Supporting Little Tech is the Practical Way to Deal with Big Tech

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18F: We are dedicated to the American public and we're not done yet

For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving the American people to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American...

18f.org

We are dedicated to the American public.
And we aren't done yet.
March 1, 2025

A letter to the American People:
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.

However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.

When former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of TTS director and met with TTS including 18F on February 3, 2025, he acknowledged that the group is the “gold standard” of civic technologists and that “you guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.” He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the work, and the value of the talent that the teams bring to government.

Despite that skill and knowledge, at midnight ET on March 1, the entirety of 18F received notice that our positions had been eliminated.

The letter said that 18F "has been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical”.

"This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA," Shedd said in an email shortly after we were given notice.

This was a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.

All 18F's support on that work has now abruptly come to a halt. Since the entire staff was also placed on administrative leave, we have been locked out of our computers, and have no chance to assist in an orderly transition in our work. We don’t even have access to our personal employment data. We’re supposed to return our equipment, but can’t use our email to find out how or where.

Dismantling 18F follows the gutting of the original US Digital Service. These cuts are just the most recent in a series of a sledgehammer approach to the critical US teams supporting IT infrastructure.

Before today’s RIF, DOGE members and GSA political appointees demanded and took access to IT systems that hold sensitive information. They ignored security precautions. Some who pushed back on this questionable behavior resigned rather than grant access. Others were met with reprisals like being booted from work communication channels.

We’re not done yet.
We’re still absorbing what has happened. We’re wrestling with what it will mean for ourselves and our families, as well as the impact on our partners and the American people.

But we came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet.

More to come.

 

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Think a little, build a little, and test a little. This process has been the most robust form of software development for a long time.

But what if what happens is that those who can afford the better tools (and the speaker spends a lot) are the only ones who can learn the new skills?

 

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Generative AI is upending freelance work—even top performers aren't safe, researchers say

A study has uncovered a startling reality: generative AI tools like ChatGPT are already reshaping the freelance job market, slashing employment opportunities and pay for workers across all skill levels. Even top freelancers—those with the strongest track records—are suffering the greatest setbacks.

phys.org

 

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Part of the "public tech stack"(thank you Maria Ressa, for better name for open source):

Matrix.org

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

matrix.org

 

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At SXSW, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber pokes fun at Mark Zuckerberg with Latin phrase T-shirt | TechCrunch

When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked onstage at SXSW 2025 for her keynote discussion, she wore a large black T-shirt with her hair pulled back into a bun.

techcrunch.com

 

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I signed up, but haven't been able to get access to Manus yet.

As I said before, we don't use punch cards anymore.

But how many people would be willing to unleash anything vibecoded software in production for anything of consequence?

Games, I get. Personal tools for specific tasks, I also get. Websites are basically all crap and have been for ages, so I get those too.

Can you imagine flight control software or medical device software vibecoded?

The building blocks can change, but we still need systems to be reliable, predictable, and explainable.

Vibecoding is a powerful paradigm, but we need engineering skills to be formed around that paradigm.

We also need for these skills to not be learnable only by a privileged few.

I first learned to code as a kid in a public library through my own initiative.

That sort of pathway to learn skills has been increasingly disappearing. Cloud and mobile was when the public library systems could no longer support these efforts. Before then, people cared about the potential "digital divide."

Once the tech companies got too big, they decided pull the ladders up.

The big AI labs built their AI coders on open source code and then activately lobby to have laws banning open source (except when it suites them).

This may seem esoteric. But the AI systems don't have to be good at their tasks before people decide that laborers aren't needed.

Vibe coding is great for demos and concepts, but will be creating bugs at industrial scale.

The big labs could be spending their money to drive down hallucinations in use cases or to combine well with perfectly reliable, non-probabilistic aspects of computer science. For example, a good old-fashioned database basically never hallucinate.

But no, that would be useful and remove incentives for building their "digital god" in the form of a bigger proprietary transformer models that's allowed to "reason" in the most energy inefficient way imaginable.

 

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The fear side of the "digital god" cult is at it again.

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB53/2025

The purported point is for whistle-blower protection and to establish Cal Compute. If those were the only things in there, then it seems applications focused and very practical.

But once again, they attempt another one-size-fits-all Franken-law to regulate all software (and possibly all math that makes use of functions).

“Artificial intelligence model” means an engineered or machine-based system that varies in its level of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives, infer from the input it receives how to generate outputs that can influence physical or virtual environments

Why can't Cal Compute and Whistle-blower protections be created without this nonsense?

California can't build housing. It can't build trains. It was one pocket signature away from not being able to build software (basically the only thing legal to build there). It's at it again.

I'm going to quote further nonsense ported from SB 1047.

(c) “Developer” means a person that has trained at least one foundation model with a quantity of computational power that costs at least one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000) when measured using prevailing market prices of cloud compute

If a person has trained a foundation model? In the past? At prevailing market prices? If this isn't a direct assault on open source and DeepSeek like moments happening California, I'm not sure how you could have worded it more anti-open-source.

Much more straightforward, if it is what they claim it is would be "a firm that's training a foundation model planned to cost at least one hundred million dollars."

It's worded in the more convoluted way so that anyone who doesn't fear (and revere) the future "digital god," would have no chance to derail funding for the "digital god" projects by delivering equivalent functionality at a fraction of the cost.

There's a lot more ported from SB 1047.

 

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(b) “Critical risk” means a foreseeable and material risk that a developer’s development, storage, or deployment of a foundation model will result in the death of, or serious injury to, more than 100 people or more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) in damage to rights in money or property, through any of the following:
(1) The creation and release of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon.
(2) A cyberattack.
(3) A foundation model engaging in conduct, with limited human intervention, that would, if committed by a human, constitute a violation of the Penal Code that requires intent, recklessness, or gross negligence or the solicitation or aiding and abetting of that violation.
(4) A foundation model evading the control of its developer or user.

This section also becomes nonsense when you consider that any physics simulation that accounts for gravity is already usable to create this sort of destruction.

Projectile motion is taught in most high-schools. Many high-school school students probably regularly program the three or four lines of code to simulate projectile motion. This code could be used for baseballs or for large explosives.

That's why it's nonsense to regulate mathematical functions put into code(IOW, machine-based systems that infer outputs from its inputs that can effect an environment, virtual or physical).

 

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The technical report seems to be more about the details of the model than about the new capabilities.

If you go to a library to learn how things work, "standing on the shoulders of giants," if you will, is how people make progress in fields where progress is possible.

Reading open-source code and papers in open science is all in the tradition of public libraries used by autodidacts everywhere.