Can’t wait for Musk’s team to finally peel back these layers, realize that the code actually implemented the laws, and have to admit they are the idiots and apologize for wasting the government’s money on a poorly-run audit.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this: the hard part in replacing/updating government system is not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the policies that have been changed and modified over the decades.
See "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software" (Jun 2023):
> There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U
One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge.
Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem":
That is the hard part in any system, not just government. Especially government, maybe, but not uncharacteristically and certainly not exclusively!
You do not get to adapt the rules to the software. The government can look at the state of the rules, say "this rule is obsolete, inefficient or unnecessarily complicated" and enact a different rule.
They rarely do this, which is why having someone go through and make the attempt is potentially valuable.
Another episode from Odd Lots, "Why Corporate America Still Runs on Ancient Software That Breaks", with Patrick McKenzie (patio11 here at HN):
> Southwest Airlines had a disastrous holiday season, thanks in part to a software bug that left crews out of place and grounded thousands of flights. But Southwest isn't alone in having software in the headlines lately. The New York Stock Exchange recently had a software error that caused weird pricing on stocks and the FAA had its own computer issue that grounded planes earlier this month. So what's the deal with corporate software? Why do these crashes happen? And why does the user experience typically leave something to be desired? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Patrick McKenzie, an expert on engineering and infrastructure, who writes the Bits About Money newsletter and recently left payments company Stripe after six years. We talked about the challenges of keeping any software system alive after years of upgrades and updates, the distribution of tech talent across industries, and whether non-tech companies can close the gap with Silicon Valley.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-corporate-america-...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-corporate-america-still-r...
The crucial bit of infrastructure (and the most vulnerable point right now) might be the domain name.
I’d be more worried about propaganda being inserted.
Domain names have been seized in the past.
It's been called "wokepedia" (not to be confused with Wookieepedia, the star wars wiki) by Musk and others, telling people not to donate.
And also people have been denouncing Google's search results as biased, as being "woke".
I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word "woke" means, beyond the Ami/UK right using it as an insult, but I can't tell if it's generic or specific, critiquing something or just telling supporters when to boo and jeer. Does the Ami/UK left still use it to mean "being aware of systemic prejudice", or have they also shifted? I didn't notice at the time when "meme" stopped meaning shared online quiz.
In the context you're referring to it is essentially an accusation of certain ideological ulterior motives in communication.
Regarding your reference to Google's search results. I have no idea what the current behavior is. However a couple of years ago there were some remarkable differences for certain search terms between different geographical versions of the website. It certainly had the appearance of pushing an agenda at the time.
It is a mistake to think that negative uses of “woke” are an exclusively right-of-centre thing.
Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to this comment I posted a bit over a month back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695516 - in which I cite several unabashed Marxists using the word negatively (including Adolph L Reed Jr, and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International).
If you read Reed, he actually means something rather specific by “woke” - whereas classical/orthodox Marxism views non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as downstream consequences of class-based oppression, “wokeness” treats them as if they exist independently of class-based oppression, or as upstream of it, or as a higher priority than it
Just the other day, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was quoted as saying, regarding his own Democratic Party, that “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack” - https://www.politico.eu/article/us-senator-mark-warner-democ... - Warner may well be a moderate or centrist Democrat, but I don’t think it makes sense to label him as “conservative” or “right-wing”. He’s not a “conservative Democrat”, in the sense that there was such a thing a decade or two ago [edit: I made some comment here about him not being a member of the Blue Dog caucus, but I’ve removed it because what I was saying didn’t really make sense-the Blue Dog caucus is and was a House caucus, while Warner is a Senator]
I don’t think Warner’s definition of “woke” is as precise as Reed’s, but essentially what he means by it is a form of progressivism which prioritises ideological purity over winning the battle for the median voter’s heart and mind
Thanks for the detailed response; one of the previous times I said this here, the answer was snarky disbelief that I hadn't kept track.
FWIW, it would be far from the first time that’s happened (including for sensitive US issues).
[0] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/02/doge-fired-hundreds-of-us...
Very well done doc, though overly concerned, on how keep people in the future away from nuclear waste: Into Eternity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
Edit: I really don’t think the way this audit is being conducted is out of a genuine love for America, or the American citizens, or even out of just wanting to do good work. This is very nakedly a dishonest, petty, and malicious investigation.
System audits require a well defined structure and scope, context, methodology, governance. They take into consideration the IT systems, and the human systems and processes. They clearly define questions to be answered.
This is neither. It is a PR exercise to create an appearance of the regime doing “something” that sounds impressive to their base.
Rule #1 of the new American oligarch: never admit a mistake
Is this really a new rule? By my understanding of history, this has been the standard operating procedure for governments since... well, since they became a thing. And when mistakes are admitted, they're done so very slowly. For example, it took the U.S. government nearly half a century to apologize for the Japanese internment camps.
The new guard are far more like the old royalty of Europe. Look at their lifestyles and riches: how could they possibly be wrong? Back then it was called the divine right of kings: they were chosen by God - the literal creator and master of the universe - and thus, by definition, could not be wrong.
Today it's the absolution of the market: how could you possibly be that wealthy if you are a screw-up? It's hard to get rich, so those who have become so must be better than the conventional wisdom and decency. Any wrong move is written off as another move in a 4D chess game that the average person just can't understand.