DOGE goon fired after admitting that he was surprised to find that "government works" and is "not as inefficient as I was expecting."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91330297/doge-sahil-lavignia-gumroad
@MikeElgan honestly reading this it sounds like he actually wanted to help with efficiency and thought DOGE would help. Sounds like an OK guy that jumped on the wrong bandwagon.
@hunterking
Young people often can't see the value of competently implemented incremental improvements over sudden revolutionary changes which can't be implemented without a lot of pain and suffering.
@sunscream sure! And it sounds like he learned that. Maybe it's the article's slant but at least he wanted to build and not burn.
@hunterking @sunscream In other words, the usual story of a young idealist who got used by someone older with an agenda and no scruples.
@roadskater @hunterking @sunscream apologize in case there is a response I'm not seeing (Mastodon does that), but I do have to point out that the OP linked fast company article starts with the following:
> Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.
So not a young idealist, in fact a tech multimillionaire; who was naive about how government works, which is probably the case of most tech multimillionaires.
@spoltier @roadskater @hunterking @sunscream
A tech founder whose tangible contribution to government efficiency was code "detecting whether a federal agency’s communication references chief diversity officers, pronouns, or WHO (World Health Organization) partnerships."
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/91330297/doge-sahil-lavignia-gumroad
@nyhan @spoltier @roadskater @sunscream
OK that kind of sucks and I guess I forgot that there was a second article linked
@nyhan @roadskater @hunterking @sunscream he also mentions that he open sourced the code.
The compliance code is 800 lines of python that extracts text from pdfs and asks an LLM to check for reference to relevant topics. Seems a bit like open-sourcing anti-cheating tools, but 🤷
https://github.com/lecy/va-doge-tools/blob/35e3ff1b9e0eb1c8aaaebf3bfe76f2002354b782/eos/analyze_eos.py#L218
@spoltier @roadskater @hunterking @sunscream I would use the description "deliberately ignorant of how things actually work due to techbro hubris"