iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

My org is hiring a manager for our web consulting team that builds sites for government customers around the state of California. It's a great team with meaningful work! Check the link to the "Duty Statement" for the actual job details […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

I'm not sure if it's because of how Firefox is deployed in my organization, or something else, but Firefox re-enabled "Stories" on my browser home page and would *not* disable it with the built-in config. I had to go into about:config and search "stories" then toggle a few prefs there to get […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

Infrastructure Architect position at the California Department of Technology - focused on Compute and Storage. This is in another division from me, but is my classification, so I'm happy to talk about the department, state service (and getting hired), and the classification's expectations with […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

RE: fosstodon.org/@haraldkliems/1167937… Harald pointed me to this thread and I think it's a great dive into the challenges of the analysis People for Bikes is doing. I personally think their older methodology is better and there is probably a hybrid of the old and the new […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2026

Come lead emerging technology and AI policy at the State of California! This is a brand new senior position working under the state Chief Technology Innovation Officer: calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/… It has been filled on an interim basis by an […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 10/04/2026

My department is hiring a front-end programmer! It's on a sibling team to mine, but I know the managers and they're all great. The web team does a mix of work developing a shared platform and providing consulting services […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 10/04/2026

Americans: These EVs are pretty great, but they're so expensive! American Car Companies: What if we bring it from $70k down to $50k? Americans: That's nice, but not quite in my price range still. What about something smaller and with fewer features Nissan: Sure, the Leaf is perfect! Hyundai […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 07/04/2026

The world remembers who issued and who carried out war crimes. It is the law of the United States to not bomb civilian facilities. Those who do will be held accountable somewhere. The bombings must not happen. 5calls.org to connect with your congressmember and tell them you expect them […]

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Reposted by Nick Santos

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 23/11/2025

This, by @giacgrassi.bsky.social, remains one of the simplest and best climate visuals

a drawing of a boat heating torwads an iceberg - lower temps still collide with ice but not as badly.

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 23/10/2025

OK, this time, a #job that is related to my work! The California Department of Technology is hiring a DevSecOps team member - I worked closely and regularly with the last person in this role to deploy secure Azure-based services […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2025

California Department of Transportation is seeking a Chief Data and AI Officer Not GIS specific, but lots of data management and policy, and they have a huge GIS program (with great people running it), so there'd be a GIS component […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2025

I usually avoid politics here, mostly because I don't think it helps. I'm going to share something #uspol now. This is a very good episode of the Law and Chaos podcast - I see it's paid subscribers only though - the intro monologue is what I wanted to link and the summary covers it […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

I'm also writing it to just share thoughts publicly about what I see as the real uses of generative AI. I don't think it has the ability to do the work of most human workers, no matter what the people who want your money say. But I hear a lot of people saying they have to hop on because it's the […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

I realize that's just super-search, where the search is likely still coming from an index and the LLM is just interpreting my language to perform the search on my behalf, and that makes me skeptical of the overall technology at the same time as I think I finally have a use for it that I […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

Similarly, I'm finding some uses asking LLMs not for answers, but for where to find the answers on particularly thorny questions. The generated answers may still be wrong or lack nuance, but if I ask it where to find the answers, it can often process my language and intent to connect me to the […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

I'm getting increasingly tired of suggestions that LLM-based AI can generate content from prompts or that it can truly answer questions when it just can't do it reliably. In a world where we expect computers to provide deterministic outputs, it's so far from crossing the reliability threshold […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2025

For something a little sillier and fully in the GIS realm - thought of this at work the other day.

A venn diagram with circles for "People in therapy" and "People who store photos in ArcGIS" - where they overlap is labelled "Attachment issues.

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

The unit I'm in is hiring again - this time for a Web Domain Specialist - see the job description at calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/… We've hired a few cool positions recently. I don't work on the specific team in this link, but I know the managers […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2025

Are there any options for running a serverless patterned STAC endpoint? Or even better, a fully static STAC-metadata store that requires the client to do the filtering? I see that github.com/stac-utils/stac-fastapi can use a parquet storage as its backend, which seems like it could get […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 10/04/2025

Today I got a vendor to reproduce a bug in a clean environment that causes the browser tab to fully lock up in a loop repeating the same request to their servers over and over again because the user is signed in, but is in a specific unauthorized state. They replicated it, then told me it was […]

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Reposted by Nick Santos

Waldo Jaquith @waldoj.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/02/2025

I set up a quick uptime tracker for websites that Trump & Musk are most likely to screw with. (It's only tracking whether the home page loads, not whether data sets disappear or whatever.) updown.io/p/ldv2p

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 03/02/2025

Incredibly mad that many people I know, who have devoted their lives to helping others, are out of a job right now because Elon Musk has some kind of grudge against USAID. Far worse things will happen around the world - thousands of people will die, millions will be harmed. Musk isn't elected […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 24/12/2024

The State of California is hiring a senior leader in web strategy - officially the Web Services Manager - this person leads web development and strategy for the state, building the design systems and platforms that other departments use to run their websites, including the main ca.gov portal […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 04/12/2024

If restaurants priced like cloud computing providers: Guest: "Hi, I'd like you to deploy one plate of pasta to my table please. How much would that cost"? Server: "Hard to say. You'll need to subscribe to the ingredients service, which has a spot pricing option. You'll need to add on the […]

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Nick Santos @nickrsan.mapstodon.space.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2024

The California Department of Technology is hiring a senior web developer. This is a great team full of forward looking people and building websites and services that support many, many agencies. Hiring details at calcareers.ca.gov/CalHrPublic/Jobs/… […]

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