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Comment by niceice | Hacker News Reader

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25.

Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical.

Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo. If we’re serious about cutting waste in gov spending, let’s not turn away new minds.

The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

- one decoded the Herculaneum Papyrii at the age of 20, winning the Vesuvius Challenge

- another built a startup funded by OpenAI

- one interned at SpaceX and got a Thiel Fellowship

- another was a top engineer at a major AI firm

This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds. https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1886480470185001025

View on HN

First, there's hardly any evidence that these are anywhere near "brilliant engineers" let alone 1%. Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects. Some might be interesting, sure. But it's hardly relevant to operating in a complex organization.

But more importantly, the real issue is regardless of how old they are an unelected individual is doling out hyper-privileged access to sensitive data to folks without any kind of oversight. It's a total mess.

It's hyperbolic to the n-th degree to call these "the best of nerds" as well.

> Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects.

And there's that one guy whose entire work history is as a summer camp counselor.

Who is that?

He's talking about Edward Coristine, aka "bigballs", though it's not the only thing on his résumé: https://bsky.app/profile/jsweetli.bsky.social/post/3lh5hr3hs...

Sure, and there's a sprinter who can outrun Usain Bolt who just happened to become an accountant instead

Probably still better than the non-technical people usually governing things.

As many issues as we have, I’d rather have somebody who understands the consequences of a security breach having access to sensitive information than someone who does not.

Think what you will about who came before or after, but everyone involved here should have experience or training in how to handle and secure sensitive information.

One of the dude literally solved a hundreds years problem and won a prize. He coded an AI to decipher an ancient manuscript AIUI. I certainly wouldn't look down on the achievement of that young programmer.

Can you explain why this makes him a good fit for doing government payroll?

None of which qualifies him for anything he’s doing here.

Being smart is a qualification.

There is no such thing as "being smart". You can be arbitrarily good at some things, and arbitrarily bad at anything else. Even the greatest physicists can have laughably naive philosophical positions. Linus Paulding, one of the greatest minds in chemistry in history, was convinced that you can cure virtually any disease with a large enough dose of vitamin C. Expertise, even the extreme peak, in one field doesn't give you expertise of any kind in another field.

This is factually wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

IQ is mostly BS. And even if it's not, it only measures the ability to learn, not the actual skills. What I wrote remains true: just because you have skills in one area (AI deciphering of hieroglyphics scroll), doesn't mean in any way whatsoever that you have skills for something entirely unrelated (administrative matters).

IQ is a grift. It is not a measure of intelligence, but "not stupidity".

Any score over 100 means no discernable difference in intelligence. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

Well... there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

Ho we got a random link to a irrelevant article.

Pack it up boys.

I'd rather have people who are smart with experience handling our inner government workings. ;P

Yes it does. He knows how to solve hard problems. Ending the vaste waste, fraud and abuse is a huge spagetti code problem.

To Actually fix the embedded structural problems of an established system requires at least as much wisdom as intelligence. So far I have not seen Elon and his young minions demonstrating deep levels of wisdom

You are being impressed by irrelevant credentials. This is what tools people into a sens of confidence while totally misplaced. he is not helping to solve hard problems or deal with corruption. He is aiding in destroying democracy and enabling corruption and collusion.

You have it backwards.

So would you say that the first step of detangling spaghetti code is to start deleting huge chunks of it without knowing what it does or why it was coded that way?

There is no control-z in physical systems, especially ones that rely on human constructs and tradition

This is not a code problem, and I guarantee none of these kids know COBOL

https://xkcd.com/793/

What a load of nonsense. Expertise in one field does not mean you're going to excel in a different field. There are plenty of people with relevant expertise and equal problem-solving abilities, but these traitors actively don't want them, because they aren't going to say and do what they want.

What would constitute qualifications in your view?

Advanced knowledge of the inner workings of governmental oversight, government funding, and the ability to understand what they are doing is illegal and dangerous.... Enough to know that whatever they have been promised is not worth the unintended consequences of their actions.

Pause any spending $X on a Foreign Nation is not aligned with making America Gooder.

The better question is why hasn't anyone done this before?

Ooh, he won a prize?? Why didn't anyone say so, he's clearly qualified!

None of that prepares him for the things he is working on now, and they have blatantly flouted the law and all security rules to get access to the treasury payments system

or the achievements of the thousands of people who worked on ML before him to help set the stage.

I've worked with a wide range of brilliant people of various ages in my life. Nothing I've seen about these kids makes me think they are significantly smarter than the somewhat-above-average folks I've worked with. Historically, the government has hired people like this (for example the NSA pulls in some number of mathematically inclined graduates every year; NIH has brilliant interns, etc, etc).

And none of these kids skills mean they are particularly well suited to the subtle job of reforming the establishment.

100%

I mean, Garry Tan has already been on Twitter with his stupid take that there are “brilliant” so it surely must be true. /s

The Treasury has been taken over and barricaded, but please enlighten us Garry with fables of their 10x brilliance.

Government employees are never elected. They are hired by the elected officials. In this case the general public in the US was aware of DOGE before the election and chose to vote for it.

Where specifically was it spelled out that DODGE would remove the free tax filing system?

Did they delete it? Elon said 18F, the group that developed DirectFile, was deleted. DirectFile appears to still be available.

https://directfile.irs.gov/

Right. Why are people suddenly confused about this?

I don't understand the "unelected" aspect - he funded Trump and Trump got elected. Trump said Elon would get to run a wrecking ball through the ship of state and the magas cheered. He derives his authority from Trump. A lot of people work at the white house and only one of them was elected.

He’s surely the most public bureaucrat in history.

Bureaucrat is a misnomer. Think of him more as a reaper of souls

He's more of a lobotomized Jack Welch imo

That's false, the average age was 29.4: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/L...

Here are the ages of the senior scientists: Oppenheimer: 38 Teller: 34 Lawrence: 41 Rabi: 44 Szilard: 44 Ulam: 33 Bethe: 36 Fuchs: 31 von Neumann: 39

So the younger people would have had plenty of supervision.

These are not the only 6 engineers working for DOGE, just the youngest. They have supervision as well.

They are all breaking the law.

Evidence? There is no evidence of that. Broad allegations that it is illegal doesn't cut it. Even Schumer is not making that claim. All he is doing is complaining. The executive branch has the power to police themselves it's not that difficult to understand that you can audit your own agency. There's nothing illegal going on.

Schumer literally said what they’ve done to USAID is illegal.

> …we know that unilaterally closing USAID is illegal.

[0]: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/lea...

Which law, specifically?

First, I was showing that the specific claim being made (that Chuck Schumer has not said any illegal activities have taken place) was false. Nothing more.

Second, as I’m sure you know, and are being deliberately obtuse about, the separation of powers doctrine, which has been upheld by SCOTUS; one example [0] is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. USAID is codified by law, regardless of its genesis, and as such, only Congress is able to revoke the law.

[0]: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

The actual US constitution which gives Congress and ONLY congress the power to spend tax money. Musk has absolutely no legal authority to unilaterally stop payments approved by congress. What Musk is doing is a very intentional effort to usurp this authority illegally. Musk should really end up in prison or deported for what he is doing right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse#United_Stat...

In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).

The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.

https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/not-confident-trump-...

Not confident Trump will prevail: Scholar on his attempts to take Congress' power of the purse Professor Deborah Pearlstein joins Morning Joe to discuss her column for the NYT outlining some of Trump’s actions implemented in his first few days in office and why she says Trump is hardly the first president to claim broad executive power, but the difference is not just the enormity of his claims, it's that the administration mostly doesn't try to craft legal justifications for its actions.

https://www.marketplace.org/2025/02/04/congress-president-tr...

How Congress — and not the president — controls how taxpayer money is spent

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trump-e...

‘It’s an Illegal Executive Order. And It’s Stealing.’

>the power to spend tax money

But they're not spending; they're kind of doing the opposite of spending. And reducing waste is a previously known (for a long time) goal of theirs.

They are... not spending tax money? If so, that would still be the only entity given power by the US Constitution to decide what to do with it.

Which is a direct violation of the constitution. Only congress the authority to control spending and Musk has absolutely zero authority to stop any payments congress has authorized. It is a naked power grab and musk should spend the rest of his life in prison for it.

>Only congress the authority to control spending

You changed your wording to fit your argument. "To spend" became "to control spending", implicitly acknowledging that the two phrases have different meanings.

The executive branch does not have the authority to cut off congressionally appropriated spending. Congress specifically passed a law (Impoundment Control Act) to make that as explicit as could be

You must realize attacks made by political opponents are always exaggerated and many times false. First of all doge can’t close USAID. What “they” aka Trump did was pause payments for review.

That isn't what they are actually saying.

I'm sure all of the people who depended on those payments and whose lives are now ruined will appreciate that subtle difference.

Which is illegal

If you are finding the government is sending money to terrorists as they have indicated and need to stop it there are quite a few emergency powers. Pausing is the first step.

If you believe they found that I have a bridge to sell you

How do we have any freaking clue what is going on with doge

By who, other than Elon Musk, in turn accountable to no one?

That's incredibly young for senior scientists! 31 years old? Nobody over 45, let alone 50?

I can’t speak to the second half of your comment, but it’s worth pointing out that 31 corresponds with a software engineer who received a BA/BS in four years after high school, started working and hit senior at 3-5 years (a lot of us). That gives a couple years of wiggle room to lead projects after that too.

TBH the 31 year old was Fuchs who spied for the SU. So not really the best pick.

And they all regretted their short sighted work didn’t they?

many senior scientists are around 30-35 years old (by that time they have completed grad school and postdoc and are starting to get their first grants). And in nuclear physics most of these folks were young but had worked in key labs and their bosses were advisors on the project.

Why did you choose to restrict your data to "senior" scientists? What is that supposed to prove?

A lot of progress in many fields largely moves in the direction of inertia. Pretty much always.

That of course means drawing upon experience, work and ongoing contributions of people who are around for long. Obviously they would be old.

Getting old is a part of life no? Unless of course some one is planning on dying early.

'senior' is only a 6 character prefix that can be attached to any name/position as an accolade. It means nothing out-of-context.

Oppenheimer was smart, no doubt, but did he have the life experience to warrant 'senior'-level decision making? I feel like the history books show it's emphatically indecisive.

> Oppenheimer was smart, no doubt, but did he have the life experience to warrant 'senior'-level decision making?

You're questioning whether the person chosen to be the director of weapons development could be called "senior" or not? What? Or are you hindsight-second-guessing the decision to make him director? It's wild to me that you would choose the director of one of the most important and ambitious (not to mention successful) programs in world history to make the point "senior is just a title".

   > Perhaps one reason startups work so well…

If you take any individual startup its probability of success is very low. Most startups fail. There is a very extreme survivorship bias at work when people say startups work well or that particular tactics are why startups are great etc (pointing at a successful startup).

Startups as a whole produce a lot of innovation because there is this extreme Darwinian process where the vast majority fail and a few succeed but you have a huge amount of risk-taking in parallel in a very compressed time frame.

Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme. So by definition government is going to be slower-moving and more risk-averse. They are essentially paying to reduce the standard deviation of possible outcomes because they can’t afford the risk of the extreme negative tail.

>>Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme.

Im guessing they will eventually discover why bureaucracy even exists. That is to move slow enough to ensure big mistakes become impossible and provide stability for newer things to happen at their own pace.

Im guessing any chaos inside bureaucracy for as little as a decade could cause a lost century to a country. The cost of stabilising, course correcting, recovering and then going on upwards could take decades.

Civil society is a precious gift, one that is hard to build and easy to destroy.

Perhaps you don't realize how badly run the government is and how much of a problem that is in real terms.

Education, physical and mental health, cost of living, healthcare, wealth inequality. They've all gotten worse the past few decades, would you agree?

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

USAID literally set up fake AIDS prevention workshops to topple foreign governments https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/0...

This is a small sample of the extreme waste, fraud and abuse, while we have very serious issues here on the ground that are systematically ignored. For DECADES. Unaddressed.

Fixing this is what the majority of voters voted for and are rightfully thrilled to see these brilliant young tech nerds untangle the beurocratic leviathon. There will be, and have been, mistakes, things deleted that shouldn't have been. Anything important and that the people actually want, will be added back in. DOGE was upfront about this process.

But doge doesn't want to improve fraud, it only wants to make the department efficients by somehow firing their workers, how does this improve fraud detection?

Furthermore, why should i trust a billionaire who has spouted lies more and more times?

What about data protection? We're giving billionaires and their team access to federal workers data. Project 2025 emphatizes replacing federal workers for loyal one, why shouldn't an american feel threatened by this? https://www.muskwatch.com/p/musk-associates-given-unfettered

And why should i care about saving all these money if the middle class is gonna get screwed with higher taxes?

In fact if you listen to what they actually say, at least half of what they're doing isn't even about efficiency, it's about ideological purity.

Because Republicans refuse to adequately fund and staff the govt agencies that can crack down on fraud, they prefer to allow the fraud to happen so they can scream "see, govt doesn't work!" (and also because some of it is their friends doing the fraud)

See: their demonizing adequately funding and modernizing the IRS

So I've dealt with mental illnesses throughout my life and I can confidently say things are a hell of a lot better now than when I was a kid. They literally understood so little about the subject that there were basically 3 categories with rigid qualifiers. If you didn't fit 100% into a mold you were considered lazy, undisciplined, etc.

Instead of just blindly rattling off a bunch of buzzwords that you know nothing about maybe select 1 or 2 of the things from your list you actually have experience in.

The age is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the fact that the engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project were all qualified and legally hired and authorized to do what they did. This is NOT true for DOGE which has no legal right to the federal payment system and no legal authority to stop any payments congress has approved.

Hilarious irony here, given that these qualified and legally hired people built the most morally reprehensible weapon in history

Likewise what Musk is doing is also morally reprehensible. It is the most unconstitutional power grab any US Citizen has tried is a very long time.

Please explain that to me? Where is the illegality and unconstitutionality? Agencies are part of the executive branch. This particularly agency was created by executive order. The executive branch can police itself. Just because some people don't like it doesn't mean it's illegal. What is illegal is USAID spending money that is violating the current president's executive order. Bringing that to light is not illegal. In fact it is the duty of the executive to make sure that his orders are being carried out.

I dont know if people are lying and/or intentionally gaslighting. DOGE brings information to Trump, Trump acts on it. The illegal part is made up by their political opponents who have apparently being using governmental agencies use to influence other countries to also influence the US - that’s where they went wrong.

[flagged]

You keep saying Musk and you are right Musk has no power, he just reports information to the President Trump who makes any call. So that part is irrelevant. The government can say we want to spend $1,000,000 on hammers but it doesn’t mean you have to spend $1,000,000 on one hammer. If the president finds you can buy a hammer for $10 then he can direct to 100,000 of them there instead. Also, if he finds government agencies are not performing on their obligations he can get rid of them. And lastly, a lot of changes are going to take effect until the next budget, which will be ratified by congress. Just because he says “we’re cancelling X” it doesn’t mean he’s stopping it now but once a new budget it passed.

If congress passes a law to give X dollars to Y department or organization than it is blatantly and utterly illegal for the Executive branch to just say "Nah" and not do so.

"The government can say we want to spend $1,000,000 on hammers but it doesn’t mean you have to spend $1,000,000 on one hammer."

This isn't the level of detail we are concerned with. Congress says that USAID gets $5 billion a year then the Executive branch HAS to transfer that money or else it is in direct violation of the US constitution. Your entire argument is nonsensical and irrelevant.

There must be some confusion because they aren’t cutting programs approved by congress. They are literally cutting funds that were NOT explicitly approved by congress only.

"There must be some confusion because they aren’t cutting programs approved by congress."

Yes they are

"They are literally cutting funds that were NOT explicitly approved by congress only."

This is false.

You really need to realize that Musk is a liar who lies all the time and he is lying about what DOGE is doing.

That's not how our government works. The executive branch does not get to pick and choose what parts of the budget approved by Congress it wants to execute. [0]

Also, a later act of Congress (The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, 22 U.S.C. 6501 et seq.) established USAID as its own agency.[1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_...

[1] https://www.justsecurity.org/107267/can-president-dissolve-u...

Congress controls spending and no one person can just decide not to transfer the funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse#United_Stat...

https://www.marketplace.org/2025/02/04/congress-president-tr...

How Congress — and not the president — controls how taxpayer money is spent

>built the most morally reprehensible weapon in history

That’s obviously arguable. Did the weapon and its usage cause more or fewer deaths and destruction than without it?

By that logic killing all humans now would be better than letting future generations die

"Let's not hire experts. Experts built the bomb, ya know."

Funny that this comment is in defense of DOGE disregarding all expertise and handing keys over to a bunch non-experts.

It is unironically DEI for nerds.

It was a sarcastic comment disparaging DOGE and the comment above. How did you get that it defends DOGE?

They weren’t the only ones building it, for what it’s worth. They were well aware of that.

If you knew a country wanted to build a weapon to cripple your own country, and you had the necessary skills to build that weapon, would you feel come compulsion to try and build it first in order to protect your family and friends? To protect yourself?

Making war between (certain) nations unconscionable and apocalyptic may have done more for peace than anything created for the purpose of peace

>This is NOT true for DOGE which has no legal right

DOGE and the Treasury Department are both part of the Executive Branch and derive powers from its head, aka the President.

This is essentially President Trump telling President Trump to hand President Trump the keys to the payment system so that President Trump can check WTF President Trump is spending money on.

Except it’s Congress spending the money, and Congress is the one who has the authority to hand the keys and do the checks (called “oversight” in that boring old world of government).

Maybe you see the inherent problem with the setup where President Trump is in charge of checking up on what President Trump is spending money on.

You seem to have forgotten that the power of the purse is Congress.

Power of the purse rests with the House with consent from the Senate, but the execution of the purse is ultimately vested with the Executive.

Congress as the Legislative Branch has no authority to Execute.

Congress has passed laws requiring the executive branch to disperse money in a timely fashion, with a few limited exceptions. USAID was also created in response to a law, which requires the executive branch to perform these functions.

And? Congress can impeach the President if they feel the law isn't being executed. The law also extends nearly limitless benefit of doubt to the President when he is executing his Constitutional duties.

This feels like circular reasoning. In order to execute his (or her) Constitutional Duties, the President must execute laws faithfully. However, the President is extended limitless benefit of the doubt if he decides to not execute the laws put forth by Congress, which means he's not executing his Constitutional duties. So which one is it?

You may, unfortunately, thank the Supreme Court for that bit of circular reasoning, rather than GP. Executives since Nixon have been pushing the line that "if the president does it, it's not illegal", and they finally got a SCOTUS to accept it.

> The law also extends nearly limitless benefit of doubt to the President when he is executing his Constitutional duties.

It does not. In fact, limiting this benefit of the doubt has been a major goal of the conservative legal movement in recent years. If what you say was true then Biden would have had no trouble forgiving student loan debt and requiring generation shifting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse#United_Stat...

If you look at the Manhattan project org chart and take people randomly at the top, they're all at least in their 40s. "There are young people on the project" is a thing but at the end of the day things like the Manhattan Project are downstream of the will of an entire behemoth (at least in theory attempting to represent the will of the people), balancing various interests and ethical or moral questions that are usually downstream of some experience.

They also have gone through the military chain of command...

I didn't see Musk's confirmation hearing. OMB's head needs to be Senat confirmed, Musk is giving OMB orders and took over their e-mail addresses. Where's the hearing? Where's the confirmation?

i feel that a lot of people are commenting without knowing a lot about the government. putting aside whether Trump is exceeding his statutory authority (he very well might be with this USAID stuff, he certainly has with his past XOs), you can have an executive branch position with access and managerial control without being confirmed. who confirms the White House Chief of Staff?

The default is that congress has to confirm _all officers_ in the executive branch, and it's only by delegation through law that you get other behavior. That's my understanding at least.

To my knowledge the Chief of Staff does not have the power to coerce other people to do things directly. Any "actual" coercion would have to go through someone like the President, right?

And my dumb thought is if DOGE is going around telling OMB and Treasury what to do (and seemingly is willing to call the US Marshalls on people who stand in their way) and the head of the OMB requires senate confirmation... well what are we doing here?

There's a bunch of nuance you can play at a micro level (for example, Musk messaging Trump to do a thing and Trump giving an OK), though in that case that's also newsworthy and important, because it properly associates who is responsible for what is going on!

Right now we have somebody who seems to be running rampant doing whatever he wants, and this lack of explicit association with the rest of the executive make it unclear who is actually calling the shots here. And if Trump isn't calling the shots... again, where's the confirmation?

the chief of staff clearly has managerial discretion over other executive staff? they also have top level security clearance and afaik none of that is in any law. ultimately all of these staff serve at the pleasure of the president.

The president, yes, not the chief of staff.

The chief of staff can relay orders from the president to cabinet members and department heads, but cannot make decisions of this scope.

I don't really know how any of that is relevant, though. Musk is not Trump's chief of staff, and as far as we can tell, is not even employed by the federal government. He is not empowered to give (for example) orders to the head (confirmed or acting) of the OMB.

>things like the Manhattan Project are downstream of the will of an entire behemoth

Plus that project in particular was more about destroying things exponentially faster, than it actually was about building things somewhat faster.

The faster building process was achieved in a relatively linear way at best, and the only thing built was a tool for destruction, no comparable efforts were made toward building things of lasting value which would need to more than compensate or the tech effort is a net loss.

Or, after destruction is induced, a recovery can not be made since the time required for building has the time it took for destruction in the denominator.

what are you talking about? All the locations used for Manhattan Project continued after the war- for example Los Alamos, Hanford, Oak Ridge, and more. Tons of long term infrastucture and it was built quickly. Much of the credit for that goes to Leslie Groves, who was an organizational genius and highly effective leader.

> The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

Wheres the evidence of their brilliance? A few projects in GitHub isn’t impressive.

Seriously if they’re brilliant this is the perfect PR opportunity to highlight the highly talented people making a difference. But instead we have secrecy.

I suspect the real reason for these choices is they needed people who are young and naive, will not ask too many questions, easy to manipulate, and coerced to work long for little pay.

Wheres the evidence of them not being brilliant? Just because they have fewer github projects, they are not talented?

Also please point to the last federal employee in IT sector who were highlighted for their "Talent and Brilliance".

Asking for people to prove the negative? I swear these posts are now being flooded by X types who only comment on these kinds of posts - and what a surprise, looking at this user's profile shows 0 comments on tech stuff, solely on politics - this level of reasoning used to be absent from here regardless of political inclination.

Burden of proof lies on GP for his claims

> looking at this user's profile shows 0 comments on tech stuff

As opposed to yours, which is even more politically charged with clear bias and scarce technical posts? You must be an ideal HN user with "no bias" and "high reasoning" I assume...

Never mentioned "no bias" or "reasoning", great job making things up there. It's not about bias, it's about being a real, actual HN user instead of coming here with a particular goal. HackerNews, a tech/startup community. I have and continue to comment plenty on tech/startup stuff that interests me, as well as other random things that aren'tUS politics. The last few weeks in particular there's been a flood of US political posts so I've commented on those as well. Your history shows being here for a different reason, only engaging with that single topic.

If you have some evidence of their brilliance you can post it now.

You are the one who made the claim. Burden of proof lies on you. Provide evidence for their "lack of brilliance".

The post you're replying to has a link to a video in which one of the guys talks about how he decoded the Vesuvius scrolls. It's literally a PR video highlighting a highly talented young person.

One of them transcribed an ancient Greek text from Vesuvius. So idiots buy into the idea this qualifies them to become unelected arbiters of THEIR OWN opinion of justice and decide who the Treasury pays or does not.

Considering the projects that USAID pays for, what they are doing is just and correct. The US executive bureaucracy is bloated beyond belief and needs to have major cuts. We are spending almost 2 trillion dollars more than we are bringing into the government. So many things need to stop being paid for.

And 2/3rds (and growing) of the Federal Budget is mandatory entitlement spending (Medicare, SS, etc), which Trump explicitly stated he won’t touch.

And don’t forget interest payments on the debt (~$800 bil?), which will keep increasing year over year as well.

It’s certainly not correct: the FY24 deficit is $1.9T, and the remainder of the ~$6T budget that isn’t DoD, Medicare/Medicaid, SSA, or interest payments is around ~$2.3T. To make a meaningful dent in that deficit, the cuts would have to be of the size that a modicum of checks, balances, and oversight is needed.

Or, instead, we could stop tinkering around the edges as a nation and think about the structural reasons why current spending on pensions and the healthcare safety net in the US isn’t sustainable, despite providing less to citizens than other comparable countries.

this "small" agency woefully mis spent its $47B budget. it should be completely razed and nothing put forth to replace it. It's employee's owe their full and total political allegiance to the democratic party, as shown by 97% of their political donations going there. It harms the world by existing and it is fully democrat. It needs to go. Its funding of the democratic party needs to end.

Your other suggestions are good! we should raze those things to the ground as well. They are bankrupting this country, and the second order fiscal and demographic effects far outweigh their first order beneficial effects. We, as a country, need to realize the limitations of government, and our current policies place us well beyond what we should be doing. We need to harden our hearts to the demands of those who chose not to build a life for themselves and live on the public purse instead. We need Seniors to voluntarily decrease the amount of money they receive so that young people can afford to buy houses and start families. Cutting social security etc would also increase pressure to sell housing to cover the costs of being elderly, which directly benefits the housing market, lowering costs. But it will anger the voting population.

I know you want to believe this is principled, but...

- the Social Security Administration, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $395 billion of spending. - the Department of Defense, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $250 billion of spending. - USAID's annual budget is $38 billion annually, so we could realistically estimate that, if they've outlaid $3 billion this year thus far, they've spent 0.4% of what those other two departments have.

Let's call this like it is: USAID is a bogeyman to Trump and Musk and is a threat to the administration's efforts toward becoming a "hard power" country. If they really cared about spending, they would have gone elsewhere first.

Source: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Thankfully it took less than a month to save its 38 or 47 billion dollar budget, whichever is the case. I am 100% certain that more extreme measures will be taken after this small, quick victory to address the deficit.

Their priority is well placed: This org sent a lot of money to shell corps, chosen political operators, and other intelligence operations that was a clear and net negative to the tax payers. It establishes bona fides that DOGE is serious and capable. It gives them experience cutting through the bureaucratic morass on a small target. It's supporters are outed as being in on the take. You are correct that they should move to bigger targets at some point, but those outlays you mentioned are far more favored in the public eye and should be approached much more cautiously and with planning. In the meantime, the intelligence operatus of the American Empire has been off its leash for some time, so cutting its funding will hamper its ability to harm the American people further.

Please have an excellent day.

"This org sent a lot of money to shell corps, chosen political operators, and other intelligence operations that was a clear and net negative to the tax payers."

As someone whose organization has benefitted from USAID grant funding, I should make it explicit that not everything is as you see or hear through Elon's Twitter feed.

It is deeply unwise to eliminate an organization entirely without exploring its net effects.

Oh? Was your org in charge of overthrowing small governments or was it charged with spreading feminism, atheism, or other American propaganda to people who do not want it? USAID was as close to objectively evil as it is possible to be. Show me otherwise if you'd like but there doesn't seem to be much to hold up as positive from that org.

This notion alone does not grant you the powers of the Congress which apportioned the money to the groups. Moreover you and I do not possess the national intelligence to make the assessment of “corruption.” If you have a complain there are mechanisms for Congressional investigations. What you are conspiring to is the overthrow of the democratic processes that ensure that no one group claims to act in the public good, while acting on their selfish behalf behind the scenes.

You have to realize that’s not how it works right? First of all “idiots” aka voters don’t need to be convinced because these people are hired not elected. You mention them being “unelected arbiters” already. However while unelected they are not arbiters. They report to the president who is the arbiter and was elected. Lastly, the president can decide how to implement lanes until his control. If the govt was buying a hammer for $100,000 instead of Home Depot for $10 then yes it can buy the hammer at Home Depot instead.

Wernher von Braun was a brilliant young engineer, one of the best minds of his generation. At age 25 he joined a patriotic party that was full of curiosity and creativity, disrupting the stale status quo of his home country.

For the next eight years he did groundbreaking work in developing rockets. In 1945 he and his youthful engineering team were actively recruited to continue their work for another country with great ambitions in space. A tremendous success for his personal career, even though the party he served fell a bit short of their goals.

He was clearly "the best of us nerds". Never mind that his genius was built on slave labor and oppression. He disrupted some governments, made good money and got to work on awesome rockets! That’s what counts in life.

This has shades of Robin Williams’ bar rant in Good Will Hunting.

Haha I think the irony here will fly over some heads, this is great though.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

All of those people you listed as examples were legally and duly appointed/hired for their roles and not given carte-blanche over agencies without oversight.

Government is not a startup just as pizza is not a vegetable, just as prison is not a vacation from a bad job. It’s more accurate and less toxic to compare molecular oxygen to carbon monoxide. False comparisons do more harm than good.

Inexperienced people imposing disruptions due to lack of experience is why young people may succeed at startups but fail at establishing companies. Likewise, government is not a startup and you really don’t want government to fail.

> Perhaps one reason startups work so well

As a veteran of startups, this puzzles me. I assume it's a perception that successful startups are the majority of startups. (They are not.)

Good grief, don’t identify me and the rest of HN with then. I don’t want to be “us” with people in government who make a virtue out of being unaccountable solely because they’re successful engineers.

They may be smart, and may have won awards, but Musk's techno-thugs are not "the best of us". At best, they're misguided and have fallen for Musk's charisma. At worst, they're actively supporting and abetting the subversion of our democratic government.

> At best, they're misguided and have fallen for Musk's charisma. At worst, they're actively supporting and abetting the subversion of our democratic government.

They can easily be both. They're definitely the latter

Let us also consider just how badly this continues to paint tech and tech workers to the general public. To distrust technology such as all the AI hate we see online.

It's the opposite. This paints tech nerds as the heroes.

To fascists. The rest of us are retroactively apologizing to SJWs who were right the whole time and we did not believed to.

They are fixing our non-democratic government that has been wasting trillions of our tax dollars, while we have increased homelessness, physical and mental health crisis, and other problems that have been ignored for decades.

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

What Musk is doing is what the majority voted for. To finally put an end the unbelievable waste, fraud and abuse. This is exactly what he said he would do and most Americans are relieved and see hope for the first time in a long time.

I am sorry that you took so much flak in this thread. The HN crowd generally pretends to dislike elitism but this whole thread seems to be questioning the abilities of the engineers and conspiracy theories about billionaires. I interestingly don't see a lot of people defending government spending though. If the DOGE program were done under a different party and perhaps to expand government spending, I imagine the HN crowd would be supportive and defend the engineers.

https://xkcd.com/793/ This is what you are doing. You're assuming all problems are variants of a software problem, because you're a software engineer.

Did it ever occur to you they might not be?

Nah, what Musk is doing is attempting to destroy democracy with no regard to harm it causes to American citizens. Oh, while not caring about what is legal or illegal at all. It is ridiculous to call previous governments "non democratic" while being engaged in what Trump and Musk are doing now. There is about 0 chance the people selected by Trump will improve health, especially so as they are trying to destroy the very agencies that used to protect food safety, the air and so on.

If you seriously think Musk of all people is actually interested in improving the lives of regular Americans, I have a bridge to sell you. He's a liar, a narcissist, and the world's richest man. That is who you're cheering on to take over the finances of the richest country in the world?

Probably won't be interpreted as such but this is an honest question; I don't care about their age really but if they are so smart, why are they taking part of an illegal operation? Befehl ist befehl? That's not very smart is it? Or are they picked because they are young and gullible and easily manipulated yet brilliant in some other areas?

As a non-American: What's illegal here?

My understanding is this is DOGE getting some analysis software in place so they can find out where the money goes and start their cuts, which I understand there is an executive order for. And my understanding is that the executive does have the power to do that sort of audit.

Where has my understanding gone wrong?

I am also a non-American so yes, I would like to see your question answered too.

My understanding from online reading (... but we know how that goes ...) is that that executive order cannot be given without approval and that approval was not given. But would love to hear someone with more knowledge to chime in as all the left-ish to even moderate right media are shouting all of this is illegal and overstepping.

As a non-american, my feeling is that it’s just about who signs the order.

If Biden creates a new program by executive order and puts a non elected person in charge, republicans will cry. If Trump does the same, democrats will yell.

It’s just the polarisation of the debate that is higher than before.

I thought so, but they seem have a lot of issues explaining it in a way that makes it seem on the up. On all sides.

Handling personal information of citizens is subject to a lot of laws and protections. You can’t just put whatever software installed by whomever.

It's probably legal, but we will find out in court.

You are pretty much correct. There is a ton of partisan vitriol that is currently obscuring the facts. My understanding is that Elon Musk is an advisor to the president, but not a government employee. Musk and his crew are given authority to do pretty much whatever they want in terms of cutting employees and programs, so long as Trump signs off on it. Is it legal? Probably, but nothing like this has ever been done before. You can very easily see it as private citizens with no official government power taking away power from more legitimate government employees.

Potentially quite a lot, although it is hard to tell with how fast they have been moving and the dubious legal claims they have been making to support it.

DOGE is not a department authorized by Congress to exist. Elon's appointment at the head of it was not confirmed by Congress, usurping its right to 'advise and consent' to the executive. All government employees have strict rules they have to follow about conflicts of interest, which Elon's companies many government contracts would put him in violation of. Congress dictates what and how the government spends its money, and the Executive is tasked with carrying that out; Elon has placed himself in the middle of that, and has been saying he will now be the one that chooses how that money is spent. There are many laws in place on how the government is to handle personal information, and there is no indication or oversight of DOGE to verify those laws are being followed. Elon was locking employees out of their workplace, despite having that authority (since he was not confirmed to Congress to be in charge of that department).

There are probably quite a lot of other ones too. A lot of the strategy seems to be moving faster than the courts can keep up.

Apart from the fact that the analysis software is being installed on insecure computers, to ingest the PII of employees and of Treasury transactions, by people with security clearance granted at the last minute:

The cuts are already preceding the actual analysis, and once the authority of the executive to do whatever they have done is decided in court, the damage will have been done. It is the “stop me if you can, I’ll be done before the Supreme Court stops me” approach that is terrifying.

> Or are they picked because they are young and gullible and easily manipulated

bingo, take developing minds with high risk tolerance to do the illegal work someone older and wiser would refuse.

Smart? Maybe. Wise? Definitely not.

The great thing about young people is that they haven't had much time to develop a moral compass. I'd say that makes them perfect for the roles they've been given

Interestingly, I see it the other way.

Young people tend to be more ideological and ready to fight for what they care. The older you get, the more problems you have (bills, health, children, etc) the less you care imho.

The older you get the more discerning you become around what is worth caring about.

I think there's a middle ground. Very young people are inexperienced but old people are also manipulable too. Probably the most fruitful average ages for doing the right thing are between 40 and 65. I think there are a lot more exceptions for older people than younger ones.

To put your sentiment a different way: The older you get, the more you realize you're a surgeon who should potentially only 'cut once.'

> The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

Their youth and technical ability isn't the problem. What are problems are their inexperience and recklessness and evident lack of awareness. Government and the administrative state are serious undertakings. Move Fast and Break Things is extraordinarily dangerous in this context.

“Move Fast and Break Things” really does only apply to the scenario where you have to clean up your own messes.

> This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds.

Wilfully choosing to work for DOGE/ current Musk certainly isn't "the best of us".

Those involved in the Manhattan Project who were young were doing scientific/technical work.

When dealing with organizing and managing a great number of people or resources, I have never seen a young inexperienced human performing adequately, even remotely.

Old age and presumed experience is not at all a guarantee that someone would be good in such roles, but from what I have seen, young age and the associated lack of relevant experience pretty much guarantees failure in such cases.

Their project literally killed innocent people.

It is legal to make a federal government employee’s name, role, and salary publicly accessible because taxpayer-funded positions fall under the scope of public interest and open-records laws, which promote transparency and accountability in the use of government funds. You can find this information on official databases like the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) website, which routinely publishes data about federal employees’ salaries and positions, as well as on other government websites that provide access to public records.

I figure more 25 year old nerds who dismantle the US government ought to be bullied. Signed, a 25 year old nerd.

(While I'm at it, there's nothing special about age here. Plenty of 25 year olds are actually doing productive things for humanity. But many 40 year olds are doing it too. The difference is that they are competent and empathetic, not random guys who Elon happens to like.)

If they're helping overthrow democracy and the rule of law, they are not the best of us nerds.

Naming and shaming them is good. No one forced them to take this job. With the skills you list they could have done any number of good or neutral things instead.

> one reason startups work so well

Since when do startups "work well"? Some startups work well, but famously >90% of them fail. Imagine if 9 out of every 10 fires was just left alone because the fire brigade was replaced by a startup, or if 9 out 10 bridges fell down within a few years. Startups are just one of many models of running things, but they are not appropriate for everything.

Treating the government like a startup is gambling, the difference is startups are intentionally disposable while a Nation State... it's a fucking Nation State.

They may be brilliant engineers, but they’re adults who’ve decided to become enemies of the state.

Wait, what?

I would be weary of nerds taking care of this nation after all I've seen in the tech industry. AirBNB, Uber, Juicero, WeWork, Theranos, Tesla, crypto...

Agreed. I used to scoff at the hate "techbros" received, but at this point the industry has done more than enough damage to deserve that derision. This is by far the biggest escalation, though.

>>Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

As some one who just turned 40. This does make sense. Perhaps the biggest deal about aging especially in the downswing is the countdown to death keeps getting closer as you go. You do tend to care less about things around you.

Im beyond the point I would take offence on anything, but Im also beyond the point I would do something to impress somebody. There is no trying twice from here. Things either work with something/somebody or you move on to something/somebody that does/do.

I definitely was more tenacious as a young man, with projects and relationships. I'd move heavens to make something work. Now they have work or something new is sought. As an aging person I care more about less noise, bullshit and more stability. Guys like me are needed for continuity of life. Whereas younger men are needed to bring about big leap frog changes.

The world needs the young and old for both progress and sanity.

> Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

So, who's the VC that will fund the 4-9 failed governments we'll have to go through until we get a unicorn?

Maybe we'll get a solid Somaliland in the ensuing chaos after this current unmanaged Chapter 11 leads to a messy Chapter 7.

Even If I take everything you said here to the T, being brilliant in making tech startups does not AT ALL mean they'll be brilliant understanding government processes and structures.

This over arrogance of us techies thinking because we're good with computers we're the best at everything is what people are annoyed and, justifiably critical of.

You're going to be responsible to assess and dismantle a government agency with thousands of employees and billions in budget being in your twenties with ZERO gov experience is indeed a huge red flag and not merely putting a target because they're young.

We've all met incredibly accomplished people who are not to be trusted with sharp objects. Expertise in one area does not translate to another easily.

There's some real irony here.

What I'm hearing from my friends - many of whom have helped build and scale some of the most successful tech companies on the planet - is that no engineer is an exceptional one without a modicum of ethics and wisdom.

These seem to be in short supply at DOGE.

You need a mix of naive enthusiasm and grizzled experience.

It feels a bit like that famous Joel on Software post - when faced with an existing code base - it looks over complex and you can't understand it - so you decide to re-write - only to discover during the process why it's so complex in the first place.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Sure it's important to challenge the status quo - but it's really important to approach it with humility and to seek to understand why things are the way they are, not just to assume you know it all.

The “problem” with youth isn’t intelligence, it’s that early twenties you are at your most confidently ideological and you’re most willing to break things. I bet the average age of a terrorist is pretty low too.

The danger of the vision is the power of the vision, fix what’s broken in the bureaucracy, it’s not being fascist it’s just easier to ask forgiveness than permission!

We’ll see!

All the bigger shame they're illegally seizing government systems.

Putting a target on? They're dismantling the gears that make America run smoothly, and you say putting a target on? This is the point where people should start taking into consideration violent actions

>Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo.

Counterpoint - they don't have the wisdom and experience in the domain they are working in that older, wiser heads do. I've seen a LOT of stuff from both 'tech bros' and programmers who are new to a domain where it's clear they are 100% confident they are right, despite consensus to the contrary. And when their plans are implemented, all the things they didn't think about come into play - such as Tesla service which is terrible.

These people may all be brilliant engineers. But not all problems are engineering problems, and while these people may be able to engineer a system to reduce costs drastically, they may not understand where to cut costs and where efficiency can actually be achieved.

Don't forget that most of the new tech economy that people harp on about (Uber, Amazon, Tesla spring to mind) is built on the erosion of workers' rights and lowest-common-denominator treatment wherever possible.

It's great that there are young, brilliant people in research and engineering and working for business ventures. It's also very cool you remember some who started out young in the past. Hasn't got much to do with the posted article though, as that is talking about the integrity of public policy versus actors personally beholden to unelected officials and their friends reaching into US-governance.

I don't care how smart they are. They are committing crimes in service to fascism. Speak for yourself in your use of the word "us".

LOL.

I’m some sort of off-brand late comer Scots Canadian so my opinion is essentially alien and invalid to people like you but I’ve got to ask:

Why does the incestuous name dropping qualify anyone especially?

Peter Thiel is expressly trying to (and vocally so) speed run everything into the apocolypse and is very worried about the anti christ (apparently). He’s also running a massive surveillance dragnet and wants power and money above all. Again, his words.

How in the global fuck does working for or being awarded by a person with those ambitions qualify anyone for anything?

You may as well have said they attend church every sunday as their qualification.

If you said, well he has spent 10 years developing high availability systems and invented novel algorithms or implementations for managing high volume data flows or something then maybe there would be something to talk about.

But I’ve seen baby faced juniors elevated to senior and management roles and bungle them SO badly that it alienated all the actual engineering talent again and again because they were little more than virtual blood boys.

It sounds more like this latter scenario is the most likely.

Its just all goddamned hype men and their blood boys up and down this grotesque beast of what was once an industry.

With those words you don’t work in an industry, you serve a new segment of technolords and their only goal is to eat everything.

Intelligence isn’t an indicator of ability to navigate huge bureaucracies.

So you are saying this is a team developing a tool to nuke the government?

There were at least a couple of guys on the Manhattan project giving information to Russia as well.

No you’re supporting treasonous actions and you must be taught and discouraged from such actions that violate the will of the people in favor of expeditiousness. Your views are a danger to a stably growing society.

It does not matter. None of that has to do with the requirements of the job which, BTW, should have zero executive power and only make recommendations to Congress, the institution that has power of the purse.

Do you understand that this is just a constitutional crisis? I reckon musk ended up appointing kids because they also did not understand the political and ethical implications of all this.

Not just that but you CAN train people. It's possible for juniors to learn >.>

When the very first sentence of your premise is false, why read the rest?

You cant compare manhattan project, NASA to a bunch of good software techs ripping apart the government. The first two projects required high levels of intelligence and new concepts.

These guys are the modern equivalent of name any destructive revolutionary group looking for stuff they don't agree with.

I don't however refute that you can be a brilliant mind and active contributor at any age. Just that these guys aren't anywhere close to the same page as our greatest minds.

Not to mention, NASA famously has incredibly strict coding standards and guidelines [0]. I somehow doubt there’s anything along those lines at DOGE.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

The Cultural Revolution was led by China's smartest students too.

Smart is not the same thing as qualified. None of these qualifications you've listed have anything to do with running a government agency.

People around here love to talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect, but seem to be of the mistaken belief that it is about smart vs dumb people rather than people with domain expertise vs people without.

They are all beneficiaries of affirmative action, for libertarians, in case you are wondering why these guys and not more competent or mercenary people, which are both abundant.

Let's see their Pull Requests. Then you won't need to make assertions about their ability. We can have public accountability in the light of day.

Source? and what's the median?

Also, that was during WW2 which would likely skew those #s (though I would actually expect to much older, as in not most-fit-military age)

Richard Rhodes' introduction to Serber's "The Los Alamos Primer" suggests 24:

> Despite this leavening of older men (Oppenheimer was thirty-eight), the group's average age was only twenty-four.

The field being relatively new also heavily influenced the scientists being so young.

The age of modern quantum mechanics started in 1925. Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize for his 1927 work on the uncertainty principle in 1932 at the age of 31. 10 years later the Manhattan Project started.

There just weren’t that many older scientists with training in the field. Young PhDs were only a few years removed from the first discoveries that enabled nuclear physics to leap forward.

They are violating many, many laws. They should be named.

Yes, name the laws.

> The Privacy Act of 1974 generally, and the Internal Revenue Code with respect to taxpayer information, make it unlawful for Secretary Bessent to hand over access to the Bureau’s records on individuals to Elon Musk or other members of DOGE.

Among numerous other laws listed in

https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/1-Complaint-7.pdf

If I’m not mistaken they just may have received authorization from the President. Could be, I don’t know.

Not that that is sufficient for allowing legal access to all data in every case. But see the next part.

There’s no evidence that the wild claims about improper access to data are justified. Claims from people who have proven to be the opposite of truthful. For instance to shut down payments temporarily you don’t need to access data; you just need a cable snipper to cut the right wires. Reference the Twitter Sacramento data center solution implemented after the Twitter purchase. Or it can be done any number of other ways with changing passwords, etc.

Don’t believe everything you hear and read.

> Claims from people who have proven to be the opposite of truthful.

Interesting you say that.

All I know is that confidential payment data is apparently being handed to specific individual(s?), known to be partisan actors, who lost a bunch of lawsuits in court of law recently. Am I to just ignore that?

The point is not to shut payments, but to use it in information warfare, Twitter Files Redux.

Not just* to shut payments.

Yes there are multiple things happening at once.

Information coming out is a good thing, luckily.

All those credentials and yet they lack the wisdom to see what is really happening.

Maybe that had something to do with why they were chosen?

Well, even if they are, brilliance isn't everything in a human... And it shows.

Don't startups fail at a very high rate though?

> Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25.

The youngest scientist or engineer was Richard Feynman who was 27 years old at the time.

Average age of scientists/engineers on the Manhattan Project was closer to 37.

25 sounds so absurd I don’t know how you didn’t double check your sources. The rest of your post makes some claims about NASA but stopped reading as it has to be BS as well.

You work on a team named after a meme.

Such rhyme. Much knowledge. Wow.

source ?

I think it's really cool they have the Herculaneum Papyrii guy working for them!

It's a shame Wired is behaving this way.

[flagged]

It’s good to read a comment of sanity amidst all this instinctual bellyaching whenever T or E do anything. But in particular when a formerly well respected publication writes a hit piece like this…

I used to scoff when people said “TDS” was a real thing, but having observed the same with Elon over the years and then listening to hours long talks between him and others, I realised “EDS” is clearly also a thing. And lo and behold: Listening to full long-form talks with Trump revealed a person wholly different to what media portrays.

And as a disclaimer, no I don’t agree with everything they do or say. But they’re not the monsters the monsters in the media machinery spin them up to be either.

The real monsters are those that purposefully trim and clip and stitch together falsehoods out of context, and then believe their own lies until they’re willing to throw other citizens under a figurative bus just because they work with or for “those people”.

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