encomiast

I've tried this approach with Lowes when I buy 2x4s. About as effective.

Agreed. This is one of the worst mobile sites I’ve used in a while. Blown away (in the sense I’m never coming back).

I would be curious about the logic that allows you to call intellectual property a nonsense term while still allowing other property to make sense. Both are social constructs.

May you have a perfectly balanced Christmas

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      e     .         i     a
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    M   r y   C     r   s m   s

I’m not sure what ‘successfully’ means in this context. If it means training a model that is noticeably better than previous models, it’s not hard to see how that is challenging.

Who said anything about parties? And who said anything about it being okay to fire IGs (especially illegally).

Which IG did anyone say it was okay to fire? The article you posted to support this idea wasn’t even fired! He’s still in the job.

It seems that you are primarily interested in polarizing this discussion. I’ll leave you to that. I’m out.

The article you posted is about a truly damning investigation into Joseph Cuffari.

Cuffari is STILL the IG at DHS. He was not fired -- sheesh:

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/about/MeetTheIG

Here’s a small example. There are more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...

I'm hoping "degoogle" is the 2026 word of the year.

It was mind-boggling to see SQL solutions last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42577736

A little sad that there are fewer puzzles. But also a glad that I'll see my wife and maybe even go outside during the second half of December this year.

Maybe you can explain why the Netflix deal is corruption? The deal was signed after he was out of office (2018). Did he or people in his administration create policy that benefited Netflix in exchange for this deal? Was there any sort of quid pro quo? Where is the abuse of office?

Safeguards only matter when there are people and institutions to enforce them. Remember all those people they fired? All part of the plan.

You must see the difference between making money from books/speaking fees and using the full power of the US government to create policy that directly benefits your investments (possibly at the detriment to your competitor).

You are right — I shouldn't have been dismissive about the age, but rather the complete lack of experience around governance, why some of these rules exist, and why some of the technology is the way it is.

What I saw was that DOGE spent all their time chasing non-existent (or at most minor) problems imagined from the conspiracy theories they heard about in the media (e.g. woke contracts). They drank their own kool-aid and when they were actually given the keys they came up with nada. A total waste of everyone's time.

I would be interested in knowing what specific 'major waste' DOGE found in your agency. I would also be curious, given how much latitude they were given, how your management made sure they could now go any further. What I saw was senior managers escorted from the building by security and put on administrative leave if they offered anything other than complete cooperation.

This is coming out the same day two DOJ cases led by a US attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience were unceremoniously tossed out. DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology while cutting entire groups of experienced technologists like 18F. To say nothing of the CDC, whose communications are starting to look like a bad, late-night infomercials.

I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.

Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.

The program started from ignorance of the functions of the federal government and the people who work in it. People who don’t know anything drank and believed the koolaid. Their actions might make sense if the propaganda was true. But it isn’t.

Another totally arbitrary narrative you could build from history is one of reducing size and increasing efficiency. We gone from room filling monsters to the raspberry pi zero.

It’s hard to make giant datacenters that require their own powerplants fit into that narrative. But I don’t know why I should prefer one narrative over another.

I can’t help hearing Karl Popper raging against historicism when I see people try to create a narrative and project it into the future as we move to some idea state.

I'm curious how we can distinguish between someone lobbying hard for the homebuilding industry and someone lobbying hard for people who need homes?

Interesting…both the linkedIn profile and the website appear to be gone.

The whole site is sketchy. A PhD and a JD. All these high level positions at well-known places. A website with very vague claims about heroically saving things. Almost no google presence other than this site. And 4 LinkedIn connections. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it's pegging my BS meter.

> I am not sure why AWS Support was unable to communicate this OP.

Maybe we should be asking why the OP was not able to hear what AWS was telling them. I think there is a fairly troublesome cognitive bias that gets flipped on when people are telling you that you're wrong — especially when all your personal branding and identity seems to be about you being right.

I wonder if this applies to Amazon Pharmacy — seems like maybe this might have a bit more governance.

It seems like we've spent the past 25 years trying to solve the big headache this creates: you have 100 blog posts, which means 100 html files. Any structural change you need to make to the site involves touching all 100 files. CSS came along and helped separate the presentation from the information a bit, but it still sucked to maintain 100 html files on the server.

I also deeply respect this decision and I wish it was not such a taboo. Having said that, I am also deeply suspicious of easy banalities like "you ought to go when things are at their best". This because we are not great, especially when we're young, of having the perspective to understand that temporary setbacks like lost loves and financial setbacks are not an indication that the best days are past us.

Private companies don't always just fail and get replaced. They find other ways of making profits, like selling user data, externalizing risk, or your run-of-the-mill enshitification.

They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do. They are just demonizing the scapegoat du jour.

Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.

The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.

This is so true. I recently listened to Lex Fridman's Marc Andreessen interview and all I could think was, this guy doesn't actually know how government, laws, and regulations work. Like _totally_ clueless and he's pontificating on the subject like he's a founding father.

There's been a lot of stupid things over the last few weeks, but this one is close to the top. 18F did really important, good work. But they also stood for equality and diversity, they were proud of their inclusive culture, and outspoken about the importance of representing the entire country.

The new administration put a 28-year old tech-bro in charge of the parent service named Thomas Shedd from Tesla who started demanding root access to systems, firing probationary employees, and generally making the place worse (to say nothing of the partner projects that were abandoned with no notice). All in a few weeks. Somebody needs to be taken out to Chesterton's fence and whipped a few times. They have no idea about the value of what they just threw away.