Simon Willison's Weblog: tim-bray

Decentralizing Schemes

2025-04-21T18:48:18+00:00

Tim Bray discusses the challenges faced by decentralized Mastodon in that shared URLs to posts don't take into account people accessing Mastodon via their own instances, which breaks replies/likes/shares etc unless you further copy and paste URLs around yourself.

Tim proposes that the answer is URIs: a registered fedi://mastodon.cloud/@timbray/109508984818551909 scheme could allow Fediverse-aware software to step in and handle those URIs, similar to how mailto: works.

Bluesky have registered at: already, and there's also a web+ap: prefix registered with the intent of covering ActivityPub, the protocol used by Mastodon.

Tags: decentralisation, social-media, tim-bray, urls, mastodon, bluesky

Quoting Tim Bray

2024-11-24T02:17:13+00:00

Whatever you think of capitalism, the evidence is overwhelming: Social networks with a single proprietor have trouble with long-term survival, and those do survive have trouble with user-experience quality: see Enshittification.

The evidence is also perfectly clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. The original social network, email, is now into its sixth decade of vigorous life. It ain’t perfect but it is essential, and not in any serious danger.

The single crucial difference between email and all those other networks — maybe the only significant difference — is that nobody owns or controls it.

— Tim Bray, Why Not Bluesky

Tags: email, social-media, tim-bray, mastodon, activitypub, bluesky

Quoting Tim Bray

2024-05-04T16:26:15+00:00

I believe these things: 1. If you use generative tools to produce or modify your images, you have abandoned photointegrity. 2. That’s not always wrong. Sometimes you need an image of a space battle or a Triceratops family or whatever. 3. What is always wrong is using this stuff without disclosing it.

— Tim Bray

Tags: ethics, photography, tim-bray, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics

Quoting Tim Bray

2024-01-20T12:13:53+00:00

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

— Tim Bray

Tags: google, search-engines, tim-bray

Making Code Faster

2022-06-13T19:40:43+00:00

Making Code Faster

Tim Bray’s detailed guide to using the Go profiler.

Tags: go, profiling, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2021-06-01T14:35:11+00:00

I’m pretty convinced that the biggest single contributor to improved software in my lifetime wasn’t object-orientation or higher-level languages or functional programming or strong typing or MVC or anything else: It was the rise of testing culture.

— Tim Bray

Tags: testing, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2018-09-01T01:41:30+00:00

When you’re pumping messages around the Internet between heterogeneous codebases built by people who don’t know each other, shit is gonna happen. That’s the whole basis of the Web: You can safely ignore an HTTP header or HTML tag you don’t understand, and nothing breaks. It’s great because it allows people to just try stuff out, and the useful stuff catches on while the bad ideas don’t break anything.

— Tim Bray

Tags: messaging, tim-bray, web

Quoting Tim Bray

2011-02-10T06:00:00+00:00

Before events took this bad turn, the contract represented by a link was simple: “Here’s a string, send it off to a server and the server will figure out what it identifies and send you back a representation.” Now it’s along the lines of: “Here’s a string, save the hashbang, send the rest to the server, and rely on being able to run the code the server sends you to use the hashbang to generate the representation.” Do I need to explain why this is less robust and flexible? This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.

— Tim Bray

Tags: javascript, tim-bray, urls, recovered, hashbanghell

Quoting Tim Bray

2010-02-10T17:40:40+00:00

The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.

— Tim Bray

Tags: blogging, information, internet, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2010-01-06T08:20:23+00:00

What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

— Tim Bray

Tags: enterprise, startups, sun, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2009-09-21T17:30:56+00:00

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

— Tim Bray

Tags: apple, iphone, sharecropping, tim-bray

Ravelry

2009-09-03T18:50:20+00:00

Ravelry

Tim Bray interviews Casey Forbes, the single engineer behind Ravelry, the knitting community that serves 10 million Rails requests a day using just seven physical servers, MySQL, Sphinx, memcached, nginx, haproxy, passenger and Tokyo Cabinet.

Tags: caseyforbes, haproxy, memcached, mysql, nginx, passenger, rails, ravelry, scaling, sphinx-search, tim-bray, tokyocabinet, tokyotyrant

Quoting Tim Bray

2009-07-16T10:16:30+00:00

I propose that the World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.

— Tim Bray

Tags: computer-science, education, tim-bray, web

Test-Driven Heresy

2009-06-24T11:03:44+00:00

Test-Driven Heresy

Tim Bray advocates TDD for maintenance development, but argues that it may not be as useful during the exploratory, greenfield development phase of a project.

Tags: tdd, testing, tim-bray

The Web vs. the Fallacies

2009-05-25T23:49:45+00:00

The Web vs. the Fallacies

Tim Bray on how the architecture of the Web helps developers handle the Fallacies of Distributed Computing.

Tags: fallacies, tim-bray, web

Quoting Tim Bray

2008-10-15T17:09:55+00:00

Are we so deranged here in the twenty-first century that we’re going to re-enact, wide-eyed, the twin tragedies of the great desktop-suite lock-in and the great proprietary-SQL lock-in? You know, the ones where you give a platform vendor control over your IT budget? Gimme a break.

— Tim Bray

Tags: cloud-computing, lockin, tim-bray

Multi-Inflection-Point Alert

2008-04-26T18:48:57+00:00

Multi-Inflection-Point Alert

Dammit, Tim, stop giving away our competitive advantages!

Tags: bigtable, couchdb, java, python, rails, rest, simpledb, soap, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2008-01-03T13:08:59+00:00

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

— Tim Bray

Tags: apple, linux, macos, microsoft, predictions, tim-bray, windows

Thai personal names

2007-12-08T16:26:53+00:00

Thai personal names

“Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related.”

Via Tim Bray

Tags: i18n, james-clark, l10n, thailand, tim-bray

WS-dämmerung

2007-11-22T09:49:02+00:00

WS-dämmerung

Tim Bray collects the latest round of WS-* repenting, which saves me from linking to them individually.

Tags: soap, tim-bray, web-services, ws-star

Some Notes on Tim Bray's Wide Finder Benchmark

2007-10-07T01:06:05+00:00

Some Notes on Tim Bray's Wide Finder Benchmark

Fredrik Lundh demonstrates some Python ninja techniques for parsing log files using multiple cores (and eventually memory mapping).

Tags: benchmarks, effbot, fredrik-lundh, mmap, multicore, python, tim-bray

The Rubinius Sprint

2007-09-21T23:32:39+00:00

The Rubinius Sprint

Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago...

Tags: java, jython, open-source, python, rubinius, ruby, sourgrapes, sun, tim-bray

Quoting Phil Karlton

2007-07-05T00:46:21+00:00

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things

— Phil Karlton

Tags: caching, computer-science, naming-things, phil-karlton, tim-bray

Quoting Joe Heck

2007-05-30T01:48:44+00:00

If you write a spec, write a validator alongside. How much pain could have been spared with early versions of RSS if we'd had a common, agreed upon validator. In short, it's the test suite that ultimately decides the spec.

— Joe Heck

Tags: joe-heck, rss, specifications, tim-bray, validator

Ten Reasons The World Needs Patent Covenants

2007-05-22T17:09:23+00:00

Ten Reasons The World Needs Patent Covenants

Sun just made their OpenID patent covenant official. Simon Phipps explains why these are a Good Idea.

Via Tim Bray

Tags: openid, open-source, patents, simon-phipps, sun, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2007-05-02T20:23:38+00:00

People don't recognize how important URIs are. The notion that you have a huge, world-scale, information space, and that everything in it has an name and they're all just short strings that you can paint on the side of a bus; that's a new thing and a good thing.

— Tim Bray

Tags: rest, tim-bray, uris, urls

Quoting Tim Bray

2007-04-14T09:13:17+00:00

In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it's really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.

— Tim Bray

Tags: rails, scaling, tim-bray, twitter

What is OpenID Good For?

2007-03-14T10:12:09+00:00

What is OpenID Good For?

Dare Obasanjo provides some smart responses to Tim Bray’s criticisms of OpenID, including a good angle on the phishing problem.

Tags: dare-obasanjo, openid, phishing, tim-bray

Quoting Tim Bray

2006-12-22T00:47:42+00:00

Seems easy to me; if you want to serialize a data structure that’s not too text-heavy and all you want is for the receiver to get the same data structure with minimal effort, and you trust the other end to get the i18n right, JSON is hunky-dory.

— Tim Bray

Tags: json, tim-bray, xml

Pictures of Nothing

2005-01-01T10:15:15+00:00

Pictures of Nothing

Tim Bray’s 2004 roundup.

Tags: tim-bray