www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… (Also #caturday)

A black cat with a colorful collar is examining a Gankoquim a dual-cowbell instrument from Ghana.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2025

In which I write about the pretty-awesome experience of attending the MLS quarter-final game with my son and 53,095 other good friends, and how getting interested in fútbol has had the side-effect that I’ve lost most of my interest in football (as in NFL) […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Whitecaps fans gather in a nearby pub before the game.

A portion of a large crowd at an indoor stadium, displaying a huge banner. Left of the banner is text “fire that burns”, center is a vaguely Tolkienesque photo of scary reptilian eyes, right is text "blue melts gold"

Whitecaps fans parade cheerfully down Granville, singing dopey songs and chanting dopey chants.

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 14/11/2025

I thought the @sarahkendzior.bsky.social suspension was an interestingly nontrivial moderation scenario. I wrote up a little case study/explainer on how it might have been handled on Mastodon. Probably only for people who care about moderation nitty-gritty. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When...

Actions available to a Mastodon moderator

More actions available to a Mastodon moderator

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 12/11/2025

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s becoming any combination of “less useful”, “less safe”, or “less fun”. I’ve been on Mastodon for 3 years and am convinced that right now, in late 2025, it’s the best place to go. Come join me. Here’s why. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When...

tbray.org

Time to Migrate

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Elad Nehorai @eladn.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Reinstate Sarah Kendzior

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 12/11/2025

Hmm: Ms Kendzior said: “the last things I posted were excerpts from my substack newsletter articles”. From her most recent “When I loved New York”: “for example, arrest war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu”. I wonder if that phrase gets you banned? sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/when-i-lov...

sarahkendzior.substack.com

When I Loved New York

Will Mamdani bring back the city I remember? Can anyone?

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 11/11/2025

WTF Sarah Kendzior?!

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 03/11/2025

Over the weekend I ripped Google search out of my blog because it doesn’t work very well any more and replaced with PageFind, which is really pretty cool. Details: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

tbray.org

Bye, Google Search

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/10/2025

“Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.” www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

tbray.org

Grokipedia

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 26/10/2025

*crickets*

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2025

News flash: There’s lots of really good new music out there! Here’s some of it: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… Featuring: Kwashibu Area Band (Ghana), New Eves (UK), The Good Ones (Rwanda), Alfa Mist (UK), Sona Jobarteh […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Vanessa SWagner plays Phil Glass's Piano Etudes

The Good Ones, “Rwanda Sings with Strings”

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 05/10/2025

Check out the “Nadia story”, and an explanation of how we can make it easier to tell when media is faked and when it’s real, with existing technology: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When...

tbray.org

Social Media Provenance Challenge

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Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · 04/10/2025

Yesterday, Kristi Noem’s and Greg Bovino’s masked agents threw chemical agents near an elementary school, arrested elected officials exercising their First Amendment rights, and raided a Wal-Mart.

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Reposted by Tim Bray

Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2025

In which I (probably foolishly) make a bunch of predictions about the future of #GenAI: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

tbray.org

GenAI Predictions

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 26/09/2025

Does Bluesky Social PBC publish any financial disclosures? I'm super interested in the economics of post-Twitter decentralized social media. (I'm similarly poking around the Fediverse and OMG it's complicated.)

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2025

Last week I gave a talk at the IPTC’s “Photo Metadata Conference”. Here’s a blog-ified version, with lots of juicy digging into exactly what works and what’s broken in C2PA in 2025. Also strong opinions about provenance. And a link to the YouTube recording […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Photo in a shopping mall in Sydney, Australia, which includes Content Credentials.

Content Credentials display provided by Lightroom describing the editing of a photograph.

Contributor details: Information shared by people involved in making this content

Produced by

Timothy Bray
@Instagram twbray
@LinkedIn Tim Bray

Content Details
Information about this content and how it was made.

App or device used

Lightroom Classic 14.5.1

Recorded by

Adobe Inc. on Sep 9, 2025

Actions

Color or exposure edits
Adjusted properties like tone, saturation, curves, shadows, or highlights
Cropping Edits
Used cropping tools, reducing or expanding visible content area
Opened
Opened a pre-existing file
Ingredients
L100004.DNG
Recorded by Leica Camera AG

Photograph taken with a Google Pixel 10 of objects on a desktop: A small black statuette of Budai, a crystal ball, and the base of a wooden lamp. Two wooden shafts appear in the background, but their nature is a mystery.

The photo has been edited using Google's Magic Erase and that fact is disclosed in its Content Credentials.

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 16/09/2025

This Thu is the “IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2025”, a free Zoom event open to all. I’m a speaker ( on #C2PA). Looks like it should be interesting for anyone interested in the tangle of issues about media provenance, #genAI, publishing workflow, social media, and so on. iptc.org/events/photo...

iptc.org

Photo Metadata Conference 2025 - IPTC

IPTC is the global standards body of the news media. We provide the technical foundation for the news ecosystem.

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Tim Bray @tbray.org · 04/09/2025

Due to my persistent yelling about C2PA and provenance, I’ve been invited to speak at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2025: iptc.org/events/photo-metadata - September 18th. It’s a free Zoom thing, so if you’re interested in this stuff, sign up and drop by.

iptc.org

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2025

I'm still digging into #C2PA and have a problem: I don’t have a camera that is equipped. If anyone reading this has such a camera, I’d sure appreciate it if they could take a picture of, well, anything, with embedded C2PA, and shoot me a copy. Should the work ever go public, I’d provide […]

cosocial.ca

Original post on cosocial.ca

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

About birds, bees, a lovely garden, and a remarkable old lens: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #Photography #Maritimes

A bee captured in flight looks ridiculously surprised.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2025

Just came back from vacation in Canada’s Maritimes. Doesn’t mean I have any insights to offer about the area, but it’s super photogenic and my blog is going to be bulging with pictures over the next few days. Starting here: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

Looking across the ocean at a shoreline with houses along the waterfront, rising wooded hills behind, blue sky above.

On a very calm lake, a cluster of kids horsing around make circular ripples. In the background, forested lands and a blue sky.

A wide expanse of waterfront exposed by low tide, the sun is low and casts my shadow across the rocky surface.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2025

Three small announcements: 1. RFC 9839, a guide to which Unicode characters you should never use: www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9839.html 2. Blog piece with background and context, “RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode”: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… 3. A little Go library […]

cosocial.ca

Original post on cosocial.ca

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2025

Visited my 95-year-old Mom in Saskatchewan and came away with Prairie pictures and thoughts on memory and topography and Google color science and healthcare economics. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #Photography #saskatchewan

The sky, between dark trees, is full of blue and pink color at sunset.

A gravel road goes straight away and uphill over the horizon. To its left, a row of telephone poles. Above, richly-blue sky. To either side, brilliant yellow canola flowers. On the horizon the right, a cluster of trees and buildings marks a farm.

A red neon sign, all-caps, in swirling lines that suggest the stripes of a flag, reads "EVERY AMERICAN FLAG IS A WARNING SIGN".

A large room with large and colorful artworks on its wall.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2025

In which I argue that arguments about whether #genAI is useful or not are the wrong arguments. The important issues are what it’s for and what it costs. Having very unkind feelings about the people pushing it. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202…

tbray.org

The Real GenAI Issue

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