iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 13h

Vancouver’s new mayor! I saw this back in August but didn't post it, because Pete didn't get to choose what his posters appeared next to. He got my vote and won the election. #Vancouver #BCPoli

A photo of four posters in a grid. Top and bottom left are the same election poster: "Our Guy Pete Fry for mayor. A city that works for you. And a mayor who will too". Pete is bald, in a dark suit and tie, sharing a kind of goofy grin.

Top right poster: "Dana's Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary. Mushrooms - LSD - DMT - 2CB - Kratom - Payote - mushroomdispensary.com - your friendly neighborhood psychedelic shop"

bottom right:

Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary
Medican Cannabis Dispensary

Get your drugs tested
We have re-opened!
new locations!
649 E. Hastings
247 W. Broadway

Check website for hours

GetYourDrugsTested.com

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 20h

Why Hunterbrook is shorting Meta: hntrbrk.com/breaking-news/muse-tick… A word of explanation: Hunterbrook is a team of investigative journalists in the employ of a private-capital fund. The journey dig up dirt on some company or investment […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Downloads of Meta’s Muse — the product CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the centerpiece of our vision” — are down 8.1% week-over-week.
Muse still has fewer than three million daily active users, far lower than Threads had at this point in its launch to compete with X. Growth in DAUs has slowed from an average daily net increase of 198,000 in late September to just 74,000 in the first week of October — a 62.4% slowdown.
App-review volume also fell. Combined Android and iOS reviews averaged about 674 a day in the week ending October 7, down 11.6% from the prior week.
Hunterbrook previously reported that Muse could endanger privacy, including systematically identifying members of vulnerable groups.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

Went to a family wedding and did some touristing in Australia, where we have friends & rels. Came back with lightweight observations and a few decent pictures: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #australia #photography

Sunrise through an airplane window with ice crystals; also a reflection of the camera and photographer.

A bunch of colorful spiritually-themed small pieces including skulls and Buddhist devikl faces

Shadow on a gauzy curtain of a young girl making a heart shape with her arms

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

“Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production”: fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf?ref=404media.… [Long and dense, have only scanned it, which was enough to convince me to share it.] #genAI

Artificial Intelligence in the Firm:
Bottlenecks in Software Production
Fiona Chen
Harvard University
Job Market Paper
James Stratton
Harvard University
Current version: August 4, 2026
First version: January 7, 2026
Click here for current version
Abstract
We study the impacts of AI coding assistants and agents on software engineering work, using
a novel proprietary dataset from an engineering analytics platform, covering 300 million work
events — including GitHub coding activity, Jira issues, and Google Calendar events — across
718 firms. We use a staggered difference-in-differences design, exploiting variation in firm-
level adoption timing of AI coding assistants and agents. Both technologies increase coding
productivity. However, productivity gains do not fully pass through to changes in software output
or employment. For AI agents, this incomplete pass-through reflects a bottleneck from code
review: review times increase, a larger share of code updates require revisions, and reviews
involve more comments. We develop a model of software production to structure these results, in
which AI affects both productivity and quality of intermediate outputs, and in turn can generate
a review bottleneck and limit pass-through.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

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 […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

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

Greg Ip
Oct. 2, 2026 at 5:30 am ET

Bar graph of proportions of GDP for
Health: 18%
Food 9.1%
AI services (assumed for 2032) 8.8%
Energy: 5.1%
Construction: 4.4%
Computers, software: 4.4%
Defense: 2.8%
Communication, Internet: 1.22%

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Blue-ribbon management consultancy Bain offers “New Innovation Is Required to Fund AI’s $6 Trillion Buildout” - www.bain.com/insights/new-innovatio… Tl;dr: The believably-projected […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

A graph entitled Global market for AI, in trillions of US dollars

There are 3 bars in the graph - $200B-400B for Consumer subscription and ad revenue, $1T-$1.4T for Enterprise productivity: Software development IT, sales, marketing, and finally $4.2 "Innovation required: Search and advertising, autonomous everything, physical AI, new product development

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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

I updated my blog’s Colophone: www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Colophon from which I quote: “The words here are not AI-generated”. #genAI

Principles · The following are important: ¶

1. The words here are not AI-generated. Exceptions occur only as examples in discussions of AI-related issues and are clearly labeled.

2. I edit pictures with software which advertises its use of AI, for example in operations such as “Select sky” and “Denoise”. However, I claim that none of the pictures are in any way AI-generated.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

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 […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

MORAL
The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did
not totally create yourself. (Especially code from com-
panies that employ people like me.) No amount of
source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you
from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possi-
bility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler.
I could have picked on any program-handling program
such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware mi-
crocode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs
will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed
microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

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

#Vancouver culture - this is at Luppolo Brewing Co. on Venables in East Van. Pizzas, mostly veg, all good. Two excellent pilsners. Peaceful patio. Recommended.

On a tabletop there is a pizza featuring green leaves and tomato topping, also a salad with garlic bread and a white dairy topping. To the sides, glasses and cutlery.

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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 · 29/08/2026

Boy, mixed feelings on this one: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-colu… That's 400 good union jobs lost in a town of 5,000 people, gonna hurt. On the other hand, cutting down temperate […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Sunset over the sea, mountains in background, pink clouds above, pink water below. Against the clouds, a horizontal layer of grey pollution.

B.C.'s Howe Sound pulp and Paper announces mill operations stopping indefinitely

Domtar says aouncement will affect approximately 400 employees.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Here’s today’s dose of raw fear about bubble-icious #GenAI finance constructs: www.ft.com/content/9cb63980-cd43-41…

The multiplying Rrisks of financing data centers

Wall Street players extending themselves to underwrite this colossal new asset class are looking to limit exposure

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Just finished “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(nove… A very rewarding single evening’s worth of reading. It’s called a “novel” I guess because there are fictional characters but to me it feels more like a book-length poem, a […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

ORBITAL
A NOVEL
SAMANTHA HARVEY
"Ravishingly beautiful." -NEW YORK TIMES
"Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage … and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye.” THE GUARDIAN

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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 · 22/08/2026

@cheeaun Hey, wondering what the little moon graphic on the 1min means.

screen cap of a post. Phanpy says it is one minute old; next to the “1m” there’s a little glyph that looks like the moon.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

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. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #Vancouver #Photography

A man smiles at the camera.He's sitting at a table which displays multiple book versions of “The Odyssey”. Also another entitled “All New Mind Benders”

A woman, seen from behind, is selecting blossoms from the back of a truck which is full of flowers for sale.

Customers gather at the Main Street Honey Shop street stand; one is wearing exuberantly pink/violet overalls.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Sometimes the rent-a-car company emits a good surprise.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

For those in #Vancouver who (like me) are grumpy about the Broadway subway-construction chaos (hey, the train will be great, totally worthwhile in the big picture) you’ll be happy to hear that at least there are many humans actively employed along that chunk of […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

Multiple cranes and excavators are working on a street rebuild with green trees in the background. A few construction workers are visible if you have a magnifying glass.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

Listen carefully for the tiny screams. They’re coming from the red pixels on your screen. #photography

Intensely dark-red leaves (coleus, maybe?) are illuminated from behind by summer sun.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026

In which I support my West-African percussion habit with new drums, write a bit about the vibe, recommend vendors, and get to use the word “onomatopoeic”: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #music #DrumsOfMastodon

Three West-African-style dununs on a rough grass lawn. From left to right: Dununba, Sangban, Kenkini.

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

Went for late dinner with friends at their new place in Yaletown, 29th floor. #Vancouver #Photography

Looking down from a 29th floor balcony: trees, cars, ventilators, urban miscellany. Spot the toes!

Looking west at sunset from high above Yaletown. All the tall buildings with charmingly lit windows, pink clouds low, cirrus high.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

When the Rapture came, we sinners learned that the beach-volleyball club had been full of Godly people. #religion #photography

On a beach on a dull cloudy day there is a volleyball net and, lying on the sand, quite a few volleyballs. No humans are in sight.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

In which I post some nice water-reflection pictures but somehow the discourse gets out of control: www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/202… #photography #oligarchy

A very dark picture, evidently full of vegetation and trees with their roots in the air and branches pointing down. Closer examination reveals that it's a reflection in a dark murky surface.

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

Fútbol match tomorrow in Vancouver is the Pride game: www.whitecapsfc.com/news/spectator-… They’ve been doing this for years, but I’m not 100% sure this is their best-ever Pride promotion:

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

Tl;dr: In football/soccer news, the FIFA scum announced a plan to spin the World Cup and the rest of their tournaments into a private corporation with investment from the Kushner scum and specified some ridiculously short deadline. And now […] [Original post on cosocial.ca]

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

Mostly just leaves. If they look a little weird, it’s because I’m shooting into a fishtank. #photography #FishiesOfMastodon #Fujifilm

Against a dark background, plants with richly-green leaves, the leaves nearly round in shape.

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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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