Comment by danso
8 days ago
Worth noting that the U.S. Digital Service (USDS, i.e the org that DOGE has now subsumed) has for a long while been experts at building and deploying static websites for the federal government. And doing it completely in the open. Within minutes you can literally clone and re-deploy all of httsp://usds.gov — 150MB of 2,700 assets and documents, built on Jekyll — locally or on S3. They've even written out the complete deployment instructions:
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there is no crusade or moral framework.
If you go to the doge website right now, there's a Libs of TikTok tweet shown on the main page. It reads:
The US government only recognizes two sexes: Male and Female. This needs to be changed immediately
There is absolutely a crusade going on, but I certainly wouldn't call it moral.
They have money. What they’re getting is political power.
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oh how i wish more people would avoid becoming lost in the details and see this system for what it very simply is
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Part of this is a crusade though. There's very much a desire to rip out anything that is considered "woke" or "DEI". But the rest of it is just burning things down for the sake of burning things down.
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Musk is such a tumour of a human that I think “it’s just money” is such a sloppy abdication of analyzing the situation.
No, it is something more sinister than that. Trump is a puppet and his statements are flat out fabrications. Musk and DOGE do outrageous things which just happen to benefit foreign superpowers. Everything the two co-presidents do openly is a red herring meant to mislead and waste time.
Who in their right mind opens up RDP and Citrix servers to public internet in DoE and nuclear research laboratory networks?
Time is running very short. Foreign powers must be assumed to already hold all possible information about the US government, including nuclear secrets, warfare capabilities, emergency plans, and kompromat of all personnel and political oversight.
It won’t be long before the US nuclear arsenal mysteriously disappears.
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How does deleting 18F translate into rich people taking money?
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In what way is it rich people taking money?
Time will tell but there's evidence that some government staff grew inexplicably wealthy while in office which would suggest corruption. Corruption in government is terrible for the average citizen, ask anyone from a country that suffers from a lot of it.
I really fail to see why auditing government spending is a bad thing?
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There's nothing moral about it. The profitability of the tax prep industry depends on taxes being hard to file. Lack of official free e-file is regulatory capture. Any associated blather about making taxes cumbersome to keep people mistrustful of taxes is a fig leaf, as is this case with most "conservative" viewpoints.
The fact that you need to pay to file taxes it's so distopic that only USA could have invented it
Without evidence that the Trump administration cares about protecting the tax prep industry, this is just a conspiracy theory.
Heck, the Trump admin wants to get rid of income tax entirely, so they're hardly the natural allies of the tax prep industry.
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All this good work by 18f destroyed by this maniac.
It's not a moral crusade, it's just a kleptocracy that uses a moral crusade as a fig leaf.
What's moral about it?
The possible moral argument, is the government is funding a service that costs businesses revenue.
However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
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"Moral" can mean "of or relating to morality", not necessarily "exhibiting goodness".
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American conservatives view governments as inherently evil: if the government can make it more convenient for people to pay tax, people might be willing to pay more tax (or at least object less to tax), allowing the government to spend more money, and since the government is inherently evil, it allows for more evil.
On the other hand, creating an office whose sole objective is to destroy other functioning parts of the government and make it less useful to people? Totally moral.
Don't ask me, I'm not a conservative.
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The mistake is to assume our concept of morality is shared by the oligarchs.
Morals are a collection of ethics. Their ethics are that people who aren't billionaires are parasites, and that rape and overthrowing the country and murdering politics are acceptable, it's what everyone voted for. The guy in charge of the military has white nationalist tattoos and an unelected foreigner gave white power salutes behind the presidential seal, get used to it.
Two things:
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
I, too, was born yesterday.
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Please tell me how 18F is openly partisan. Also explain how most of Trump's hires are NOT openly partisan?
I've learned about the USDS in the past on hackernews and was always impressed. If someone wanted to really make a "DOGE" in good-faith (i.e. improve efficiency of government instead of just destroying everything), I think it would look like expanding the power and scope of things like USDS.
I agree. Have always felt that USDS/18F are best in class examples of tech innovation being brought to perhaps slightly tech-backwards areas of government, and doing the interpersonal work to bring other agencies along as well.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
Are you sure this isn’t bias from your personal interest? Is IT and bad websites the problem with the government?
I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
Bad websites make the times we interact with the government much less efficient than it otherwise would be, especially if a artifice has no reasonable online alternative and instead required in person appointments, costing you time, requiring additional staff, and requiring office space.
One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office.
Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
> It IT and bad websites the problem with the government?
It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government.
Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.
> I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
This is not what Elon is saying or doing or planning to do.
A SOP for static content, it feels great.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
Are they just running shell scripts off the public web for deploying federal gov sites that are targeted by nation states?
From the docker file:
A vein pops out in my forehead every time I see a shell script echoed from the internet into a prompt.
It's much better when it's done importing javascript snippets ...
Based on the heavy downvoting of my comment, I guess it's considered a good practice by folks now. shrug
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I see recent changes being made, are the prior timestamps available for archiving?
If you’ve checked out the git repo, you can go back to any point in the history and build that revision.
That is, until DOGE decides to rewrite (git) history.
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Yea so far DOGE doesn't seem like they take any time to ask questions or research before doing anything.
What's especially unfortunate is that experienced USDS employees had already achieved the one software engineering task that is basically impossible for a 19-year-old (or a newly hired USDS employee of any age): convincing a federal department manager that using a static website is a great solution — nevermind also publishing all of its source code and documents on a public github.
USDS really did represent the best of the federal government. They modernized hundreds of websites, brought accessibility and mobile access to the forefront, improved usability, and a lot of that work is invisible, slow, internal politics/battles.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
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Move fast and break things.
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
I believe they deleted all of the map layers because they couldn't figure out how to write "Gulf of America" on them instead of "Gulf of Mexico".
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This stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
Is this DOGE's doing?
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That's what you get when you only have a handful of complete juniors reporting directly to a capricious CEO. There needs to be adults in the room.
This is so clearly not the case of an underexperienced team trying to accomplish something complicated and failing at it. The goal is to dismantle the government and that's exactly what they're doing.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
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They are just henchmen following whatever playbook was developed by some reactionary jerks. That’s why Elon and co look for dysfunctional personalities that are easy to control.
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Move fast and break things is what built Silicon Valley and the modern world. It works, demonstrably.
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.
It works as long as you have investors shoving millions or billions into your behind so you can fix the fuckups
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The U.S. government is a service with 330 million people who are both users and legal stakeholders, mandated to provide and maintain a variety of services and databases that predate the Internet and personal computing by several decades, and run by a publicly elected executive who is term limited to 8 years. Which Silicon Valley entity do you think comes close to the scope and continuity of service of the U.S. government?
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This is a thing someone says if they think Silicon Valley was built in 2005. Semiconductor development built Silicon Valley, and it was not by my relatively limited understanding a "move fast and break things" process.
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Move fast and break things started in 2005 which was exactly when Silicon Valley stopped producing companies that could make a profit and instead relied on endless fire hoses of investor cash
It works? Are you sure?
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Doesn't work in what sense though?
err, Silicon Valley hates to admit it but the Federal government built Silicon Valley...and Tesla.
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But that’s only useful if the incoming people in charge don’t have any contempt towards existing employees and want to leverage best practices instead of pretending that they know better. Twitter had the same problem after Elon took over.
You mean the next incoming people