sailfast

That implies malice on the part of DHS. I tend to lean more toward incompetence as the most likely culprit these days.

If the conspiracy goes deeper than a layer or two I get skeptical. Moving forward, it would be a good idea to have a bunch of fake identities in Active Directory - but I can hear the internal conversations about seat costs already :)

Unfortunately it’s very much a legal militia until proven otherwise.

Know that you don’t have to bend the knee to work for the government. You still have your oath, your union, and the knowledge that this ends in two years. Many have left, but not all. Those who stayed don’t necessarily agree or like what is happening.

I’ll update my threat model to include sophisticated non-state human traffickers or smugglers that are all sharing intel with each other if that’s what you’re suggesting? Or perhaps just selling in the dark to whomever is buying? Sounds like you know this is happening?

I’m not making a good guy / bad guy judgment here FWIW. I do, however, find it less likely a smaller scale non-state operation would bother hacking a government agency or buying info on the open market. Sounds like it’s a higher priority than I thought.

Makes sense for larger orgs at higher levels - but I admit my mental model didn’t think about parallel private attempts to exploit, sell, use and otherwise secure comms. It was a blind spot. Seemed too leaky and obvious given the incentives to leak information - but I clearly don’t understand bad guys very well.

I don’t personally believe that everyone at ICE is specifically focused on this administration’s efforts (most are of course and many have quit in protest). In the past, the agency has done work that you’d probably want done around human smuggling and trafficking, anti-terrorism (actual terrorism) etc, and I wouldn’t paint all agents with such a broad brush. People stick around in the hopes they can do a good job again when the next guy lands. Sometimes!

Anyway - I just wanted to point out that these things can have consequences in the real world for people that aren’t necessarily the evil people you paint a picture of in your head. This isn’t a “oh just a few bad apples” thing - on the contrary that agency is quite rotten and should be disbanded.

Not a value judgment. Just sayin’ that this dump is 53+ certified undercover legal names out in the open.

I’m not saying that at all. I’m merely suggesting that there’s potential that non-state actors like a local human smuggling ring, drug ring, or human trafficking operation may now be able to easily type in some name and figure out they have been infiltrated.

Of course it’s possible some bad guys had this. But probably not all of them.

EDIT: I would also not equate these leaks to the NSA leaks in terms of resources and sophistication required to know about the NSA programs vs potential public access on the open internet with this one. Resources and intelligence required seems quite a higher bar, but that’s just me being an armchair quarterback.

Whatever your feelings about ICE and this administration, there are probably some undercover folks in real danger at the moment. Probably doing some real work to stop some real abuses that you’d want them to stop. (Not saying all - but likely some / many to be in that program)

So - while I might agree that secretive domestic organizations like MI5 should not exist and sunlight is good for government, I feel for the families of the folks that might catch a bullet because of this.

Other than the “you can now make software samplers and soundboards” I don’t know why you would want a touch screen on a laptop.

The entire purpose of the laptop (for me at any rate) is to do real work without the touch screen.

I’m not sure what pro workflows would actually benefit from this vs. a wirelessly paired iPad. I would not pay a dollar extra for touch personally - but that screen does look nice.

Turns out anyone with a 401K is also invested.

But we’re also taxpayers. So maybe there’s an equilibrium.

Also ideally some competition between those providers that will keep prices in line. (Spoiler: it absolutely does)

GSA also requires that the government is the lowest cost customer so nobody on earth is allowed any better deal. This also applies pressure. You have to rely on incentives in the end.

If you assume nobody has any integrity and incentives are all fake and nobody will hold to their agreements then there isn’t really a “public” good anymore anyway so what’s the point in trying to make a public cloud? It would just lead to grift at larger scale that wouldn’t even benefit our stock portfolios.

It’s a good sentiment, but that’s not how it currently works outside of agencies like the NSA that have some special needs and maybe the technical capacity. (Granted it’s been a minute for me so maybe this has changed) Either way it’s all contractors for the most part. In-house roles are not as flexible and don’t pay market.

I don’t actually think you want the federal government doing their own cloud work tbh. It’s a hugely expensive endeavor and the incentives are not there to do it right across government.

These agreements are pretty iron clad and the data centers are often separate and have their own setups.

Once a cross-cutting services agency like DISA or GSA own the stuff they quickly become a bottleneck for government agencies because they can, and then each agency goes out and fights for their own budgets to avoid the bottleneck, and then we’re back to renting.

It’s often better for service to have separate agreements with agreed upon commercial providers for this reason.

At what point would it be better to download a few real sources and do plain text search? Why risk a hallucination for content that would probably be smaller than the size of the model?!

Claude gov is AWS Bedrock hosted on GovCloud which is managed via GSA schedule and FEDRAMP. So… that’s how GSA does exactly that these days.

While that is true, I find that in a small company / startup environment you are almost always working on something that will contribute to revenue. The list is long. And you don’t have that much time for nonsense if you’re doing it right.

The other factor here is scaling of humans. Without these tools we would need a lot more humans. We don’t need as many but the ones we do have are heavily taxed. That salary savings should be passed on (again, relative productivity to AI spend) but we’ll see!

This tracks with my experience. The other bit that contributes here is that upstream inputs using AI also get faster - so you’re basically speeding up the entire machine but you’re still a human.

Unfortunately this means that you always feel the need to keep building or fall behind (picturing Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory) which means you’re pretty much always feeling burnt out and it feels harder to step away than ever before without feeling a certain way about it.

I hate it. It’s the best time ever to build. That excitement lasted about a year - but now it’s a treadmill I can’t escape and companies are not really paying more for the productivity (even factoring in the cost of my AI usage)