panda_abyss @ panda_abyss @lemmy.ca

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7 days ago

Canada's OAS and CPP are not a pyramid scheme, they're based on what you actually put in and guaranteed.

They don't have the solvency issues that US Social Security has.

A lot of 80/90 year olds have family they love.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think letting 16 year olds vote is the right move.

The reason I think every department needs an internal tech team is precisely because "just throwing tech" doesn't work. We need bespoke tailored solutions to the specific problems that workers are dealing with.

Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.

This is exactly the problem having internal teams building internal tools solves. You're not stuck waiting to go from 0 to 100% on an expensive project with long runway and out of date standards until finally the consultants to toss a solutoin over the fence and leave because they want to get the minimum done and move on to their next paycheque.

You can only do tech really well by understanding the domain and problem, and the people working on it.

I definitely think we should be going big on both OSS and Canadian owned tech. I don't expect the government to build Office, they should be using (and ideally contributing to) OSS. On the other hand, Statistics Canada has a ton of open sourced code that might as well be closed source, and would probably help them move quicker.

I have a different proposal

The government needs to adopt tech. No, not just “we use Office and SharePoint”, but something like making 10-20% of the federal workforce tech workers.

Why?

In many departments there are maybe 1-3% of staff in IT and IT adjacent roles. I know of departments with less.

That means we have a ton of tasks which frankly can and should be replaced by technology.

Technology means systems, and systems decide how work happens. When the only option to evolve systems is to pay contractors (which we’re making harder) we see only stagnation and productivity declines — and we are seeing real productivity declines in the federal service.

I’m not implying federal workers are dumb or lazy, I’m saying they’re stuck in a massively outmoded way of working. Management doesn’t have the tools to make changes that will really increase efficiency, and frankly most of them are tech illiterate and don’t even know those opportunities exist.

And here’s an example of how tech can help. I write Model Context Protocols for LLMs to fetch specific files and documents for my work, which turn large data gathering efforts into short tasks. 5 years ago that was real work, but with cutting edge tools it’s an small part of my job.

Imagine if we gave the exact same tech to the CRA, enabling them to do bigger and faster and more thorough investigations into tax cheats and errors. That would be big revenue increases without needing cuts. Cuts that reduce our effectiveness and will reduce revenue because as I said we’re stuck in the past.

Every government agency needs teams working on internal tooling, relentlessly driving down the time spent on tasks, that way we can use more of our federal workers strengths. We don’t need contractors for this, they too are often behind the times and have perverse incentives to make departments dependent on them.

90 year olds shouldn’t be voting on things that are going to affect 2 year olds for the rest of their lives without 2 year olds having a voice. That argument is kinda vague and baseless.

And likewise, why does a 16 year old get to decide how an 80 year old that can’t get to the polls should live their final days? How much OAS they get, or which healthcare they get, etc.

Those old people will die soon and the rest of that 16 year olds life they can vote for whatever selfish things they want to have too. It’s annoying to arbitrarily assume old people are just trying to fuck over the younger generation without a care when that would be wildly unpopular with basically all other age groups.

Honestly I do not think 16 year olds should get to vote. They’ve barely had a chance to have a job (legally 1 year at most) and they haven’t even applied to university or college yet. They broadly don’t know what responsibility is, they don’t know what work is, and they’re not fully mentally mature.

18 sure, life is starting to hit you then. 16 is simply too young and too inexperienced at life to put in a place to decide how we all live.

Totally disagree. Your position is way too overly simplistic and naive.

An engineer only builds a bridge as strong as it needs to be, and likewise I “vibe code” things based on how few fucks I need to give.

I’m experienced and can review the output for sanity and completion. I can test it, I can rewrite it, etc.

Stop looking at vibe coding as doing the whole thing, it’s more valuable as the glue between things, or to create scripts tools that make you more efficient.

And you can vibe code entire apps that basically just work these days. You probably don’t want to maintain those apps but thats a question of lifecycle planning.

It is so much faster to vibe code an API integration and a suite of tests than I can write. It’s faster to write a functional jq or bash script.

But it’s also much much much worse at doing data viz or writing pandas code because it’s trained on 10,000 shitty medium blogs.

You really have to know what you’re doing and what the model is doing, but it is not universally trash.

And if you don’t believe me, put $20 into the Claude API and install Claude Code and ask it to build something.

I use dimethyl mercury patches, it’s easier than pretending I’m Scorpius changing out my heat rods.

I need to stop doing this

Why do they have anuses?

This is why the apes blew everything up.

That’s kind of just semantics and the frap the Trump admin is doing to say it doesn’t exist.

The FBI definitely has a file on this. They have the contents of his vault, his log books, etc.

Everyone on the Epstein list deserves to face open justice.

If he’s innocent he could have just released the list and proven it to the whole world.

I don’t think anyone would even trust that now.

Let’s try making Karma a real universal force

Don’t openly declare “economic warfare” then cry about it.

Sounds like criminal fraud to me.

Well it is owned by Oracle now

I don't know rust, but for example in Swift the type system can make things way more difficult.

Before they added macros if you wanted to write ORM code on a SQL database it was brutal, and if you need to go into raw buffers it's generally easier to just write C/objc code and a bridging header. The type system can make it harder to reason about performance too because you lose some visibility in what actually gets compiled.

The Swift type system has improved, but I've spent a lot of time fighting with it. I just try to avoid generics and type erasure now.

I've had similar experiences with Java and Scala.

That's what I mean about it being nice to drop out of setting up some type hierarchy and interfaces and just working with a raw buffers or function pointers.

“These aren’t real candidates. They aren’t campaigning. They aren’t engaging with constituents,” Poilievre wrote.

Boy, that sounds a whole lot like how none of the CPC candidates showed up to any of my local debates or showed up on a single local news or radio program, or took a single interview.

Frankly, I don't think we should be limited from running for office based on their percieved level of seriousness or that it's a protest. That's a slippery slope right there. We can increase the signatures or whatever, but it's still not going to be particularly useful and will primarily increase the floor of how much money you need to actually campaign.

I actually do like that C/C++ let you do this stuff.

Sometimes it's nice to acknowledge that I'm writing software for a computer and it's all just bytes. Sometimes I don't really want to wrestle with the ivory tower of abstract type theory mixed with vague compiler errors, I just want to allocate a block of memory and apply a minimal set rules on top.

Reminds me of java

I have Toolkit toolkit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(); seared into my brain. Then there were the bean factories…