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Tim Bray 💉💉💉🎉 Profile picture
Tim Bray 💉💉💉🎉
@timbray
Canadian Web geek with a camera. Class traitor. He/him. Eccentric short-form writing project at @ArtisanPortents.
Ernesto Rico Schmidt Profile picture Vergil Iliescu Profile picture 2 subscribed
Dec 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1/5 Hey, I’m not really here on Twitter any more but a bunch of people said “You have to look at this!” So take a second to read Nik’s thread, which is excellent, and I’ll add on a couple of remarks below.

If you want to ask questions or argue, I'm @timbray@mastodon.cloud 2/ Tl;dr in case you didn’t read Nik’s thread, which you should: Pipes a universal-crossbar for AWS, stream input from lots of sources, filter it, transform it, deliver it. Takes care of scaling, buffering, ordering, data normalization, lots of details.
Oct 27, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
1/10 Here’s my quarterly look at Amazon financials, with an eye to how the profit and loss is spread out among retail, AWS, and other divisions. Boy, Mr Market hated 2022 Q3, the share price is getting hammered. Whatever… Source: s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/file… Title of Amazon's Q3 2022 financial report 2/ Revenue up 15% to $127.1B YoY, would have been more without forex weirdness. Profit $2.5B. Outgoing free cash flow is high; the financial geeks don’t seem to look at that last number much and maybe there’s accounting voodoo I’m missing, but looks bad?
Oct 16, 2022 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
1/12 Conservatives (some even not Putin tools) are screaming for a quick Ukrainian surrender, because the risk of nuclear war is unacceptable. Doesn’t sound insane on the surface. Here’s why they’re wrong. 2/ The Ukrainian offensive might grind to a halt and the war becomes a stalemate. Nothing happens for a year. Why surrender now? (Let’s say “WSN?” for short.)
Jun 6, 2022 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
1/ Here’s a little tour of what a crypto-bro swarm looks like. I think it’s well-known that if you are publicly cryptoskeptical you’re going to get some grief. Here’s what it looks like. 2/ Back story: @jchervinsky said this:
Apr 28, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
1/8 Let’s look at the Amazon 2022 Q1 results: ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/n…

Most interesting: Where does the profit come from? 2/ First of all, there was a $7.6B loss on their Rivian holding. Not as terrible as it looks since they booked a $11.8B win last quarter. Amazon reported a $3.8B quarterly loss; without Rivian the “real” profit was $3.8B.
Apr 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Hey, check out the brand-new RFC9116, which defines a file format that any org can/should post at /.well-known/security.txt
rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9116.ht…

Nice idea! Image Check out google.com/.well-known/se… and adobe.com/.well-known/se… and oops microsoft.com/.well-known/se… is a 404.
Apr 27, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/7 This is a clear statement of an intended policy change. For those who (like me) think it’s impractical and likely inflicts grievous harm on vulnerable people, we need to pull together a coherent evidence-based argument to that effect. 2/ Fortunately there’s no big hurry, it’s gonna take months for this deal to close.

The thread starting at Musk’s tweet already contains some pretty useful discourse (ok, admittedly, plenty of crap too).

Anyhow, here’s a whiteboard-style list of arguments to dig into.
Mar 6, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
1/ I think we maybe should stop sharing these Russian-PoW videos. Because they feel like suicide notes and I’m not sure I even believe them. 2/ Make no mistake: I think it would be wonderful if Putin choked on his breakfast and died, and I hope the Ukrainians humiliate and repel the invaders, and I think the anti-Putin sanctions are only now starting to go far enough. I’m on Ukraine’s side here.
Jan 27, 2022 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
1/11 Hey, here’s a new acronym: C2PA. For digital media provenance/attribution chains. Press release: c2pa.org/post/release_1…
Specs: c2pa.org/specifications…

I think this is potentially a pretty big deal… Image 2/ There’s common Internet jargon “Pictures or it didn't happen!” What we're worried about is “Picture AND it didn't happen.” C2PA is trying to address that in an age of deepfakes & sophisticated media-editing technology in the hands of everybody.
Oct 21, 2021 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
They were still very competent during my non-early-days (2010-14) tenure. But let me put in a plug for the equivalent at Amazon, with background and a funny story. For people who aren't familiar with the scenario, at a Big Tech company everyone has a computer and uses it very hard all day every day and it's massively inconvenient when it breaks. So when it does…
Oct 7, 2021 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
0/ Here’s a thread with early half-baked thoughts on @bluesky and Identity, in preparation for this event. There are high-quality ideas in the comments, but Twitter threads get awfully tangled awfully fast and I couldn’t figure out how/where to fit this in. 1/ The operations that @bluesky supports are likely to be pretty similar to the things that Twitter (or another conversational social service) does.
May 5, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1/4 Here’s a #CanadaCensus protip if you’re a parent/parent/children shaped family. Because it’s easy to put the website in a bad place. 2/ We did it at the dinner table and entered the people in the order they were sitting around the table: Mom, daughter, son, Dad.
Sep 18, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
1/ Big news out of BP last week, but media coverage was light and mostly paywalled. If you care about the #ClimateCrisis, this is essential stuff.
Here’s their actual “Energy Outlook”: bp.com/en/global/corp…
But that’s not the best place to absorb the key message. Read on… 2/ I didn’t find the actual outlook that easy to absorb, it was a little *too* interactive and didn’t tell a story. But BP does tell the story, in two other places. First of all, here’s an overview page, not bad: bp.com/en/global/corp…
But wait, there’s more and better…
May 1, 2020 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
This is going to take more than one. Sometime around 1980 I was a co-op in a steel mill. There was this huge machine that pressed slabs of hot steel into thin strips. It was overheating. 1/ The machine spec said it was up to a root mean square (RMS) amperage of 400 or so. Damn, that's a lotta juice. 2/
Dec 17, 2019 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
1/ The sad story started when my old phone began to die so I got a Pixel 4 because of the camera. 2/ It wouldn’t connect to Android Auto in my car, which was thus deprived of several essential functions. Not a flicker of recognition from either side.
Nov 16, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
1/ Discovered that many people don't know the protocol for people who travel to China on behalf of a big tech company. 2/ You do not take your laptop. Company gives you a burner laptop with VPN. (Great Firewall typically lets corporate VPNs through.) No files, please.
Nov 21, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
0/ OK, my turn for #AWS #reinvent tips, and I’ll just offer one (in multiple parts).

It’s this: Meet people and talk to them!

Here’s why: I do this and I *never fail* to learn something interesting.

Here’s how: 1/ Every day, there’s a free breakfast and free lunch provided by the conference. You can probably get better food outside in a Vegas joint, but don’t, go to the conference meal. Then…
Sep 2, 2018 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
0/ Thread: Facebook is actually OK if you use it correctly. 1/ Stay away from the newsfeed. It’s a torrent of vaguely ill-tasting froth. I used to watch it to find out when a friend moved cities or got pregnant or their dog died, but the cost of the mainstream Facebook bullshit is too high.
Feb 12, 2018 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
1/ Suffering from disorientation and cognitive dissonance around blockchain and Bitcoin. It’s time to stop the craziness. 2/ First, Bitcoin. The technology is a fantastic engineering achievement. But, a Bitcoin is a thing that costs several thousand dollars in capex and opex to create, and then can’t be used for anything.