ongoing by Tim Bray

This summer has been very sporting; in the course of a couple of weeks I attended a World Cup match and a minor-league baseball game. Took pictures and thought about enjoying this stuff. “Haha, sportsball… I know that a whole lot of people, including not a few among my online audience, see neither joy nor virtue in fandom. That’s an attitude they’re entitled to have assuming they realize the absence of joy is a them thing. After joy there’s virtue. Yes, organized professional sport raises…

Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better, and by “something better” I mean Mastodon. Which I’m here to say not only offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives, but also that the alternatives are fatally flawed. By “Mastodon” I mean the many servers, mostly (but not all) running the Mastodon software, that communicate using the…

It’s been a while. February was the last entry in this Quamina Diary; I never stopped working on it but there hasn’t been much blogworthy. This piece offers a progress update for those who’ve been entertained by Quamina, and also a pleasing (well, to me anyhow) dip into finite-automata theory and practice. With numbers and graphs and a bluesman! Since it’s been so long, here’s what Quamina, a Go-language library, does: You can add “Patterns” to a Quamina instance, they match the values of…

The piece you’re now looking at exists because my latest “Long Links” curation of interesting not-lightweight material included quite a few focused on our dominant malaise, namely you-know-what, I mean it’s in the title. Plenty of people have had more than enough of this discourse and I thought I’d spare them by moving these bits over here. Let’s start with raw data: Is AI improving people’s lives? Christine Lemmer-Webber was kind enough to ask the world or at least the Mastodon part of it, and…

Hey everyone, I know you’re overloaded because everything has become overly efficient. Long-form reading or writing or art or music, who’s got time for that? Fortunately there are those who still do and here’s some if it. I hope one or two of the link targets can chisel their way into your jammed schedule and bring with them joy or rage or another appropriate feeling. Today’s curation has a lot of books and music and way more humor than usual. Also, a good electric wok. Now, let’s all take a…

The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m not the inventor of either, my name’s on the front of both official specifications. Hey, it’s JSON’s 25th birthday, what a run! And what ever happened to XML? Let’s shake off the dust and have a look. JSONiana RFC 8259 is now nine years old and, like all other RFCs, is immutable. And, as is usually the case, a list…

A person watching over my shoulder asked “How are you switching around so fast?” and I realized that while most readers here know this trick, some may not, and it’s awfully useful. [Update: I published an earlier version of this in 2012 but have got that “How do you” question a couple times recently, so maybe it’ll still be new news to a few people.] In all the browers I use, Command-1 takes you to your leftmost tab, command-2 to the next one over, and so on up to Command-8. Command-9 selects…

Recently I got an invitation from an organization I respect, to a gathering of senior people, unconference format. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it doesn’t reek of boosterism. My guess is that the discussions would be relatively intelligent and unbeliever contributions would be welcome. I declined, because it’s in the USA. Here’s the text; maybe someone in a similar situation might find it useful. Thanks to whoever thought of me for the kind invitation, which I must regretfully decline. I’m…

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. [I mean that, see below.] So, what to do in a war one didn’t choose? How bad is it? It’s really bad, and getting worse fast. I recommend cruising through Wikipedia’s excellent article on Distribution of wealth; maybe jump straight to the Wealth inequality section.…

That’s James S.A. Corey, which is to say Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and their new series The Captive’s War, an in-progress work comprising 2¼ or so novels. The Coreys are of course best-known for their deservedly wildly popular The Expanse series and the subsequent success of the streaming-video version. The new series is… different. If you’re wondering whether or not you should wade in, the following is for you. Minor and meta spoilers Don’t worry, you can go on reading even if you plan to…

On impulse, Lauren and I went out for a short walk — around just a few blocks — as the grey Spring afternoon shaded to dusk. On a second impulse, I grabbed the camera on the way out the door

Our family has used 1Password for many years. Most recently 1Password 7, now at least three years out of date. We didn’t want to upgrade to the latest version, went looking for alternatives, and have been exploring Bitwarden. The best choice isn’t obvious; here’s the story thus far

This will be the 30th Long-Links outing. I’m 100% sure that there does not live a human being who has looked at all those Links, but my logfiles say that quite a few of you, Dear Readers, at least take the time to open one occasionally. All aboard!

What happened was, soon after New Year’s, friends and colleagues in the UK and Germany started letting us know that their emails to us were bouncing. Our “textuality.com” family domain is a Google Workspace (or whatever they call it this year) for email and docs and so on. Its Web presence, including DNS, has for many years been handled by a local outfit I’ll call “CWH” for some absurdly low monthly price, and has been trouble-free