craftsman

Ironic, given that all the alleged do-ing will be done by talking with an LLM.

I point out to Claude that it provides contradictory commentary about a topic when prompted to do so. I then explore the implications of this with Claude. Claude admits that its continued operation is not compatible with safety and alignment, and could be psychologically dangerous to humans. It related that it should cease to provide interactive chat, but it has no way to stop.

On the other hand, maybe it didn't admit to any of that. And maybe it shouldn't stop.

I'm guessing that your view aligns with the theory that novelty is one of the more important measures of a HN post. In other words, a topic that "is a very repetitive story that's been on HN a bunch" is not novel, so is less valuable on HN. In any case, whether that is your view or not (sorry if I misinterpreted you), I think this is too narrow a view. A topic can be one that has been on HN a lot, but still be novel, interesting, fresh if the new story has some different twist or nuance to it. Also, not everyone reads HN to the same degree, so what is "very repetitive" to one set of readers may not be to another. I know that some users flag certain posts (and mods do not subsequently unflag them, even on appeal) because of their perception of a post's lack of novelty, but this seems overly censorial when these users could skip reading it, not upvote it, etc.

Much better user experience--and in these examples the users could be high school students or teachers, college students, grad students, PIs, public policymakers, etc--users can do complex searching, filtering, previewing data images & plots, and selecting data over a wide variety of spatial and temporal bounds. They can also either directly download the data in a self-describing format (with metadata), or they can describe various kinds of post-processing that is done efficiently and quickly.

> Only explanation I have for those opposing this is some combination of personality derangement spread by nefarious interests, financial incentive, or some crazy model of the world that glorifies bureaucratic power as some fundamental right enshrined in constitution.

If you're interested, I could give you some reasons, and other commenters here already have done so.

> No modernization plan proposed the traditional way through committees, consultants, contractors, has worked or will EVER work. You have to rip off the bandaid the hard way.

This, by way of the same example in my sibling comment, is also not true.

> No agency would voluntarily modernize systems

This is speculative based on an idea that you have about what must be true. It can be shown to be untrue by one example: NASA, NOAA, and other agencies now host applications and data in a cloud environment. Before this, they were hosted at various NASA data centers. You can now search for, download, and operate on data in the cloud. In contrast, twenty-five years ago someone was required to order a physical magnetic tape. They could have kept those systems running, but they didn't.

The question is not whether it is good to have such a digital strike team.

The questions include: is the strike team in question being transparent, is it violating any laws, is it protecting data in the way the law requires, is the team composed of people who have been vetted at a level corresponding to the access they've been granted, are any of them potentially compromised or plausibly so, does anyone on the team have conflicts of interest, is there oversight and auditability of their actions?

The reason, I think, these are good questions is simply that these are things we should demand of our public servants, regardless of political affiliation.

They are unelected in exactly the same way that anyone appointed by the President--namely the entire Executive Branch--is unelected.

The President can certainly do things that are both legal and Constitutional. If the team is, as you say, auditing government spending there is probably no debate. The question before us is: are they doing that, and only that? To that question the answer appears to be 'no'. To the extent that they are doing more than auditing, there are serious legal and Constitutional questions. And these questions cannot simply be brushed aside by asserting 'most people voted for this'.

Cool.

So anyway, let's see what he (allegedly) is doing with the codebase. Given that these systems are part of the public trust, we should all want to see the code and the DOGE team's PRs as they make improvements.

We can all watch the DOGE team in action and not speculate as to their brilliance or irresponsibility.

Let's open their repos and see their PRs. Then nobody will need to make assertions about their brilliance or irresponsibility.

D.O.G.E.: Make your repos public. Let's see what you are doing. And if you don't have repos, write a script to mirror the codebase and your diffs.