Can you elaborate on the type of issue submitted?
Did Claude provide a suggested solution?
Did Sophie provide a report on the cause of the issue?
How did Claude handle the response from Sophie?
Today, I am posting it again because I believe the HN readers will benefit from it. Why? The majority of HN readers work in IT or adjacent information fields; we communicate information with strings aka words.
Falsehoods programmers believe about strings: All strings are words.
More seriously: While I find the topic appropriate for HN, connecting the topicality to the use of strings in IT is weird. If the ban only applied to audio or sign language, the topic wouldn’t be any less appropriate.
Yes, it definitely is censorship, because scientists employed by the government may not report findings, existing government information is being erased, and the public cannot access it. So studies about racial concerns are cancelled, programs measuring the rate of climate change are being cancelled and the data and even the data collecting instrumentation is destroyed. This list of banned words is just one aspect of the censorship ... taken as a whole, this is an unconstitutional censorship of data that has public health and public safety implications. Does it qualify as Hacker News? Well, does Hacker News even exist when we no longer have access to critical data? Is that not topical? And does this kind of post suddenly become relevant when the government starts censoring the website directly? And how would we know when that starts to happen? Are you going to magically send us all letters in the mail? Or will you just silently acquiesce?
And that is flat ignorance of all the other context of destruction of data going on right now. Ignoring that research data is being maintained by private citizens to protect it doesn't support your point. Censorship of government websites is just a small piece of this, ignoring it doesn't help anyone but a rank partisan, which you clearly are.
Your refusal to look up "censor" in a dictionary doesn't make you right. Some people are actually trying to have a reasoned discussion about the downsides of what the administration is doing, in particular the censorship, which is the problem with articles like this being flagged, especially when it's justified with partisan hyperbole such as what can be found in your comments here.
> "Censorship of government websites" is an oxymoron.
> The government choosing not to engage in or endorse certain speech does not suppress others engaging in that speech.
The second sentence is not related to what I'm saying. I'm responding to the notion that government resources can't be censored.
> What is your argument here?
There is no argument, but an observation: government resources can be censored. I'm not going to insult you by copying a definition of "censor" and explaining how it is possible to apply that action to government documents. You're smart enough to figure that out on your own.
That string of words is nonsensical. Literally nothing in the OP is talking about "your grant."
If you want to start your own grant, either personally or through a foundation you start, nothing in the OP pertains to you.
The OP is only about whether the government will endorse speech contained in your application for a government grant, which—again—is categorically different from what you said and fundamentally not censorship.
Many of the rest are clearly editorial or phrasing preferences (e.g., "Latinx" in place of "Latino/a"), which are reasonable to have; I'm sure any mainstream publication like the NYT also has its own preferred language and style guidelines.
True. And a lot of examples from the previous administration, for example, where you weren't allowed to say "gay" or "equality" or "equal opportunity."
Even still, this list is passed around at my university where researchers are censoring their proposals to not include these words. That's called a chilling effect, and it's against the ideals of free speech.
No, these are public proposals for public money to do public research. There shouldn't be restrictions on want can be funded based on the President's own personal morality. This isn't the "government's" money or Republican money or the Trump administration's money; it's our money, allocated for research that American public decided that scientists and academic institutions, who by dedicating their life to these pursuits and demonstrating excellence in the process, earned the right to conduct. Although the executive branch has the power, they do not have the mandate to impose its own morality on the entire country, that's what Congress is for.
I'm not saying every proposal deserves to be funded, but I'm saying proposals should not be denied funding on the basis of capricious, political, partisan, myopic moral crusades.
> That said, it's plausible it could have a chilling effect on their independent research, which is of concern.
This is more than plausible, it's actually happening at my workplace at least. Very anti free-speech for a party that said they were pro free-speech.
What? The government has been quite openly going around pulling unrelated funding and launching investigations into educational institutions for similar reasons.
Using the current POTUS opinions versus engineering decisions derived from carefully studied military research clearly puts the Navy at risk. Given that the consequences of following such opinions are known, one should ask why would the Navy have to acquiesce? How much longer can the ego/power-trip go unchecked before the nation suffers an irreversible blow?
If only it was just an ego trip. Trump has been fooled by both adversaries and allies with their own agendas into doing things that are vandalizing American institutions, alliances, and both hard and soft power.
You're seeing all these half baked AI adoptions in government specifically because they're the entity most likely to be able to dodge paying for it when they've done wrong.
AIUC (AI Underwriting Company) is the only thing I've heard of: https://aiuc.com/
They're new. We'll see if it works out. (Just did a quick search and there are some other new entrants too. Just found out about Testudo: https://www.testudo.co/)
I guess you have never sued the government, even a local one? Allow me to illustrate how this works:
Kids-for-Cash scandal: 2,500+ children were affected by thousands of juvenile cases in a corruption scandal centered involving two judges, private detention company (hired as part of youth services, and the juvenile justice system), thousands of police officers and at least half of school officials, and tons of social workers involved in the scandal imprisoned kids for a cumulative 417 years (that's the absolute minimum, they won't say how much it really is, probably a factor of that).
"resolution": ZERO restitution to the victims, the budget of the department responsible was raised by 10s of millions. Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years (mostly for dodging the taxes on his bribes), of which he spend 17 in prison, while Conahan, who paid taxes on his bribes, spent less than 9 years in prison before home confinement, and had the remainder of his sentence commuted by Presidential clemency. He is living off his pension in Florida, and receives police protection (there's been several attempted murders of him by his victims. There is a slight issue with his police protection: apparently his police guard LET kids beat him up more than a few times too. He filed a case against the officers, which was dropped). To add insult to injury, extra budget was approved to you youth services "to help". Needless to say, they used part of the budget they got to imprison more kids for refusing to cooperate (and worse, they complain about the total unfairness that one of the employees was killed by one of those kids and the very light sentence that kid got for some reason). A LOT of people got attacked by kids in Pennsylvania for over a decade.
What they DID was imprison 2500 children for a minimum of 2 months each, bribed by money paid from youth services budget by a private detention facility. NONE of the other people involved faced any consequences. Not the private detention facility (children are locked up there at this very moment), not the youth services department. Not the people who organized the cases, not the mostly school officials doing the referrals, not the politicians approving the cases and budget that was used for bribing judges. In total about 1200 state officials were involved.
For comparison: Michael Webb kidnapping (Texas, 2019). A private individual confined an 8-year-old girl for about 8 hours before police rescued her. He was sentenced to life in federal prison.
In the kids for cash scandal 1200 state officials conspired to imprison kids for a cumulative total of 417 years, and a normal person gets life in prison for 8 hours of confinement. This would mean that a fair court system would have had enough cause to put EVERY state employee, and the governor who was responsible of course, in prison for at least 5 consecutive life sentences.
You see how holding the state responsible works? If it's bad enough they'll throw someone to the wolves, as well as everybody who refused to pay taxes. Totally ignoring that half the state's employees were involved, as a lot of politicians were pushing for this to happen (e.g. the governor was obviously strongly involved here). But if you compare the punishments for private citizens violating the law to what is given out if government is responsible for the exact same crime you get completely absurd comparisons. The punishments doled out to officials for the crime of kidnapping children were 46 THOUSAND TIMES less than to a criminal. That's 4,600,000% less.
Oh and to make the comparison even more ridiculous, the restitution the offenders owed to the victims, when they were state employees was MINUS 36 THOUSAND times what the court gave to a private individual's victims. And the result of this "justice" the state's budget was INCREASED due to the crime, with the net result of "justice" being more kids getting locked up. Again: government victims got ZERO (unless you count getting imprisoned again)
It's not just that courts are absurdly more lenient against their employer, they are also generous with other people's money and literally reward the offenders if they're the courts' employers.
(and let's not pretend Europe is any better. Every European government also managed to lead poison large amounts of kids, and failed to take responsibility)
So you see, there is no need to worry about the financial fallout when the AI fails catastrophically for insurance. No need at all.
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