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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

This is the story:

> 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...

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I think the real story is a guy who replaced all his customer service with chatbots is now pushing code at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a place with actual life or death stakes if a customer can’t get the answers they need because they’re stuck in chatbot hell.

Several months ago there was a strange story from a startup founder who was lost and looking for his next step.

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.

Are you referring to the co-founder of Loom? https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...

That’s it! Thanks for searching for it.

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's honestly extremely depressing

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