There's a fairly interesting story in here, and I almost didn't bother reading it because of the opening where the author just talks about their pathological aversion to gum and how they dislike Gumroad because it has "gum" in the name.
> The story is about DOGE, but it points out something curious:
> > On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad!
The rest of TFA is a frame around this single paragraph from the original Wired story [0] and doesn't really add anything meaningful to it. The connection to the not-really-Open-Source release is tenuous at best, the heart of it is just "turns out Sahil is in DOGE, DOGE is bad, so boycott Gumroad".
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
He described how he got recruited into DOGE (or what was to become of it) via a series of online conversations that served as interviews. It was light on details but gave the impression that he basically got vibe-checked by a couple informal chats until he was into DOGE.
He left quickly afterward, not giving many details. He meant it as a side note to his story but I thought it was telling that people with zero experience in auditing or managing large government systems were being vibe-checked with online chats straight into DOGE, which was then given massively destructive powers to cut government spending.
So I suppose I’m not too surprised to see another startup founder mysteriously appear in DOGE, doing mysterious things to our nation’s infrastructure.
This is the part that stood out:
> Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups.
Major government decisions being made by a cabal of people recruited on a whim to work out of Signal groups, outside the reach of record keeping and transparency attempts.
An omen about what was to come.
It seems the actual meat is a link to a Wired article the author read and decided to write a long-ass blog post about, to promote his newsletter and project on ko-fi...
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
Myself, I've explicitly stuck to KDE instead of Gnome for many years, because the logo of the latter - a foot - was viscerally disgusting and repulsive to me.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement(2f)FootAndCulturalIssue.ht...
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/gnome-foot-logo-rebrand/
> It is actively off-putting and unappealing to at least some folks including much of the GNOME design team, newer contributors, people outside the open source bubble—and apparently potentially entire cultures (which has been raised multiple times over the past 20+ years).