1/ You can think that Tridge made some mistakes (I do, and he acknowledges them) and disagree with his take on GenAI (I do) but the pitchfork-wielding burn-the-witch mob being led by @nprofile1q... should show some humility and humanity. I acknowledge I'm a bit prejudiced based on having for a few decades used Tridge's work to save my ass and achieve results that seem miraculous.

In which I consider the state of incumbent markup formats. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/06/01/XML-and-JSON-in-2026

#json #xml

This is a *nice* flower, a *gentle* flower, a flower you could take home to Mom.

#bloomscrolling

I signed this petition and if you’re a Wikipedia editor you probably should too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity

#wikipedia

In which @nprofile1q..., who’s on a tear recently, defends and promotes the use of the word “clanker” to replace “agent” (in the LLM sense): https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/26/clankers/

#genai #clanker

Most of the fossil fuel consumed in North America is produced in North America. The cost of production hasn’t gone up, but the price has, because of Trump’s foolish war. Thus an avalanche of pure profit for the oil&gas sector. This is not remotely reasonable. What to do about it? Impose a lower price by government fiat? Price controls are hard.

Here’s a Canadian petition drive with another pretty simple idea: A windfall tax on unearned profits: https://act.stand.earth/page/97584/petition/1
Doesn’t sound crazy.

TFW you spend a couple hours trying to track down a horribly obscure bug, you're looking at the code blankly and are getting seriously irritated and then it was a typo in your unit-test code.

#software

The tbray dot org hosting provider, which has been rock solid for years, has been mostly down for the last 72 hours. They claim DDOS. I know hosting is a tough business but I guess I gotta look elsewhere… not what I wanted to be worrying about just now.

In which I don’t accept an invitation to a high-prestige unconference. “I declined, because it’s in the USA”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/05/19/Declining-America

#USpol

Hey, I asked @nprofile1q... and he confirmed my impression: This year (last month, actually) is JSON’s 25th birthday.

{ "greeting": "Happy birthday!"}

#json

I ❤️ Debian: https://nerds.xyz/2026/05/debian-13-5-linux-security-update/

#debian #linux