Step 2 is actually worse: They shut down the highly successful pilot system to automate much of tax filing: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/y...
I have been quoting The Ideas Factory recently: the difficult bit is not having good ideas but working on good problems. Execution cost is a forcing function to whittle down the problem space. If execution is free, how do you reintroduce that necessary friction?
Another example I read about: tailwind is laying off a bunch of people because AIs are writing a bunch of CSS from scratch. From a maintenance standpoint, that’s probably not the right move. (NB I don’t think this will always be the case, just the case now)
But I think that’s the design aspect. An example: I’ve been doing some side projects in formalizing mathematics. The AI assistants will often write a correct, mostly complete proof, but they will often do it from first principles instead of first structuring abstractions
I’ve been thinking about how so much progress in software amounts to “someone designed a better (for a specific use) tool,” eg, C++ > C, pandas > numpy. AI exploits all of that design work but so far can’t actually do (IMO) good design
I think geom_segment will get you there. Not sure if there’s a package for this
Oh totally. That’s why I wondered how other places do it. All the ones I’ve seen in Canada have pretty standard designs for instance (but I’m not an expert on the requirements)
I wonder how other jurisdictions handle this. Canada Post has been doing community mailboxes since the 80s
(I have on my backlog an article about how some giant amount of policy coordination is mediated by the procurement office and the product choices of a very small number of vendors. Also why it would be nice if Canadian governments coordinated to build their own open source software suites)
Yeah it’s a little chicken and egg. Granicus et al are best thought of as a contractor and not a SaaS provider. They implement something when a few big jurisdictions ask and then try to re/upsell to other jurisdictions. So if you can get them to build it, it ends up proliferating over a few years
Maybe some use Hootsuite etc but I’d put money on one of the government-focused players (N.B. my experience is mostly US-based)
My experience with local governments is that there’s a small ecosystem of players (Granicus, Tyler, etc) that service governments and few other enterprises. Granicus does full social media management
granicus.com/services/dig...
Have you spoken with Granicus or the other big government comms providers? If they embraced ATProto there’d probably be a big barrier removed to change
I thought when Alon Levy was looking into this they found it was Anglophone and not common law that was the stronger factor, but I could be misremembering
Fires have become relatively rare, so fire brigades double as “basic life support” providers, whereas ambulances can provide “advanced life support” and transport to hospital
Don’t know for sure, but I’d guess that if separated, fire still responds to BLS 911 calls to save ambulance capacity
Is there an estimate of the “return on marginal dollar invested in 0-10 year olds” versus the S&P?
Is there a Canadian on the editorial board? So confused by this acronym choice
Thank you! I do think it’s related! At a high level the problem of “irrevocability” sort of looks like one cryptographic entity signing some other cryptographic entity’s assertion and storing that some where. I’ll take a look
Yeah that was the underlying issue I was running up against: votes are inherently archival, which fits a bit better with the blockchain idea
But you could combine the ideas where ATProto handles the votes themselves and some AppView archives the relevant parts of the firehose
I wonder if you know if there have been projects on “irrevocable” changes to repos. (I have some ideas, but curious what others have done)
On a different topic: I was designing this where each congressperson had a DID and I was thinking they could use that as they moved institutions (EOs as a gov, votes as a city coucilmember)
But I encountered a problem: users own their repos, so can, eg, delete or change votes in this design
Thanks for the tips! Will do at some point soon!
The gov.congress domain was just a placeholder in the lexicon specification for votes, but the PDS itself I was testing under my personal domain as you see
Anyway, to avoid confusion if you happen to know how I can delete those records, happy to do so as this just a hobby project and not Congress 😅
Shut down the PDS during the workweek to save some cash as I didn’t think it had broken containment yet
I was playing around with trying to understand ATProto this weekend and thought congressional votes would be an interesting use case. Was following some QuickStart guides and too early registered with the crawlers
My hottest take is that you should put all the votes in a big hat and draw one out. Whoever’s on the ballot wins
Achieves (on average, high variance) proportional representation. Plus I feel like the ceremonial aspects would be incredible
Why not just turn off replies by default? Still could be tagged if you want inbounds. And a creative comms strategy might introduce special posts for specific moments like inclusive budgeting
I think this is during the time when he was giving well-regarded televised daily press conferences
I bike past Rogers basically everyday and the only issue i have is that the intersections around there are huge due to needing to support Gardiner off ramps. Also, the bike lane network is oddly disconnected a couple blocks away from the stadium itself (eg the Yonge and Bay bike lanes disappear)
Semi-seriously, you could probably get the same functionality from a <$200 laptop like a Pinebook, and a small amount of custom software (eg boot into a Chromium browser pegged to a single site)
