omnivore

I'm far more willing to trust someone in the field every day (you), over keyboard warriors who want to validate their new toy is alive.

What an unhinged moment in time. At some point, they'll need to be courageous people with the ability and funds to speak up and say enough. But will they? It does not appear so.

Civic tech is dead.

Meh, good riddance. The old internet wasn't all good.

This thing was always underutilized even by the last 2 administrations. For all of the purported DOGE savings, these folks actually legitimately saved money from agencies, which is why big contractor shops were so opposed. They didn't take Congressional appropriations and charged agencies for work, but couldn't just go to agencies and pitch business, they had to be reached out to.

Can't imagine how much better the thing had been if it'd been allowed to fully blossom, but given all the stuff they deal with it, it wasn't perfect but it was a really good experiment.

even conceding that, letting one guy decide it using executive power is problematic. And illegal

Procurement rules exist for a reason, letting one guy funnel business to his company using the President's power is a huge risk to the nation-state.

It's illegal and unfair competition. We can't just throw out laws we hate all the time on the whims on an unelected guy in the White House.

haa, an insepector general looking at this stuff is quaint in the era of let's just break all the rules.

Not young people at all, actually. Mostly mid-to-senior people.

"losing money" is a canard when it's a self-producing government entity that was using not public dollars but instead user fees from a GSA Fund. There were lots of folks who had incentive for that thing not to work: https://insider.govtech.com/california/www-techwire-net/form...

Also, that IG report is a comedy show compared to the last 3 weeks of chaos from these people doing what they're doing flouting laws, rules and the common order.

there are lots of them already, but many more that need them.

In reality, they were embedded with federal agencies and worked on engagements for them. You gotta read what people actually do in practice, versus just the pitch.

The model of 18F changed a lot, none of those products including Login.gov or Cloud.gov were part of 18F, they're all spinfoffs that live within TTS.

it's expensive, the risks of losing are big and they dig into your whole life and basically ruin it. But agreed more people should be in these roles or at least advising these people, but the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.

I think there's a big difference between -- hall monitors making stuff impossible and what we're seeing now. USDS part of the executive branch made things more difficult, but if you'd given those folks even half the runway these doofuses have right now, imagine the sort of good they could've done.

Dark patterns as a name needs work anymore, but I like the general premise of this and think it could be cool for people learning this stuff for the first time. Good work conceptually.

same with dating apps. match owns all of them but bumble

Mastodon is fine for a specific audience but not a scalabale Twitter. SubNotes won't be either, but it's atop an ecosystem that should prevent the spam & trolls of Twitter, et. al.

Loved pen & paper baseball as a kid, used to invent vast worlds. Now I use Out of the Park Baseball as my simulator of choice, but there have been precedessors since the late 90s.

That book was a childhood favorite of mine.

The problem is Deloitte is in the pockets of Congress and won't ever allow this to happen. In fact, they've made it worse.

Honestly, I've found when I give kid presentations just telling them you do computer stuff is pretty impressive by itself. I think demystifying the world around them, letting them know that it's not magic that powers their phones, but actual people who had to build all of the stuff that works for them, has been a huge way to get them to be more curious.

I think rather than wowing them, I'd hope they'd walk away and be able to feel like "this is something I can do.." because unlike being an FBI agent, it's something they could start doing now. They could start using Glitch and be making stuff tonight. That's huge.

The street food vendor market in NYC is also really screwed up. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/dining/halal-cart-food-ve...

In-person interactions dramatically improved my remote work experience and improved the bonding that happened outside of the project. I can see why someone reclusive might not like it, but it's almost always on the company dime anyway. In my case, it wasn't a retreat but meeting IRL for project work which I liked better.

Agreed, the hardest part of remote work and the lack of accessible coworkers iRL are these in-person opportunities to be out of the house. If you move somewhere that you don't know people, still getting into groups, volunteering, and generally having a thing or three that forces you to be somewhere not on your own time with people who need you to be there is a good thing.

Could that work? I'm wondering aloud.

Before social media, you probably wouldn't have these distant connections to begin with because a lot of them are conceived in forums that just didn't have a parallel back in the day besides pen pals or someone you met at a conference once somewhere random.

I've noticed this too. You also have to make sure there are words on the photo posts to get any engagement. Articles do all right too, but yes, I agree that people aren't engaging with just regular text and I often delete stuff and repost it figuring the posts are just getting screwed by the algorithm. Same with Instagram but in different ways.

What I like that you've done is that start CTA in the right nav menu. Not just that it's action oriented it just made me feel like I could start/play around post-login without having to deal with a lot of redtape just to start using it.

Which for any new tool is important. Good luck.