Sean Boots

my election night hot take is that a bunch of the progressives who won big had such a history of community organizing and knew how to mobilize a deep bench of volunteers, organizing matters so much and you can get started organizing literally anything. talk to people face to face, get organized

I would like to thank my local municipal election worker for exclaiming “whee, democracy” in a monotone voice as the vote tabulator sucked in my ballot

The Test, Learn and Grow Playbook is here www.gov.uk/guidance/tes...

i am on a plane sitting next to a lady who looks 40ish and has informed me that this is her first time flying she is visibly excited. she asked the flight attendant how much a soda costs and was happy to learn that drinks are free on airplanes. she's taking lots of pictures. i love this for her

“Paris’ traffic is so uncomplicated because of the City’s enormous recent investment in bike mobility (€250 million for its 2021-2026 cycling plan). Bikes are literally everywhere, both in and out of mixed traffic… Here in Toronto, we are hurtling back toward the Stone Age…” @spacing.bsky.social

The increased travel times may look like a thing, but a) we're talking <50% higher at the absolute peak, b) comparing to 2022 is not fair because Toronto was still experiencing pandemic-related traffic reductions, and c) PEOPLE WERE SPEEDING AND PEOPLE WERE DYING BEFORE

One thing I can't get over is that the cycle tracks hardly affect drivers at all: travel times and parking are only marginally different and they still get their pointless removal wish granted. They saved lives and doubled cycling and it just doesn't matter. www.toronto.ca/wp-content/u...

Went to see it for myself #BikeTO

New blog post! 👨‍💻 “I hoped the system would have had more capacity for institutional reform than it has.” (on the launch of Digital Transformation Canada) sboots.ca/2026/10/14/h...

This week's @showuptoronto.ca newsletter hit your inboxes at 6am this morning because there was a 6am bike lane protest to highlight! But there's an additional 70+ cool progressive events in the next 7 days you may want to read about in addition to my bike lane musings buttondown.com/showup/archi...

I will be eternally grateful to have been born in a literate culture where literacy was valued and expected and I still had the time, attention, and freedom to develop a literacy practice. Understanding context, inference, vocabulary, perspective, affect — all powerful, useful skills and values.

“…a dense web of rules, sign-offs and reporting that slows the public service down far more than it holds it to account for results. Government never measures the effort spent complying with processes against the effort spent doing the actual work.” Clarke & Charbonneau: irpp.org/research-stu...

Even better: the post is about an HOA. I want to give OP a standing ovation. They know what they're in for.

The OP of a Reddit post commenting "I am unfortunately trying to solve a political problem with a technical solution" is one of the most goddamn insightful and self-aware comments I've seen lately and I want to give it so many upvotes

"The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the “new normal” for the people or organizations that maintain it." Kudos to the @wikimediafoundation.org team for saying this explictly: wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/10...

worst case scenario for someone else getting hold of oracle's database licensing business, go

They had the privacy screens and folders, crayons to mark the ballot, a poll attendant, and a ballot box. It was the same place as the advance polls and many adults were also voting at the same time. 6-year-old was a little grumpy that he wasn't allowed to vote in the mayoral election though.

We did this today and it was SO good and the kids loved it. Informal exit polling in the neighbourhood suggests sugar maple is a pretty strong contender.

first draft of the less computer handbook is done :) lesscomputer.ca

FRIDAY at 9am PT it's me and @farrahbostic.bsky.social on How People Work, Live! ... with what KSR's The Ministry for the Future has to do with understanding people better, having awkward conversations, and telling the truth to those who don't want to hear it. calendly.com/verylittlegr...

New anti-Data Center graphics package just dropped on our free downloads page! justseeds.org/graphic/no-m...

And it’s much less a matter of abstract philosophy or ethics or whatever and a lot more about the actual ways that humans behave and make decisions together collectively

Overwhelmingly what you do in a white collar job is mostly the soft stuff, and no, that doesn’t actually reduce to “humans are a liability condom” or whatever. It’s just stuff that is traditionally devalued becuase it’s not flashy/is sometimes hard to articulate, but it’s really important

Here’s the thing: soft skills are still real and they’re really important and they can’t be trained directly as a target by reinforcement learning, and even if they could be/even granting that models do have some soft skills, they depend on existing as a human in an organizational context

The kids will still randomly recall stories I made up and told and read to them years later, that I had completely forgotten. Bedtime reading and story time is absolutely magical and I could never delegate or outsource it.

I've found recently that repeating "Efficiency isn't one of my values" as a kind of affirmation has been really freeing.

It’s hard enough for cities in Canada to do smarter things given how often bad city leaders hurt their own cities. But it’s extra infuriating watching awful provincial premiers sabotaging cities by ripping out good things they FINALLY managed to achieve. Premiers should not have that power, period.

Looking at this chart, my first question is whether there are Canadian or European suppliers that can do whatever IBM and Microsoft are doing for the federal government.

I think this story is less about any failure of the Carney government's "buy Canadian" policy and more about the interesting questions raised by any attempt to reorient government procurement away from the United States.

Fascinated by the few multiple trains daily places. Ontario-Quebec, DC-Boston of course....but never would have thought St Louis & Kansas City.

I wrote about some of the pitfalls of the DIA earlier this year: www.thestar.com/opinion/star... It's a good idea. But if it's so great, it should just be responsible for doing all procurement, instead of leaving the broken system to run in tandem (Carney is, I'm told, considering doing just that.)

Look, I work for an independent agency of the provincial Crown, I clearly don't object to the idea in principle. But procurement, and defence procurement especially, is a pretty core part of government and the sums involved here are going to be massive.

One of the important parts of @justinling.ca's recent piece that set off alarm bells for me personally was the bit about Carney trying to govern around the bureaucracy with new agencies instead of doing civil service reform. www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/art...

If I do say so myself, the deck I've prepped for this, tomorrow, is awesome. Much fun, and informative. Very stoked about presenting it. www.cigionline.org/events/the-c...

fwiw arstechnica.com/apple/2026/1...

"Framing any disagreement as a difference of opinion between two sides, and then asking everyone to pick a camp, is intellectually convenient. It also happens to be a really bad way of actually wrapping your head around the possibilities present in the world." - @spavel.bsky.social

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead