Doug Sartori
dsartori.bsky.social
Doug Sartori
@dsartori.bsky.social
Software pro. Community organizer.

Chair: hackf.org, opendatasociety.ca

Owner: p42systems.com
Pinned
I put together a little archive of all the stuff I've written for publication over the past few years. Because I am insufferable, you can conveniently access the archive using the Gopher protocol.

Check it out at gopher://sartori.ca
Reposted by Doug Sartori
At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars...

Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools
November 27, 2025 at 7:55 PM
I put together a little archive of all the stuff I've written for publication over the past few years. Because I am insufferable, you can conveniently access the archive using the Gopher protocol.

Check it out at gopher://sartori.ca
November 26, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Idly wondering how many times a day some Canadian media outlet kills a story about questionable use of temporary foreign workers.
November 25, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Doug Sartori
Let’s see if one single pundit who said there was some great realignment of American sentiment with this last election, based on what they saw on the Nazi-owned platform overrun by foreign actors, offers any retractions or corrections for their gullibility.
November 23, 2025 at 4:10 PM
I work in a blighted downtown. I understand the sentiment. I feel governments are being rewarded with an easy way out after their inaction created an explosion of suffering and public squalor.

Maybe that’s how the public truly wants it, but it bothers me.

www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...
Opinion: We have normalized delinquent, disorderly behaviour in our cities for too long
There is nothing normal about an encampment forcing toddlers in the daycare next door to stay inside
www.theglobeandmail.com
November 21, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Doug Sartori
it's great material, I'm not not laughing, but then I don't spend my time in a Skinner Box designed to turn me into a living Grok
November 20, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Tech monocultures are a smell: I know to be wary when I encounter an org using only the Microsoft stack (they do not trust their own technical judgment).

Running something weird that perfectly fits your use case is a sign of a capable, confident tech shop.
November 18, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Having like four places you can effectively distribute apps is an unacceptable concentration of power.
Don't be evil?

"Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officers..."

www.404media.co/google-has-c...
Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort
Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable gr...
www.404media.co
November 16, 2025 at 12:35 PM
If you’re interested in analyzing Canadian elections, here’s 90 minutes dumping everything I know about working with political data.

youtu.be/wUqvQT81u7M?...
Border City Data: Analyzing Canadian Election Data
YouTube video by Hackforge
youtu.be
November 4, 2025 at 12:34 PM
Should not be this hard if avoiding vendor lock-in has been a priority.

Tech monocultures are always bad but now more salient: previously, the main consequences of lock-in would be financial. Canada being unable to divest now touches our sovereignty.

thelogic.co/news/ottawa-...
Documents reveal why Ottawa can’t stop using Amazon Web Services - The Logic
When Amazon pulled out of Quebec, Ottawa said it would review its contracts with the firm. Documents obtained by The Logic reveal how much it depends on the tech giant.
thelogic.co
October 31, 2025 at 9:06 PM
If you or your organization is still using Twitter, shame. There is no excuse.
From an article about the man in the SS uniform arrested for attacking the woman in Georgia. Just wild that we've accepted that there's a huge social media platform where an account called "@GasChambers" is allowed to openly do Nazi fundraising and that's fine, in fact all the reporters post there.
October 29, 2025 at 1:27 PM
The big cloud services are convenient but it’s increasingly clear they’re bad for the ecosystem.

Now, there are clearly huge risks in relying on US services.

Invest in your own team’s capacity and lean a little less on the turnkey services that lock you in.

blog.42futures.com/p/your-data-...
Your data, their rules
The growing risks of hosting EU data in the US cloud
blog.42futures.com
October 27, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Friday I’m talking about using public data to build a text RPG, but also I think expressing a bit of a contrarian view of what is possible with AI coding assistance and point in the direction of some promising paths few are talking about. Free in person or online.

www.hackf.org/event/neighb...
Neighbourhood Quest – Windsor Hackforge
www.hackf.org
October 22, 2025 at 12:39 PM
One of my services is software evaluation and tech buying advice. This means I talk to a lot of vendors once or twice while gathering options.

I definitely notice the ones whose marketing afterward is intensely persistent and borderline unethical. I never evaluate or advise their adoption again.
October 20, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Doug Sartori
the media has made a huge deal about Neutrality and Not Editorializing and it all falls apart when you realize they are too afraid to publish a factual description of the video Trump posted
October 19, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Obviously needed.

Will this government or any government have the will to look carefully at the risk of continuing to use U.S. tech infrastructure? Is anybody going to consider how open source adoption can contribute to digital sovereignty? I hope so!

www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
Carney's 'Buy Canadian' policy expected to be fully in place next year: source | CBC News
A senior federal source with knowledge of the government's plans said initial elements of the proposal should be in place by as early as November, with the entire policy expected to take effect by the...
www.cbc.ca
October 6, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Is anybody working on reviving Gopher as a parallel internet for LLMs? Because we should do that. Return to #gopherspace.
October 3, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Doug Sartori
September 24, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Finding out the hard way you have less juice than Jimmy Kimmel.
September 22, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Reposted by Doug Sartori
Is it time to built a 1000 ft. tall wall of ice across the 49th parallel? This man was fired for asking the question
September 19, 2025 at 8:43 PM
By the same process all us little people learned firsthand that elite fools are as common as everyday garden-variety dummies.
In the 2010s, this country's elites were thrown onto social platforms with everyone else and could finally read what we all think about them and it caused them so much psychic damage that they decided to destroy both the internet and democracy to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.
If this is what it took for you to be pushed into fascism you were probably already there
September 19, 2025 at 12:27 PM
In the spirit of Software Freedom Day (tomorrow) all of this critique is fair and more than fair.

aria.dog/barks/forkli...
Introducing the Forklift Certified License—Aria’s Barks
It's not following the OSI definition of open-source because i don't give a damn how capital defines its needs.
aria.dog
September 19, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Not a good sign that my AI chatbot tells me I'm a crazy liar consuming absurd misinformation every time I ask it something about contemporary political events in the USA.
September 18, 2025 at 6:25 PM