I worked in #civictech for a long time, now I teach.
| Website | https://jpt.sh |
| Codeberg | https://codeberg.org/jpt/ |
jpt
@jamesturk
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If you have lots of projects that are bundles of markdown (for me about a dozen hugo/zola/quarto/mkdocs/zensical sites) you might find this useful:
https://codeberg.org/jpt/owl-write
Written to scratch my own itch-- it's a TUI "project manager" for these files. Spellcheck, banned words/phrases, some basic stats (word count, etc.).
This release is the first one that does the main things I want in a single executable-- I had a few bespoke tools for this but found myself wanting to combine them.
julesh
Jani NikulaUsing a free software stack, you could be an effective developer with a relatively low budget. A cheap or used laptop and an internet subscription.
LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.
The prospect of your output as a developer being tied to a proprietary service seems risky at best.
Matthew GarrettMy job as a senior developer with a team of juniors is to figure out what to write, sketch a PoC as guidance, and then delegate the actual implementation to them. I'm going to look at that, explain misunderstandings or poor style choices, and guide them into implementing something that meets our standards.
I don't think LLMs can do my job yet. But I think we're getting shockingly close to them being able to do the other part. And I'm worried how we're going to get more senior developers.
Pavel A. SamsonovTech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
FOSS nerds: the Torment Nexus cannot be ethical until it is Open Source
Paco Hope@pluralistic
No company has announced “thanks to AI, we have the same number of employees, but we have launched zillions of new services and are growing our product lines because of all the time our people get to spend innovating.”
I don’t know why that is.
I was asked to contribute a page to @PagedOut on some lessons from Civic Tech-- that's now here:
https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=8&page=34
I personally think the page before (by @jyn ) is more interesting :)
https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=8&page=33&article=computers+should+be+liberating
The vision shared by many of those of us that have worked in {public interest tech/civic tech/whatever you want to call it}--technology as something that can be liberatory & democratizing--is not wrong. I'm far from the first to acknowledge that we were overly reliant on a Silicon Valley-centric tech scene that has always been proto-fascist and that continuing the work will mean decoupling from them, for good.
People once lauded for their desire to use technology to improve people's lives are now openly & persistently advocating for decimating public sector unions as well as replacing workers with generative AI trained on stolen works. The latter is particularly jarring: an embrace of technosolutionism 100% at odds with the lessons learned by actual practitioners about the real nature of this kind of work and the value of human expertise.