1,059 karma · joined August 6, 2010
On the other hand, maybe it didn't admit to any of that. And maybe it shouldn't stop.
If you're interested, I could give you some reasons, and other commenters here already have done so.
This, by way of the same example in my sibling comment, is also not true.
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 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.
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.
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.
That is different than the statement:
* The Pentagon has stated that (a) X is true, and (b) they have no evidence that Y is true.
* Where X is defined as "These are not US military drones"
* Where Y is defined as "these activities are coming from a foreign entity or the work of an adversary"
This statement logically means that:
* The Pentagon assessed (determined) that X is true
* Where X is defined as "The drones do not originate in the US or any other nation"
That is different than the statement:
* The Pentagon has stated that (a) X is false, and (b) they have no evidence that Y is true.
* Where X is defined as "The drones are US military assets"
* Where Y is defined as "The drones originate from and/or are assets of a foreign nation or adversary."
Rather, I said when we read papers we should realize that results are tentative. It's fine to have some personal assessment of the probability, but it's not actionable by anyone, and communicating it doesn't assist in improving our collective assessment of what is going on in the world. I'd also suggest that we probably don't, in fact, "often need and should be able to make a summary assessment..."