US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):

1. Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn’t use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don’t even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

2. Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency – People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:

   Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.

   If I’ve learned anything from all this it’s about how unfathomably based cool a lot of federal workers are.

3. The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog

   I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.

4. Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].

Holy smokes Jeeps will reportedly show ads while you are freaking driving:

Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.

One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their “JeepCares” representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the “X” to dismiss them.

“Listen guys, if you don’t want me stabbing you you simply have to ask nicely every time, and also I’m trying real hard to reduce the rate of stabbing incidents so in a way I’m the victim here.”

Reading around it sounds like modern cars can be user-hostile in general, and this might not be new; so I’m sure glad I have one from the ancient times of 2012. It has a tiny unobtrusive screen which does nothing but show my music, the odometer, the backup camera, any warnings, and the Hatsune Miku wallpaper I loaded into it.

go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction).

Why would you do this to me?

Well as they promised Google Maps has finally fallen. It now shows “Gulf of America” and nothing else to US users. I suspect someone outside the US will be shown both the real name and Gulf of America. Denali is still labeled as Denali… for now.

Disorganize the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and stupid.

One more year of controversial Gemini sports ads and it will officially be a tradition!

Reading books in US high school was an exercise in frustration. There weren’t many books assigned, and not a lot of them vibed with me. Most of my classmates did the minimum reading they could get away with (and this was before cellphones were everywhere).

Also I once read through the entirety of the Lord of the Flies before the first quiz on it and so got a quiz answer wrong because I got mixed up due to remembering stuff that happened later in the book which I’m still bitter about.

Fixed the graphic for them:

Also Google is no longer woke, so not too much equality: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-scraps-diversity-hiring-goals-002553150.html

Mission accomplished or whatever I guess.

deleted by creator

Somewhat related I was thinking about how different this blog post from a DOGE “employee” reads during Elon Musks coup attempt: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life/ – it was discussed here but no one really knew what was coming at the time.

There’s also a youtube video which has been popping off on social media over the last week and is a gentle introduction to techno-fascists for the general public.

(After sleeping on it it’s possible the book I was thinking of was written in the earliest 21st century).

There was an announcement on their mailing list here: https://lists.pglaf.org/archives/list/gmonthly@lists.pglaf.org/thread/MTHHI3TD7YXD3EHLKVBBA57KRBBWRI72/

We then worked with the same programmers [as AI generated categories] to provide automated summaries of nearly every book in the collection. You can find those summaries on book landing pages. These summaries are intended to be helpful for people trying to decide what book to read, or to get an idea of what a book is about.

For example, here is the automated summary from book #1, the US Declaration of Independence (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1): […]

If you spot errors in summaries, let us know. Summaries of most books are based only on the first 12,000 characters, because the costs would have been too high for if we included all of every book.

We have also been corresponding with another programmer seeking to instruct AI technologies to “read” books from Project Gutenberg, summarize them, and answer questions about them. We hope this might be described further in a future newsletter.

Based off Wayback Machine poking around it looks like they were added sometime between September 20th to October 1st.

The file metadata of the oldest copy on the gutenberg webserver says 2003 – and the document itself says Gutenberg created it in 2003 and published it in 2005 (whatever that means, maybe they were delaying ebook releases to ensure a steady stream)

Anyway this 2003 copy had their public domain boilerplate; it was described as a book in the public domain.

There are indeed a lot of websites about this, but none with any more information that Project Gutenberg so I’m guessing they all trace back to the Gutenberg release. Probably you’d have to find some physical information about it in an actual library to trace it further.

But I’m not like a professional book researcher or anything, that’s just my opinion!

Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696

(Two comment threads about the CDC purging “woke” research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)

Gee given a forum full of hackers you’d expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to “information wants to be free”?

Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the bee’s knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943

Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future 🙃.

These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.

* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.

** If there’s interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.

Heck yeah walkability!

Also note how the author said the city transcends geography, as if geography was something useless or to be overcome by an advanced civilization (except for a bunch of artsy folks tucked away in a corner I guess?). But humans need variety. I would get so antsy if I lived in a perfect grid city with nothing out of order (or even a perfect hexagon city, no offense hexagons). There need to be paths and trails and rivers. There need to be trees and mountains in the distance.

Stop stop I can only update my priors so fast!

Aaaah my eyes

The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.

This future doesn’t have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.

I don’t remember (reading it was a bit like a fever dream) but there’s a non-zero chance it has racist vibes in parts you have been warned.

But oh so quotable:

We have been treating the trees on a ten mile radius with an anti-flammatory solution for several years as well, and it is quite impossible to set them on fire.

Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.

I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don’t judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg’s summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There’s actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.

Given that it’s in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It’s also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn’t really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.

Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.

* maybe the '70s give or take but I’m not a professional date guesser

Oh no it’s more US politics.

So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it’s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA’s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

Sure is weird how all the people distrustful of ideologies have an ideology.