Comment by nop_slide
1 day ago
I find the following bizarre. Ignoring who this marko guy is, why would a random person post such a "take down" of the repo? I have never randomly passed by a repo and wanted to just dunk on it. Also this critique reeks of being AI generated.
> On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”
Link from quote: https://github.com/markoelez/async-ip-rotator/issues/1
The follow comment is interesting to be a coincidental, such a weird interaction.
It's only "bizarre" if you "ignore who this marko guy is." It's not a coincidence, it's somebody pointing out that DOGE's "cracked coders" are wearing no clothes.
And the follies here seem to be many. I’m not following why this Marko guy would make a publicly-visible fork of a repo (though he seems to have deleted it since this story went big), and why they would openly request to have their accounts exempted from logging when they were apparently already privileged users.
I must be missing something here; surely the level of elite technical skill implicit in his résumé would preclude this kind of thing
Well yeah they're junior developers. By all account from good schools but literally everyone here has dealt with junior developer brain.
I would say that Elmo picked a bunch of junior devs because they don't have enough maturity to talk back and will do anything they're asked but I think that's too charitable. I think he actually went this route because Elmo is a sad man in his 50s who is desperately trying to pretend that he is, and has not matured beyond, his 20s.
Not just junior developers, but zoomer junior developers. I'm guessing Marko was just following Grok's advice.
On February 6th, Marko Elez announced his resignation from DOGE after the WSJ discovered many racist posts he made in 2024 (which they published on the 5th). That likely made someone really interested in what his actual coding skill levels were, and they took a look at a repo he had made.
Musk did a "poll" on X that voted for rehiring Elez to DOGE, by February 20th Elez had a US Government email address again, and on Febrary 21st he was reported as working for DOGE at the Social Security Administration.
> Upon learning of your resignation, following reports that you were linked to an account advocating to “normalize Indian hatred” and for a “eugenic immigration policy,” I can’t help but address the staggering hypocrisy of these views within the context of the IT industry
the 2nd comment in the issue explains why the 1st was posted pretty clearly
They took down the repository ~20 minutes after OP's comment. Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250423135719/https://github.co...
Are there forks of this repo out in the wild and available?
Surely Elez is currently reading this thread right now too. Probably reveling in the attention like all the juvenile hacker boys.
Why wonder? The user who wrote it seems to be a pretty well established user, and their public repositories suggest that they work in adjacent contexts, so it's entirely plausible they attempted to use async-ip-rotator in one of their projects.
???
The public repos for this person that I could find that weren't forks with no activity to upstream consisted of a dice-rolling guessing game, rock-paper-scissors, and some kind of framework for downloading and transcribing audio files that does not yet download or transcribe, but implements a whole bunch of boilerplate. I find it rather difficult to believe this person engaged in a good-faith review of the async-ip-rotator code base.
I wouldn't expect somebody to use their main non throwaway account, which probably ties to their job or school to write this today... when if someone in the gov doesn't like what you say they do things like cancel your visa or sanction your employer.
4 replies →
It's also worth noting that Feb 6 may very well be after Marko Elez became a public figure with DOGE. The article doesn't do a great job of expanding on any of this.
Ah yeah that would make more sense
Are you genuinely puzzled or just wanted an excuse to point us all toward that comment? If "the comment" is correct word for what amounts to full article in length.
Why would they want an excuse to point everyone to that comment when it's literally linked in the article?