Yeah that’s rough. If only there was a way for people to evaluate claims and reason about ideas together.
Software pro. Community organizer. Chair: hackf.org, opendatasociety.ca Owner: p42systems.com
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Yeah that’s rough. If only there was a way for people to evaluate claims and reason about ideas together.
Buns me out to think about where we could be today if there was interest from politicos in advocating for consumer rights to their own data and citizen rights to government data, algo transparency from social media firms, or open and accessible software that is free for everyone who wants to use it.
For example, so many voices in tech warned that proprietary closed social media was going to be a disaster. Who listened? Not policy makers on the left that is for sure.
I don’t want it to be true but it is at least in my experience. I’ve done tons of work for little gain trying to get elected officials and candidates who say they’re progressive to care about these issues or see how they are vital to finding a just path forward in the 21st century.
Those CEOs have the wealth and power they do because the whole of society stood by and let them grab it all. There were many voices pointing out the dangers. They were ignored.
Sure but I’m not talking about tech skill. I’m talking about making space for new people and ideas in the movement. If the left made space and engaged those of us who saw a different path for software, the Internet, and social media we might have got some policy momentum out of it.
My point is that the willful ignorance of the political left to tech movements based on shared values, like the free software movement, has left us all poorer and in more danger than otherwise. Tbf the liberal centre also is hostile/doesn’t give a shit.
Watching the last decade of shit unfold onto the world as opposition is completely and, to my eyes, wilfully unprepared for it has been a souring experience. I’ve been working these trenches a long time. The left don’t want to do what it takes to win the 21st century, and that may well kill us all.
There has been a forty year effort to make this sort of thing happen in software that has been basically ignored by the organized political left for aesthetic / vibe reasons (this is the reason I despise the political left). I'm not holding my breath I expect vibes will once again carry the day.
They should invent a way out that isn't through
Apropos of nothing, a reminder that commenting on politics and policy does not actually make you an expert in political messaging or electoral tactics
Pretty stoked to run this vibe coding demo for Hackforge. Say what you want about LLMs: they are a tool that can’t be ignored in software engineering. There’s a lot of BS out there. I’m going to show you what actually works and when vibe coding is not a totally bad idea.
Tell me more Ray
I support preserving biodiversity. Is there a way to do it that doesn't involve escorting individual moths off construction sites? www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
You’d think the web bubble would have taught us you can’t speedrun mass tech adoption with sheer will and hype but I suppose it was a generation ago now that we learned money may make things go faster, but infinite money doesn’t actually create infinite speed.
The ones that log off from Omelas
I feel like this has something to do with the contagion of people adopting media prioritization of being “savvy” over talking about values.
Genuinely surprised to discover that small models aren’t already the standard for this sort of thing. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to be done with local models specifically, and hardly anyone is doing it. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02153
Eric Schmidt (February) vs Eric Schmidt (August) is the fight of the century. [joking aside, this is a very significant shift] www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/o...
I think that’s the universe where U2 broke up and The Police stayed together.
genuinely i feel like “the discourse about ai in left-wing spaces is heavily shaped by the over representation of artists defending their class interest” also leads to a lot of motivated reasoning about what is valuable about the service they provide
Check out this valuable resource from @torontopubliclibra.com. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuo-...
Kids, if you want to know what horrible tech journalism was like in the web era or the early PC era look no further than “typing things into the computer to make news.”
That’s more or less where it is. Limited to no interest in how we can use tech to build a better, more fair world.
From my point of view as a technologist and a political organizer, free software is a political movement that is well-aligned in principle and in detail with the goals of the political left, but they mainly ignore it because of inherent prejudice against tech, and lack of tech rep in their movement.
The organized political left completely whiffed on the free software movement (and still does, main reason I despise them) so I expect this to be like that.
📣 New Podcast! "Current Affairs 04.07.2025" on @Spreaker
Every product team talks a big game about their future-facing roadmap. But ask to compare last year's roadmap to last year's releases, and they'll mutter some excuses. Promising the world is easy; delivering on promises is the challenge. OpenAI promised AGI, and delivered an incremental update.
Going to get to the point where everything coming out of the U.S. is tainted by association. I wonder what’s going to happen to the American cultural industry.
Terrible, but sadly, expected — and the latest remark in an Orwellian laundry list that suggests the president views gov economic data as a source of propaganda to make him look good, not to guide policy for the best interest of all Americans. Facts don’t matter, only Trump does.
I don’t know if Kevin McLeod makes any money from incompetech.com but it’s the best music and graph paper site on the Internet. Provides the score for all my dumb video game clips.
Hackforge posts most of my community tech talks on YouTube. This one is a tutorial on adding MCP servers to OpenWebUI, free software for interacting with Large Languafe Models. MCP servers connect an LLM to the wider world. For me it makes a valuable research tool. youtu.be/ZEJ5oX0zkP4?...
ah yeah the familiar whiplash of seeing a legacy media org cover something you're an actual expert in and realizing "oh if this is how badly they're fucking up this, how badly are they fucking up every other topic?"
Second and third tier SaaS shops: stop trying to push chatbots that nobody wants to use. Make it easier for our own agents and chatbots to engage with your stuff. It’s cheaper and some of your users actually want it.
Brilliant piece. The key to the current American agony and also quite illuminating for how small time politics often plays out.
Interesting piece. There is a pressing need to have a public discussion about LLMs and related tools, and it can’t be all consultant/startup hype shit, which Liberals seem to have swallowed whole. Opposition parties should consider this piece carefully.
NDP and other people organizing to the left of center in Canada saw their voting base destroyed by Carney in the last election. They’re trying to get some back, which is natural, but they are going about it in a counterproductive, stupid and undignified way.
I'd just like to point out how weird it is that places with hundreds or even thousands of reporters — the NYT, WaPo, CBS, NBC, AP, etc. — are all getting pummeled on every major story by the dozen computerboys at Wired. To fumble the bag this consistently is, at some point, cowardice and a choice.
That response more than anything makes me fear that America is going to struggle to come back from this.
So interesting. Local politicians don’t interpret being part of a movement as sharing the same values as their leaders. They see it as sharing the same enemies.
I broke into the industry during the dot-com bust. Neither of these apocalypses is hugely impactful on me. I have always supplied technical services to the real economy, which doesn’t really line up with the SV boom-bust for better and for worst.
Consent manufacturers not sending their best bsky.app/profile/edro...
Divest from U.S. tech financialpost.com/technology/c...
Our tours are built with Pytheas, which we wrote and GPL licensed. You candle find the Pelee tour code and assets here: github.com/p42systems/p... Sincere appreciation to all the photographers whose work we used. Everyone is credited, and we are happy to correct any errors and omissions.
P42 has a couple new tours out. If you’re out and about in Windsor / Essex, check out pointpeleeplanner.com for a guided National Park experience, and gatewayparkecotour.com for an exploration of wild plants and animals in an urban setting. (Thanks to PASS for the commission and WWF for funding.)
I wonder what he thinks he achieves with this rhetoric. Assuming even feckless America isn’t down for a pointless forever war in its own heartland, all this does is make life easier for Canadian negotiators.
The Canadian Open Data & Govmaker Summit will take place in Fredericton this November. If you've got an open data story to share we want to hear from you! The Call for Proposals is open until July 11th. opendatasummit.ca/call/
What I'm curious about is whether there is direction on the specific level of levity allowed in characterizations of the administration. Someone should FOIA the border security guidelines on insulting the majesty of the emperor.
The Leeroy Jenkins Administration
P42 developer Dana Teagle will be in Windsor on Saturday to talk about her personal project tg-id.ca, an app to help people navigate the legal processes around changing name and gender markers on official ID. www.hackf.org/event/tg-id-...
I've seen this movie before and it sucks.
LLM discourse on here is pretty dire. Conflating what you see as the tool of your opponents with your opponents themselves will not lead you to any good place. Progressive people relinquishing ground without a fight on software and the internet is how the tech industry got into its present mess.
Surely it’s directed not to disclose its system prompt to the user.
In Canada, you hear barely a whisper about divestiture from the bloated giants of Silicon Valley, perhaps owing in part to their equally-bloated hospitality budgets. So much risk being ignored because it’s inconvenient. www.raconteur.net/technology/i...
Live your life so millions of your fellow citizens don't take to the streets to tell you to go fuck yourself on your birthday.
Casual tech talk tonight sharing some stuff I’ve learned about MCP and local LLMs. As always, free to attend in-person or online. www.hackf.org/event/ai-get...
I feel for the folks who are getting obliterated on here for experimenting with AI things at their small non profit. The people who feel powerless/anxious in the face of Silicon Valley’s imposition of AI hype into all of our lives seem pretty excited to find a nice soft target to bully.
No chance we're getting Megalopolis II now, I guess.
From the piece it feels like the heavy focus on LLMs is a bit out of proportion, but there’s a lot of utility in teaching people the value and limits of these tools. I observe heavy use of LLMs among knowledge workers. From what I see not all of the uses are good, to say the least.
Imagine seeing a homeless person barely surviving in a park tent and thinking, "Fuck yeah, fining them $10,000 and putting them in jail will solve all of this." www.thetrillium.ca/news/housing...
There's a tendency to think that if something that's happening is ridiculous, it must not be important--which you'd think we'd all understand is not true in the Trump era, but no.
Highly useful in the hands of an alert and intelligent human operator but so far they’re very unable to push past that frontier.
Everything various Americans are doing to placate Canadians is really only making us madder. The root cause is asymmetry in each nation’s understanding of the other, culturally and politically. We know all about them. They don’t give enough of a collective shit to know the first thing about us.
New: Australia became on Friday the first country in the world to require victims of ransomware attacks to declare to the government any extortion payments made on their behalf to cybercriminals.
Drunk guy on Reddit has it nailed completely. It’s wild to see companies issue press releases that every experienced programmer knows are straight-up lies.
I don’t understand how you can be an effective technical leader without understanding industry hype cycles or having a method of determining the potential of a new technology independent of vendor bullshit.
sports betting and ads have ruined so much of being a sports fan
Early in the pandemic I wondered why there was so little Spanish Flu literature. I get it now.
So weird that the Ambassador’s “you’re overreacting, you’re hysterical” approach isn’t winning over Canadians.
Having a great Saturday afternoon finishing up the slides for my talk on the nuts and bolts of Canadian election data, plus a bit of technique show-and-tell. It’s free to attend virtually via Zoom.
It probably was at the time! I agree that resolving the lack of infrastructure will deliver big gains - maybe more than more scaling at this point.
A genuine productivity boost for software dev that will probably end up being as impactful as scripting languages or IDEs. I’d imagine there will be other fields similarly impacted. Jury’s out on how useful it will all ultimately be, but it’s one of the coolest things humans have made.
So much chaff in the air the only way to know for sure is try it in your use case.
My adoption of this tech has been cautious and I’m careful to validate my perceived gains along the way. A lot of promise but it is not ready for broad deployment. Applying it over-liberally will obscure opportunity. I blame silicon valley’s endless need to feed investor cash into its maw.
The only Canadian graph declining is the number of conservatives saying "what about China".
Next week I’m running a little discussion on working with election data in Canada. We need more data skills at the grassroots level for Canadian democracy to thrive. www.hackf.org/event/analyz...
everything is so stupid I just spent the last 7 hours assuming you guys were doing elaborate photoshops of grok talking about white genocide
Carney appointing a Minister for AI gives me hope the government will finally right a historic wrong and appoint a Minister of Relational Databases.
It's useful information for foreign observers that both American political parties seem to think it's stupid to spend any energy or time on threats to the prosperity and sovereignty of U.S. allies. Some might conclude it would be very stupid of us indeed to ever trust America again.
Why does the British press churn out anti-trans piece after anti-trans piece when polls show a totally uninterested British public? Why do foreign dictators fixate on “cancel culture”? Read and find out!
I still can't fathom why respectable people are maintaining X accounts. It's depressing. Such a basic moral line.
Yes - so much better tooling like that is needed. In many ways I think it’s the deterministic wrappers holding us back more than llm capability today.
For sure, you’re outlining a superior approach for professional development. Code gen has its place too but you are right to put tight boundaries around it.
I mostly agree. There is nuance. LLMs are a valuable support, but they are lousy at debugging and have no sense of design. I’m a relational database person and my dev team mostly aren’t. I notice that their LLM assisted queries are better and more importantly they don’t lean on ORMs as much.
We had a good discussion about this at the hackforge swap meet this week. One thing I learned from that chat: there are many ways to use these things for coding. Understanding what you’re working with and good technical judgment are prerequisites to finding a useful mode in your own circumstance.
Hmm perhaps, depending on what you are working on. Different domains will have different levels of sensitivity to that sort of thing. I use these tools and that challenge doesn’t come up. The thing missing the point and going down a useless rabbit hole is a common failure state I encounter.
An LLM is not an isolated piece of technology. The deterministic software you wrap it with is where much of the value comes from. A lot more development is required to get real consistent value from the tech. LLM + search is a powerful combo, but the tools are still weak.
I always thought Stephane Dion’s electoral reform proposal deserved more attention.
If you’re a nerd with a home lab in or near Windsor you won’t want to miss our infrastructure swap tonight: www.hackf.org/event/home-l...
What happened in SW Ontario is *not* progressive vote splitting. Rather it's lost NDP votes breaking 2:1 to the Conservatives. There's a lot of blue-orange "anyone but Liberal" switchers. Windsor West: Conservative +16, Liberal +3, NDP -20
I vote by special ballot for the convenience. Creating a ton of drama in close races is a surprising side benefit.
It’s a separate count done at the returning office on election day. Usually your most experienced scrutineer watches that one because it’s the biggest raw numbers.
Yes. The advance polls get their own number and results reporting.
He makes me mad a lot which is not not what he is going for but also he has good info.
Frank takes a lot of shit because he wears his heart on his sleeve, but he was the one who first saw the LPC movement for what it was.
An example of how productivity gains created by tech aren't instant and require good service design and implementation is the bizarre tangle of school and homework apps. My kid just logged into one app which says they need to check a portal to find the task which is then to be completed in a 2nd app
Dear lord people. Sabotage, sabotage, sabotage. If you do computer stuff there are 50 million ways you can sabotage stuff with credible deniability. Think of all the things you try to avoid normally, and make sure they happen «accidentally». Lose and misunderstand orders. Sabotage.
This terrific resource crossed my bow just as I'm developing guidance for tech professionals getting into data warehousing. I'm sharing it with my clients. Thank you so much for putting this together!
The days of Google Docs are ending; we enter the age of Docs, made by France's Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs and Germany's Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration. We need more governments to collaborate on public software projects to achieve digital sovereignty.