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Comment by Cider9986 | Hacker News Reader

The Whitehouse learned about vibecoding. See this and arcade.gov.

Also, what?? https://america.gov/privacy

At least realfood.gov was decent [1].

Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?

Where's the source code for these websites? First of all, if they are vibe coded by government employees they have to be open source, and secondly, if they are vibe coded (even by a contractor), then they can't be copyrighted.

[1] https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/04/national-design-...

Edit: it says this one is made by the National design studio at the bottom.

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They laid off the highly skilled professionals who voluntarily took pay cuts (vs industry) to work for the US Digital Service (now "US DOGE Service," God help us) and GSA 18F, and who built some pretty solid standards for government sites.

They then replaced them with a bunch of inexperienced but ideologically aligned frontend developers who use the same insanely resource-intensive defense tech startup-esque template on every page, and who seem to be under the impression that scroll hijacking and fade-in blur effects are very essential to a government website, but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.

Feels like a step backwards to me, but perhaps the 4D chess game they're playing is just way above my level.

This is the new 1000x productivity improvement introduced by LLMs that they've been talking about so much.

Will it lead to better quality? Nope.

>but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.

These are probably features

True to form for this administration, they just ripped off Apple's style guide for https://america.gov/privacy.

arcade.gov has "Border Patrol along the Rio Grande" game, wtf's wrong with you America these days?

It seems like a pretty crappy idea for a game funded with public money. It's a bad joke about a real, nuanced problem where people are actually losing their lives. What will be next? 'Hit that Iranian school' the game?

Yes, probably. Americans love this stuff

> Americans love this stuff

Only a certain subset of us that happen to be fond of repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot and acting like spoiled children in adult bodies with no actual adults in the room. The rest of us are genuinely horrified that our country is now run by mentally challenged psychotic lunatics.

we've totally earned this, so i'm not offended by what you've said. but i'll just step in here to say i fucking hate this stuff.

you could easily argue that there are plenty of things our government has done that matter much more in the grand scheme of things, but the rampant twitter / x meme posts and absolute horseshit like this "arcade" site disgust me. it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.

> it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.

What's worse is that they're proud of being "despicable". (I can think of a few choice words that describe them better, but "despicable" will do fine for now.) The sorts of behaviors that are normalized these days were reason for absolute shame just a few short decades ago, but apparently it's a badge of honor to be an absolute scumbag these days. Can we stop the handbasket ride to Hell now? I wanna get off.

Only conservative do. Some old one do not, but they're the exception.

Our government is an embarrassment and a disgrace right now. Anyone who wasn't guzzling elon's twitter or fox's hatefest knew it was going to be this way. We need severe regulations on oligarchs and their propaganda toys. Used to be we had enforced anti-monopoly controls on media outlet conglomerates. The anti-government Goldwater/Reagan legacy worked for decades to destroy regulation. It needs to return with a vengeance.

The White House is basically run by right-wing internet trolls.

Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think where such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.

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