Hacker News Reader

Comment by manymany | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

You may, or may not be asking in jest. In any case, I think you are alluding to the fact that Luke Farritor, winner of the Vesuvius challenge in 2023 and former SpaceX intern, is now employed by Elon Musk in the Department of Government Efficiency, ostensibly to find waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpflT8XuSyg&t=11s

well, that's cursed knowledge

Why? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?

It's likely that the talents needed to solve a technical challenge such as finding text in CT scans of heavily burned pages using machine learning doesn't mean he will have the same level of success when dealing with insights about socioeconomic issues in both the local and global scale and all the politics that such endeavor needs, specially when there is a heavy bias to an existing decision, the decision to reduce funds (meaning, even if he concludes that there is one particular endeavor where the government should spend more, it would be frowned upon by his boss and peers)

Just the cutting of everything USAID shows how little he understands of politics, the soft power that such organization earns for the country cannot be overstated, but in the business context Musk knows best there is really not equivalent, so he thinks such spending counts as "inefficiency", turns out countries are not companies and Musk and friends are in for a rude awakening and the country is the one who will suffer because of it as it increasingly alienates it's allies.

So you're saying the kid who digitally unwraps Vesivius scrolls is not smart enough to write automated systems to detect that Covid payments to literal

"Free money LLC"

are likely fraudulent?

Just to name an example.

Without comment on the guy himself — I assume he's enthusiastically trying to do the best for the world, like most people — there's a huge gap between "let's find and stop very obvious fraud" and "let's cancel all soft power spending everywhere immediately because I don't know what value it has and don't want to spend money for the time it takes to find out".

The former is police work.

The latter is a practical demonstration of Chesterton's Fence, which is the "conservative" part of the word "conservative".

Presumably yes, if they were written on papyrus, set on fire and then buried in volcanic ash for a thousand years first.

Possibly more efficient options are available...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com