I'd say it's because we're tasking ourselves with dumb stuff. No one half-asses building a shelter that keeps their family alive, or throwing a new favorite bowl on the pottery wheel. But instead of that we're writing posts for Facebook etc etc so we can (???) profit. So of course we want bots to do this all this dumb stuff, and of course we get dumb results.
For some things, yes. But I'm half-assing some really cool stuff right now. Made a scraper to pull my city's meeting minutes, agendas, recordings, made transcripts. Regex for "Flock", found every mention, passed those files into a cheap model (DeepSeek V4), had an understanding of who in my city is down with building the surveillance state and who isn't. I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all. I lightly polished each email and fired 'em off. Already got some replies back. Plenty more in the quiver too (pulled and analyzed CSVs of FOIA'd datasets).
If they're gonna spy on me with AI cameras, I can oppose them with AI research. :)
Did you use some stuff like https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.
I rolled my own. I hadn’t heard of this one, but I looked into stuff like OpenStates (now privately for-profit owned, ugh). My city just uses a Wordpress site so it’s structured enough. I’m looking at building something to ingest cities with Granicus and one other big local government meeting recorder via API whose name I forget. That should get decent coverage. There’s no way to catch the long tail of every local government’s recording process. Some cities people will just have to do manually. But it’s easy enough with LLM help.
> I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all.
Please tell me you did the work to validate that the quotes and figures were not made up by the cheap model. These things make stuff up all the time, you absolutely cannot rely on them without validating the output yourself.
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-...
Yep, I manually listened to the meeting recordings (easy to find the spots based on the transcript timestamps) for any quotes. There are also meeting minutes and agendas with supporting docs to corroborate against (e.g. for dollar amounts). They really don’t make stuff up all the time if you root them in data.
Love this. Thanks :)
You created the surveillance state to fight the surveillance state lol
Edit: it's a joke people
Nope, I used a minute fraction of the technology they have, along with open records as is my right in this country, to stand up for my Fourth Amendment right to travel without creeps stalking my every move. I need to make my specific framework a bit more generic and then I'll put it here on HN. Or just offer a platform where people can bring an OR key and it can run on their city.
I grant the lol-concept, but citizens monitoring their government is extremely different from governments monitoring their citizens.
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It used to be called journalism
We just need bots to read all these facebook posts and then we can put the phone down and go back to doing something real.
My last post [0] has proof-of-work: video evidence of my physical notes. How many people are willing to draft a complete essay on pen and paper first?
Ah this is clever! Feels very cosyweb. I'd be delighted if not caught on
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs in action.
Play silly games, win silly prizes
Oligarchs gotta pay rent on those data centers somehow.
The serfs will till and sow the server fields!