What an unhinged moment in time. At some point, they'll need to be courageous people with the ability and funds to speak up and say enough. But will they? It does not appear so.
This thing was always underutilized even by the last 2 administrations. For all of the purported DOGE savings, these folks actually legitimately saved money from agencies, which is why big contractor shops were so opposed. They didn't take Congressional appropriations and charged agencies for work, but couldn't just go to agencies and pitch business, they had to be reached out to.
Can't imagine how much better the thing had been if it'd been allowed to fully blossom, but given all the stuff they deal with it, it wasn't perfect but it was a really good experiment.
"losing money" is a canard when it's a self-producing government entity that was using not public dollars but instead user fees from a GSA Fund. There were lots of folks who had incentive for that thing not to work: https://insider.govtech.com/california/www-techwire-net/form...
Also, that IG report is a comedy show compared to the last 3 weeks of chaos from these people doing what they're doing flouting laws, rules and the common order.
In reality, they were embedded with federal agencies and worked on engagements for them. You gotta read what people actually do in practice, versus just the pitch.
it's expensive, the risks of losing are big and they dig into your whole life and basically ruin it. But agreed more people should be in these roles or at least advising these people, but the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.
I think there's a big difference between -- hall monitors making stuff impossible and what we're seeing now. USDS part of the executive branch made things more difficult, but if you'd given those folks even half the runway these doofuses have right now, imagine the sort of good they could've done.
Dark patterns as a name needs work anymore, but I like the general premise of this and think it could be cool for people learning this stuff for the first time. Good work conceptually.
Mastodon is fine for a specific audience but not a scalabale Twitter. SubNotes won't be either, but it's atop an ecosystem that should prevent the spam & trolls of Twitter, et.
al.
Loved pen & paper baseball as a kid, used to invent vast worlds. Now I use Out of the Park Baseball as my simulator of choice, but there have been precedessors since the late 90s.