Simon Willison’s Weblog

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

# 4th May 2024, 4:26 pm / photography, tim-bray, ethics, generative-ai, ai

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

# 20th January 2024, 12:13 pm / tim-bray, google

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

# 1st June 2021, 2:35 pm / testing, tim-bray

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

# 1st September 2018, 1:41 am / web, tim-bray, messaging

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

# 10th February 2010, 5:40 pm / tim-bray, internet, blogging, information

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

# 6th January 2010, 8:20 am / tim-bray, sun, startups, enterprise

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

— Tim Bray

# 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm / iphone, apple, tim-bray, sharecropping

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

# 16th July 2009, 10:16 am / web, tim-bray, computer-science, education

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

# 15th October 2008, 5:09 pm / lockin, tim-bray, cloud-computing

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

# 3rd January 2008, 1:08 pm / tim-bray, predictions, microsoft, windows, linux, apple, osx

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

— Phil Karlton

# 5th July 2007, 12:46 am / caching, computer-science, phil-karlton, tim-bray, naming-things

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

# 30th May 2007, 1:48 am / rss, validator, joe-heck, tim-bray, specifications

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

# 2nd May 2007, 8:23 pm / tim-bray, rest, urls, uris

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

# 14th April 2007, 9:13 am / twitter, tim-bray, rails, scaling

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

# 22nd December 2006, 12:47 am / tim-bray, xml, json