I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.
I keep thinking back about that Chernobyl miniseries; head of the science department used to run a shoe factory. No one needs to be competent at their job anymore
> [ChatGPT] is blocked for other Department of Homeland Security staff. Gottumukkala “was granted permission to use ChatGPT with DHS controls in place,” adding that the use was “short-term and limited.”
He had a special exemption to use it as head of Cyber and still got flagged by cybersecurity checks. So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.
They already have a deal with OpenAI to build a government focused one https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-chatgpt-gov/
More likely, everything gets added to the list because there shouldn't be false positives, it's worth investigating to make sure there isn't an adjacent gap in the security systems.
I presume pulling this data out is simple if you’re, say, China.
There really no security to investigate. Without a private instance, it’s an absolute non-starter for anything classified.
Why would you presume that?
I mean, I don't know if he had a security exemption, or if anyone who clicked on it would have infected us. But he was the weak link, at least in that instance.
30 years in about 8 software companies, Northern Europe. Often startups. Between 4 to 600 people. When they grow large the work often turns boring, so it's time to find something smaller again.
You don't have worked in enough companies then.
Just for the sake of argument, you think anybody would have denied Jobs or Bezos or Musk one?
(Extreme burnout, did not get rich from the pain. It was just pointless destruction.)
Give sound advice of course, but ultimately it’s the exec’s decision make.
Case in point: Allowing a CEO with no flight training to "have the keys" to the company <rare, expensive, uniquely outfitted, airframe> because they want to take it for a spin.
Sheparding Royalty in Monarchies has been a neccessary, delicate, loaded, and life threatening role for centuries.
Being a C-suite Groom of the Stool isn't a happy job, but somebody has to do it.
To be clear, I’m referring much more to CEO/owners - maybe more like Zuck than Bezos
> To be clear, I’m referring much more to CEO/owners
Owners are what you are talking about. CEO / Owners are Owners and can act like owners.
That said, even owners need to be herded like cats when they are making bad decisions that impact tens of thousands of people on the basis of hubris and feels.
Somebody has to toss them shiny keys until the moment passes and they can make rational choices again.
The CEO of vocal cola has no business need to know the secret formula. Giving it to him has no upside only downside, so you don’t.
Semiconductor does this all the time…engineers on team A know only about their process critical gate materials step. Engineers on team B know about their lithography step. They are trained not to disclose and people respect that.
Bad is still bad, no matter what the party doing it.
Dig up a live mic catching Hillary calling the IOC a bunch of self-serving scum just as Obama was begging them to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago, and we might call it comparable.
Don't forget the Large Adult Sons!
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-land-...
That's actually the whole point. Placing incompetents in positions of authority means they know absolutely to whom they owe their loyalty. Because they know they would never have that job on merit. And since they don't really know how to do the job, they have no moral qualms about doing a poor job, or strong opinions on what they should be doing -- other than whatever mission their patron has given them. It's a tool used by weak leaders and it's unfortunately very effective.
Make the government look so incompetent that it is a no brainer to let a private company (headed by your friends and family of course) to do the important jobs and siphon resources much more effectively.
No joke, the previous head of the State Department task force tasked with fighting corruption and nepotism in international contracting was named Rich Nephew. (He's a very talented career civil servant and I mean no shade I just find that hilarious.)
Any time you have to include "competent" in a description of a job or related technology, that's a clue that it needs requisite oversight and (possibly exponetial) proportionate cost.
That is of course the thing about ideologies like it: loyalty before all else.
The entire Trump administration, every single person, is a DEI hire.
But, even though that's what DEI can be, not all "someone got a git not because of ability" is DEI. Cronyism, racism, and sexism all do that, too.
In the case of this administration, I think the traditional term is "yes men" - people who are hired not for ability, but because they will not say no to the boss.
I once read an interesting book on the economy of Nazi Germany. There were a lot of smart CEOs and high ranking civil servants who perfectly predicted US industrial might.
If the reality of a thing is in opposition to the regime’s wishes, you can’t just wish that away.
However, the regime will favor those who say “yes” over those who accept reality.
It we loosen "fascist" to just mean any authoritarian government, there are many that run of very long time.
More importantly, maybe the Nazi's were competent at first, but they absolutely fell apart internally due to mistrust, back stabbing, and demanding of loyalty above all else. Hitler famously made many poor military decisions.
And as a government they'd still be in power 20 and 30 years later if they didn't start the war (judging from Franco's spain).
I hear Los Alamos labs has an LLM that makes ChatGPT look like a toy. And then there's Sentinel, which may be the same thing I'm not sure.
Care to say more about that?
Apparently he was in fact allocated on a top secret project at los Alamos and his expertise was alternative propulsion back everything else is folklore, but it is deep folklore if you're interested in conspiracy theories