sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy - Profile | ThreadSky

Did you know Elections Canada hires hundreds in each riding across the country to work during the election? Poll workers are needed for advance voting days, and many many more are needed Election Day April 28. Pay starts at $20/hour (for a long day!), and training is paid too. If you’re […]

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

It's still early, but several of my goats are looking extremely wide so I think it's time to start the #BabyGoatCountdown (will I remember to keep using the hashtag? Probably not, but worth a try). First mama isn't due until April 2, but I'm REALLY […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

Today, in dystopia. This looks like it's directly lifted from a Cory Doctorow novel. CBS News: DoorDash and Klarna partner to offer an eat now, pay later plan "...DoorDash customers will have the option either to pay in full, to pay in four equal installments or […] [Original post on ai6yr.org]

submitted 5 days ago • 6 comments

“Every time you talk to someone who actually works with career civil servants, you realize that overwhelmingly, they’re super motivated, well-meaning, passionate people. These are not bad people. There’s no deep state. These are people who care about their country and the planet and their […]

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

“With this latter group, the need to continually find elite enemies when you are now the elite leads in two directions. One is authoritarianism, as with Viktor Orbàn and Recip Tayyip Erdoğan. The other is chaos as in Trump term one. Trump’s second term appears to be combining both in what can […]

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Before being eliminated, 18F saved taxpayers billions in bad contracts and failed software projects over 11 years. I was very proud of my time in early-18F, from which we launched shared services and critical components for federal technologists, like cloud.gov, login.gov, and the US Web Design […]

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Europe-Trumpistan science war erupting in Houston airport https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/03/19/etats-unis-un-chercheur-francais-refoule-pour-avoir-exprime-une-opinion-personnelle-sur-la-politique-menee-par-l-administration-trump_6583618_3210.html

submitted 7 days ago • 5 comments

Wired is going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. #Media https://werd.io/2025/wired-is-dropping-paywalls-for-foia-based-reporting-others-should-follow

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

A devastating review of Benjamin Netanyahu's criminal war. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

This is absurdly great, but I haven't read a single blog post or news article about it. A fully open source, offline-first alternative to Notion that's a collab between the French and German governments because they want to host documentation securely and on their own terms. THIS is what Europe […]

submitted 10 days ago • 2 comments

“The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.” —M. Gessen […]

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

New Yukon tourism data dashboard launched today! 📈📊 Super nice work by Brett and Geof and the Tourism and Culture crew! https://yukon.ca/en/statistics-and-data/tourism-statistics-and-reports/access-yukon-tourism-indicators-dashboard #opendata #dataviz #Yukon

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

“This isn't just about strain on one individual project, it's about the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that makes open knowledge possible.” @molly0xfff with a must-read piece: https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/ #AI #creativecommons

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

"Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a […]

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

So circling back on an earlier post of mine. If your Canadian and interested in the EU, check out https://europeanmovement.eu/publication-articles/european-movement-international-strengthening-the-eu-canada-relationship-in-response-to-trumps-isolationism/

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

👏🏻 “I want friction. I want intentionality. I want to listen to an album because I chose it, not because it was shuffled into my ears by a recommendation engine. I want to write, read, and think in places that don't depend on ad revenue or growth hacking. I want to use tools that exist to […]

submitted 21 days ago • 4 comments

📜 I've started a new project — PHP at Thirty. 🥅 The goal is to collect the stories from the PHP Community's foibles over the last 30 years. 🔗 https://github.com/derickr/php-at-thirty 🥺 I am actively seeking contributions, as I don't know all the stories in detail, and, I can't possibly […]

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

1970s-1980s physics textbook titles have the best fonts.

submitted 19 days ago • 3 comments

New blog post! 😳 “Things that are happening” (on the dismantling of US civil service institutions and technology teams, and consequences for public sector reform elsewhere) https://sboots.ca/2025/03/04/things-that-are-happening/ #18F #uspol #GCdigital

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Whitehorse friends! Next week Tuesday (March 11) I’m doing a presentation on open data and open government, with friends from Geomatics Yukon and the federal government. 📊🎉 It's open to the public and part of Tech Yukon's AI and Data series. Find out more and sign up on the Tech Yukon event […]

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

the destruction of 18F is a wrecking ball to the real and meaningful efforts—by some of the best and sharpest people in US tech—to make government work for people. such a kick to the chest.

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

This, from @lchski, is absolutely spot-on: https://lucascherkewski.com/hit-and-miss/391-burning-18f-change/ #18F #uspol

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

"Mozilla has given a masterclass, yet again, in how to erode trust among people who have loved your work." #Technology https://werd.io/2025/mozillas-new-terms-of-service-and-updated-privacy-policy

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

People always say: "if libraries didn't already exist, you could never create them today." Well, lots of the stuff MAGA nihilists are destroying right now is like that. We're not just going to put it all back in place when this if over. It's going to take generations to repair this shit.

submitted 27 days ago • 52 comments

"Another critical tool taken down by the Trump administration but preserved for the American people: FEMA’s Future Risk Index. This tool shows how much #climate change will cost American communities (actual dollar figures!)...[and] the near-term economic stakes of climate change and why […]

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

Normal science. Normal international collaboration. Today, recommendations from WHO on 2025-26 flu vaccines for the northern hemisphere. And I'm reading the US news too about defunding science, banning contact with WHO, and cancelling expert advice on flu vaccines. #flu […]

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

We should redesign cities for autonomous kids, not autonomous cars.

submitted 124 days ago • 28 comments

It has been one of the worst weeks I have seen in my entire career for cybersecurity jobs in America. Between government cuts of normally stable roles in defense to entry and mid tier cuts in large corporations, you need to check in with your networks and share any postings you have with them.

submitted 29 days ago • 6 comments

🧵Delighted to share a new guest post by Dr Anne Toomey on 8 things scientists can do right now to stand up for science in the US Thread of her evidence-based actions follows, whole post here christinapagel.substack.com/p/eight-thin... 1/11

submitted 30 days ago • 11 comments

I just sponsored ddev. Go sponsor your open source dependencies! https://github.com/sponsors/ddev?o=sp&sc=m&sp=mgifford

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

For anyone here who is being affected by the unprecedented changes in the USA Federal Government as either a Federal Employee/contractor or a small business, this resource might be useful - https://g2xchange.com/resource-center

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

The street snow banks are getting slightly out of control #Ottawa

submitted 31 days ago • 2 comments

@aworkinglibrary always comes through. Le Guin + Seeing Like a State + Mandy’s own orienteering == ways to move in uncertain and unstable moments. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/make-life-possible

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

BREAKING: A bunch of U.S. Digital Service employees (including me) were fired tonight. It's still unclear exactly how many. There is no visibility whatsoever into what determined who was let go. Legacy USDS (i.e., pre-DOGE) leadership was not involved in the decision about whom to let go and […]

submitted 40 days ago • 15 comments

“I know that’s such an extreme take, and the sane part of me is saying that would never happen — but a lot of the stuff we said would never happen, did” #uspol @signalapp https://www.theverge.com/news/610951/federal-workers-privacy-surveillance-signal-facebook-messenger

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

As long we're out here archiving data, know that you can download the full PostgreSQL archive for usaspending.gov. Federal spending data since 2001: https://onevoicecrm.my.site.com/usaspending/s/database-download

submitted 46 days ago • 2 comments