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Sean Boots

@sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy
29 followers 5 following 211 posts

A better world, by listening. [bridged from mastodon.sboots.ca/@sboots on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy ]

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Reposted by Sean Boots
J. Nathan Matias 🦣 @natematias.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026
Wow, LinkedIn's algorithm really doesn't want people to read @sarahgilbert's article about keeping the Internet human in the era of AI Out of the 10,200 impressions the feed gave my posts last week, it only gave 65 to Sarah's *important* article in @techpolicypress As Sarah writes, "If AI […]
social.coop
Original post on social.coop
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Shauna @shauna.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026
I think people do this because it helps them feel righteous about their position, which is a small measure of comfort/control in the face of overwhelming odds. You may be helpless but at least you're morally correct! But choosing community with other flawed human beings over moral correctness […]
social.coop
Original post on social.coop
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Shauna @shauna.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026
RE: hachyderm.io/@evacide/1173503736136… Trying to seperate people into the groups "deserves to be exploited by big tech" and "does not deserve to be exploited by big tech" will not in fact prevent anyone in the latter group from being exploited by big tech
hachyderm.io
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026
“On how proximity to power reshapes behaviour, relationships, and identity inside large institutions” This piece from Honey Dacanay is a must-read for anyone working on digital government: honeydacanay.ca/writing/inner-circl…
honeydacanay.ca
The Inner Circles — Honey Dacanay
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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
RE: cosocial.ca/@timbray/11692485708258… I probably shouldn’t fling the term “class-reductionist” around without refreshing this link to what I mean, since I increasingly since it increasingly is invading every conversation I have about politics […]
cosocial.ca
Original post on cosocial.ca
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Tom MacWright @tmcw.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026
the future of geospatial data is lies, i guess github.com/tmcw/awesome-geojson/pul…
github.com
Add Europe Beach Map to data by Flightmussy · Pull Request #75 · tmcw/awesome-geojson
Adds Europe Beach Map to the data section — 511 European beaches as a GeoJSON FeatureCollection (Point geometry per beach) with sea temperature, sand type, best season and Blue Flag status. Direct ...
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Mike Gifford, CPWA @mgifford.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026
Installing #solar 1 house at a time leaves a lot of value on the table. What if neighbours planned together? How about #Ottawa & specifically #Centretown - Shared buying power - Lower costs - Better #battery options - More resilient communities - Less #CO2 […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
New work publication! 📊 Tabular data format standards: guide.yukon.ca/en/content-and-desig… (Feedback and thoughts welcome!) #opendata
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Reposted by Sean Boots
Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026
I cannot believe that in the year 2026, here I am making a pamphlet to help Saskatchewan farm kids identify space junk and get in touch with me. This is so ridiculous, because: 1. Even though I have seen space junk in Sask with my own eyes, it's still hard to believe that billionaires are […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026
“I originally got into computing because of the beauty of ideas, the joy of creating, and the possibility of building tools to help people and foster human relationships. I still believe in those things, even though it seems like most of the industry does not.” @byorgey […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026
“When the work the state is being asked to do produces harm at the point of contact — wrongful denials, administrative burden as deterrence, surveillance of the poor as eligibility verification — making the inside operationally cleaner scales the harm.” @ronbronson […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Jason Santa Maria @jasonsantamaria.typo.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026
It’s a banner week for web friends’ personal sites! @beep Redesigned his site and there are heaps of nice details: view transitions, background scroll-y secrets, and visited link styles (remember those). Made with the same care as his writing: ethanmarcotte.com @nazhamid Revived his […]
typo.social
Original post on typo.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026
“The deskilling occurs at the level of the community, not only the individual.” @aworkinglibrary aworkinglibrary.com/writing/ten-tim…
aworkinglibrary.com
Ten times
“After all, who could be opposed to getting more done with less work?”
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Reposted by Sean Boots
Mwistar @mwistar.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2026
Fixed-rate mortgage holders should prepare for mortgage renewal sticker shock, unless their finances can handle a 15% increase in the cost of borrowing.
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Reposted by Sean Boots
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops @ifixcoinops.retro.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026
It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your […]
retro.social
Original post on retro.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026
“Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.” Ted Chiang […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026
“These measures are common practice in adjacent industries. They are not novel. Their absence reflects a regulatory choice rather than a technical constraint.” Daniel Morgan: www.thespacereview.com/article/5234… via @sundogplanets
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Steve Bellovin @stevebellovin.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026
Cybersecurity and Kessler Syndrome: www.thespacereview.com/article/5234…
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026
“A filter would easily solve this. All we need is an “AI” checkbox to toggle.” Jess Weatherbed: www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-inte…
theverge.com
Let us filter AI slop, you cowards
Let’s put those AI labels to the test.
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Reposted by Sean Boots
Harold Jarche @harold.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/06/2026
RE: mstdn.ca/@teledyn/116652708401285794 "every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at scale" 1. The hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it. 2. Bias amplification 3. Environmental cost 4. Documentation — the training datasets being […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026
Yesterday Olwyn and Nigel from the Yukon government’s Environment department launched the human-wildlife conflict data dashboard. 🐻📈 human-wildlife-conflict.service.yuk… Really awesome work (with CSV open data coming next week!). #dataviz #opendata #wildlife
human-wildlife-conflict.service.yukon.ca
Human-wildlife conflict
Human-wildlife conflict application
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 29/05/2026
“I will never surrender my creativity to a machine, and neither should you.” Hallie Bateman: halmail.substack.com/p/on-demis-fee…
halmail.substack.com
On Demi's feeble A.I. statement
Let's just say I disagree
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026
“What is less remarked upon is the same dynamic playing out inside organizations: time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them.” On output-competence decoupling […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Niki @nikitonsky.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026
1.8 GB per emoji
macOS Tahoe 26.5 update notice, weighting 14.45 GB with comment that it adds 8 new emoji
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jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny.neuromatch.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026
Who gives a single shit how good the "AI" can code when the purpose of "AI" is and always has been enclosure of all information in an ad-driven surveillance platform. If you love LLMs, this is the future you, yes you, are actively helping create.
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jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny.neuromatch.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026
RE: dair-community.social/@emilymbender… "links will become an afterthought" is not even coded language for "the rest of the internet is merely training data and we will own the entire means of accessing information online"
dair-community.social
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Dave Winter @luchador.thecanadian.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/05/2026
DontSurveil.Me has put together a great explainer on Bill C-22. Canadians need to pay attention. Expanding surveillance powers, retaining metadata, and weakening encryption all threaten privacy, free expression, civil liberties, and digital rights. If we care about privacy, digital rights […]
thecanadian.social
Original post on thecanadian.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026
“the national subsidy for data centers exceeded $2 million in costs per permanent job … companies received nearly $77 million in tax breaks for a facility that created exactly one permanent position.” Abigail Bassett […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Patrick @ppb1701.ppb.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/05/2026
So…Bitwarden quietly swapped their CEO for a PE exit specialist, dropped “Always free”, rewrote their values, then half-scrubbed a 4 year old blog post to cover it. Post still contradicts itself. I looked. There was no announcement. blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovati… […]
ppb.social
Original post on ppb.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 19/05/2026
“Yukon’s system, which allows donations from outside the jurisdiction, is as a result also a recipe for foreign interference” Duff Conacher: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/notori… #Yukon
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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/05/2026
HAHAHAHA NOOOOOO
A large barn covered with peeling yellow paint, and also snow.  Lots of snow.  It's surrounded by snow, all over the ground.  On freaking May 16.A view across snowy fields (that just got seeded). There's a sundog visible in the sky in between some trees and a farm building.Another view of snow-covered fields, next to the big yellow barn.  There's not a lot of snow, but it's a lot of snow for mid-May.Some budding green trees surrounded by snow all over the ground.
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2026
“This year, reporters were identifiable by red or pink stripes on our badges, literal scarlet letters warning attendees about our presence. Hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line. No one wanted to get caught talking out of turn.” Gaby Del Valle […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Sean Coates @sean.scoat.es.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026
This is not to say that alternatives might not even exist. Just more that Google has successfully embedded themselves in our children's education and lives so deeply that it will be really difficult to change at this point. I've been this kind of tired for a decade.
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Sean Coates @sean.scoat.es.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026
I recognize that this is not a *new* idea, but it occurred to me that if Google wanted to start pushing “51st State" propaganda (or any other disgusting ideas) to a whole generation of children in #Canada , we don't really have a viable alternative to Google Classroom and Chromebooks. This is […]
scoat.es
Original post on scoat.es
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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026
excited to announce that Wizard Zines is now shipping Canadian orders from Canada! now shipping is cheaper & there's no risk of being hit with duties get your zines at wizardzines.com
a cartoon with a map of Canada, where the the order is being shipped from Montreal to Saskatchewan
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Florian Weber @fnwbr.chaos.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/04/2026
RE: mastodon.sboots.ca/@sboots/11645526… looks like the kids are alright: "There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally" and "31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel […]
chaos.social
Original post on chaos.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2026
“It just makes me want to dig my heels into a career where I never have to use AI, even if that’s a career that isn’t going to pay as well” www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-inte…
theverge.com
The more young people use AI, the more they hate it
Caught between fears of job loss and social stigma, Gen Z’s opinions of AI are hitting new lows.
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Glyph @glyph.im · 23/04/2026
I want to be clear that this is pretty divorced from my own views of likely scenarios, even likely nightmare scenarios, so they're not getting this from me. If you're reading this and you're involved in LLM hype, I'd really like you to take a moment to pause and examine the fact that this is […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Glyph @glyph.im · 23/04/2026
Talking to my 8-year-old about my upcoming Way Too Big Blog Post About genAI. I explain that my goal is to describe why I think it's bad, because it's really complicated and hard to understand, and so I don't blame people who disagree. They ask, matter-of-factly, "Oh, are you trying to get […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Laurie Voss @seldo.alpaca.gold.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2026
"You know what would be really cool? If we put a creepy mass surveillance company in charge of our food supply" said nobody. www.linkedin.com/news/story/palanti…
linkedin.com
Palantir, USDA cut $300M deal to protect food supply | LinkedIn
Rising supply costs — particularly for gas and fertilizer — have caused many American farmers to "rethink what they produce," per CNBC.
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2026
“I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2026
“Whether that dynamic is reassuring or alarming depends on your view of where the responsibility for protecting citizens from their own governments should ultimately rest.” thenextweb.com/news/whatsapp-italia…
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/04/2026
“An actual economics response to food price inflation would involve indexation of income supports, a wage floor that keeps pace with the cost of living, a competition authority with teeth, and a provincial fiscal framework that does not leave households absorbing every swing in oil royalties.” […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Ben Zanin @gnomon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/04/2026
If all you do in your tech career is: 1. When something is slow, you look carefully at the output of a profiler or a query plan & make measured suggestions about what to improve; 2. When something breaks badly, you gently but insistently ask what & why until you truly know, then the next time […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Mastodon @mastodon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/04/2026
We’re happy to share that Mastodon has been awarded a service agreement from the Sovereign Tech Fund @sovtechfund 🎉 This covers five major initiatives through 2026 and 2027. We are very grateful for this support. Read about the details in our blog post […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 15/04/2026
“This is the common fuel animating the rather disparate furies of militant doomers, anti-AI activists, data center protestors, and labor organizers alike: the profound antidemocratic tendency inherent in the modern AI project.” […]
mastodon.sboots.ca
Original post on mastodon.sboots.ca
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 15/04/2026
“Regulators can and should take an initial step by releasing Markdown versions of all of the PDFs they release.” Yessssss: mhsu2112.substack.com/p/policy-as-c…
mhsu2112.substack.com
Policy as code
The tools now exist to close the gap between regulatory intent and machine execution. Readers can test one out below
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Sean Boots @sboots.mastodon.sboots.ca.ap.brid.gy · 14/04/2026
@adamchainz Adam I just read adamj.eu/tech/2023/09/18/git-dont-c… and was like, huh, this is so much better, I never would have thought of that! Thanks for sharing! 🙏
adamj.eu
Git: Don’t create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead - Adam Johnson
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
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