The trump administration very briefly believed that publicly saying "I was racist before it was cool" and "normalize Indian hate" in public just months before being hired was crossing a line. Then they realized that no it actually wasn't and that their base likes people like this and rehired him.
I do wonder what JD Vance's kids think about situations like this.
What is DOGE even doing now? Can we get some status reports on what the DOGE employees are doing every week since they're such proponents of radical accountability?
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-adm...
Unofficially, they are the worst people so they are probably doing the worst things you can imagine.
> But without flashy leadership, DOGE technologists are now quietly cycling into federal agencies, spending days or weeks building products and cutting contracts before cycling out once again. This is all done with little oversight from the White House or the United States DOGE Service (USDS), which these technologists purportedly represent.
Forcing the NRC to rubber stamp any requests that come in front of it, apparently[0].
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/14/doge-to-regulator-r...
If so, sounds potentially life threatening.
NTSB might wanna look into that.
Edit: DoD is also contracting for $200 million for grok. Yeah, this is bad. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/14/elon-mu...
Somewhat to one side but when up to USD800 million is being spent (Grok, is not the only AI shaped snout at the trough) it's depressing to see the vagueness of the supposed uses [1] (in a five line paragraph this is the most specific description of why that need to spend the money ... "to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries")
So far no one has taken me up on them.
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This shows how careless secret management can scale into a huge breach, especially when the same org handles sensitive data.
Shouldn’t teams building with LLMs have automated checks to catch exposed keys before they hit public repos?
quantified•6mo ago
It raises additional questions. Plenty of questions already unanswered. Seems likely it's been a shitshow.
saalweachter•6mo ago
zdragnar•6mo ago
More worrying is that the article points out at time of writing the key was still valid. Why such a high level key was used in an agent script, why it hasn't been rotated (can't be rotated?) and about a dozen other "whys" point to some rather damning practices.
I get that the idea was to avoid the obscene levels of red tape that can be common in government IT, but the pendulum has clearly swung far, far far too far the other way.
jfengel•6mo ago
The government has some programmers, but the vast majority is done by contractors. That lets the executive branch claim to have reduced those dastardly government workers, and replaced them with upstanding, virtuous, competent, handsome private industry.
Even before the recent harrowing there weren't a lot of government programmers left. Government employees award and manage contracts.
JumpCrisscross•6mo ago
Ones we should be ready to prosecute with official resources come ‘26 and ‘28.
In the meantime, I wouldn’t let him into my country. But the EU will be the EU.
relistan•6mo ago
If there were anything like proper processes in place, controls would have made that very difficult.
Then there are the weird issues about why obvious close ties to xAI here....