Just having user agent header based attestation would work for most people.

It would be easy to bypass sure, but kids are boomer levels of tech illiterate these days.

Parents should be setting up content restrictions, the government has no place making us submit ask to view porn.

The failure of parents is not my problem.

Yep, and 2x64gb RAM

Their setup is here:

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/full-deepseek-q1-with-the-ik-version-of-llama-cpp-on-am5-no-distills-just-a-quant/233530

I would be fine with not charging workers under 18 tax.

When I was that age saving for university wasn’t easy and staying life off with a bunch of debt and no guaranteed job isn’t fun.

Canada's OAS and CPP are not a pyramid scheme, they're based on what you actually put in and guaranteed.

They don't have the solvency issues that US Social Security has.

A lot of 80/90 year olds have family they love.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think letting 16 year olds vote is the right move.

The reason I think every department needs an internal tech team is precisely because "just throwing tech" doesn't work. We need bespoke tailored solutions to the specific problems that workers are dealing with.

Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.

This is exactly the problem having internal teams building internal tools solves. You're not stuck waiting to go from 0 to 100% on an expensive project with long runway and out of date standards until finally the consultants to toss a solutoin over the fence and leave because they want to get the minimum done and move on to their next paycheque.

You can only do tech really well by understanding the domain and problem, and the people working on it.

I definitely think we should be going big on both OSS and Canadian owned tech. I don't expect the government to build Office, they should be using (and ideally contributing to) OSS. On the other hand, Statistics Canada has a ton of open sourced code that might as well be closed source, and would probably help them move quicker.

I have a different proposal

The government needs to adopt tech. No, not just “we use Office and SharePoint”, but something like making 10-20% of the federal workforce tech workers.

Why?

In many departments there are maybe 1-3% of staff in IT and IT adjacent roles. I know of departments with less.

That means we have a ton of tasks which frankly can and should be replaced by technology.

Technology means systems, and systems decide how work happens. When the only option to evolve systems is to pay contractors (which we’re making harder) we see only stagnation and productivity declines — and we are seeing real productivity declines in the federal service.

I’m not implying federal workers are dumb or lazy, I’m saying they’re stuck in a massively outmoded way of working. Management doesn’t have the tools to make changes that will really increase efficiency, and frankly most of them are tech illiterate and don’t even know those opportunities exist.

And here’s an example of how tech can help. I write Model Context Protocols for LLMs to fetch specific files and documents for my work, which turn large data gathering efforts into short tasks. 5 years ago that was real work, but with cutting edge tools it’s an small part of my job.

Imagine if we gave the exact same tech to the CRA, enabling them to do bigger and faster and more thorough investigations into tax cheats and errors. That would be big revenue increases without needing cuts. Cuts that reduce our effectiveness and will reduce revenue because as I said we’re stuck in the past.

Every government agency needs teams working on internal tooling, relentlessly driving down the time spent on tasks, that way we can use more of our federal workers strengths. We don’t need contractors for this, they too are often behind the times and have perverse incentives to make departments dependent on them.

90 year olds shouldn’t be voting on things that are going to affect 2 year olds for the rest of their lives without 2 year olds having a voice. That argument is kinda vague and baseless.

And likewise, why does a 16 year old get to decide how an 80 year old that can’t get to the polls should live their final days? How much OAS they get, or which healthcare they get, etc.

Those old people will die soon and the rest of that 16 year olds life they can vote for whatever selfish things they want to have too. It’s annoying to arbitrarily assume old people are just trying to fuck over the younger generation without a care when that would be wildly unpopular with basically all other age groups.

Honestly I do not think 16 year olds should get to vote. They’ve barely had a chance to have a job (legally 1 year at most) and they haven’t even applied to university or college yet. They broadly don’t know what responsibility is, they don’t know what work is, and they’re not fully mentally mature.

18 sure, life is starting to hit you then. 16 is simply too young and too inexperienced at life to put in a place to decide how we all live.

Don’t openly declare “economic warfare” then cry about it.

Sounds like criminal fraud to me.

I actually do like that C/C++ let you do this stuff.

Sometimes it's nice to acknowledge that I'm writing software for a computer and it's all just bytes. Sometimes I don't really want to wrestle with the ivory tower of abstract type theory mixed with vague compiler errors, I just want to allocate a block of memory and apply a minimal set rules on top.