There’ve been a few bugfixes and optimizations since 1.5, but the headline is: Quamina now knows regular expressions. This is roughly the fourth anniversary of the first check-in and the third of v1.0.0. (But I’ve been distracted by family health issues and other tech enthusiasms.) Open-source software, it’s a damn fine hobby

Confession: My title is clickbait-y, this is really about building on the Unicode Character Database to support character-property regexp features in Quamina. Just halfway there, I’d already got to 775K lines of generated code so I abandoned that particular approach. Thus, this is about (among other things) avoiding those 1½M lines. And really only of interest to people whose pedantry includes some combination of Unicode, Go programming, and automaton wrangling. Oh, and GenAI, which (*gasp*) I think I should maybe have used

I’m just landing a chonky PR in Quamina whose effect is to enable the + and * regexp features. As in my last chapter, this is a disorderly war story not an essay, and probably not of general interest. But as I said then, the people who care about coercing finite automata into doing useful things at scale are My People (there are dozens of us)

What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling

The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that. To me, the urgent and interesting questions are how widespread the damage will be and what the hangover will feel like. On that basis, I was going to post a link on Mastodon to Paul Krugman’s Talking With Paul Kedrosky. It’s great, but while I was reading it I thought “This is going to be Greek to people who haven’t been watching the bubble details.” So consider this a preface to the Krugman-Kedrosky piece. If you already know about the GPU-fragility and SPV-voodoo issues, just skip this and go read that

Here’s a story about African rhythms and cancer and combinatorics. It starts a few years ago when I was taking a class in Afro-Cuban rhythms from Russell Shumsky, with whom I’ve studied West-African drumming for many years. Among the basics of Afro-Cuban are the Bell Patterns, which come straight out of Africa. The most basic is the “Standard Pattern”, commonly accompanying 12/8music. “12/8” means there are four clusters of three notes and you can count it “one-two-three two-two-three three-two-three four-two-three”. It feels like it’s in four, particularly when played fast

Last Saturday I had one of my peak 2025 experiences, at the MLS semifinal between the Vancouver Whitecaps FC (hereinafter “Caps”) and Los Angeles FC (“LAFC”). Both those FC’s stand for “Fútbol Club”. 53,095 other fans were there with my son and I; we came home smiling. I’d like to share a bit of the joy and an unexpected side-effect: I’ve gone off most other TV sports

As usual, offering more long-form stuff here than any one person should be expected to read all of, hoping that a few of the choices will improve your day. This time out it’s almost all politics, but that’s the way the world is. And some of the politics aren’t American!

There was recently a flurry of attention and dismay over Sarah Kendzior having been suspended from Bluesky by its moderation system. Since the state of the art in trust and safety is evolving fast, this is worth a closer look. In particular, Mastodon has a really different approach, so let’s see how the Kendzior drama would have played out there

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”. This month marks the third anniversary of my Mastodon migration and I’m convinced that right now, in late 2025, it’s the best place to go. Come join me. Here’s why

For this blog, I mean. Which used to have a little search window in the corner of the banner just above that looked up blog fragments using Google. No longer; I wired in Pagefind; click on the magnifying glass up there on the right to try it out. Go ahead, do it now, I’ll wait before getting into the details

Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions

There are musical seasons where I re-listen to the old faves, the kind of stuff you can read about in my half-year of “Song of the Day” essays from 2018. This autumn I find myself listening to new music by living people. Here’s some of it

At a a recent online conference, I said that we can “change the global Internet conversation for the better, by making it harder for liars to lie and easier for truth-tellers to be believed.” I was talking about media — images, video, audio. We can make it much easier to tell when media is faked and when it’s real. There’s work to do, but it’s straightforward stuff and we could get there soon. Here’s how

I’m going to take a big chance here and make predictions about GenAI’s future. Yeah, I know, you’re feeling overloaded on this stuff and me too, but it seems to have sucked the air out of all the other conversations. I would so like to return to arguing about Functional Programming or Free Trade. This is risky and there’s a pretty good chance that I’m completely wrong. But I’ll try to entertain while prognosticating