I know some companies that at a high level want to "organize the world's information" or "build the future of human connection", yet have done innumerable cruel and harmful things to society (at least in my opinion).

And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.

Did you look at usa.gov at all?

A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:

* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?

* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?

* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?

* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?

Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.

It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:

Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.

So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.

Brilliant.

Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.

It's rijksoverheid.nl in my country- good luck to any poor expat trying to pronounce that lol.

There is a big difference between "these ads have flashing lights and take up half the screen and are annoying" and "this ad is attempting to defraud you".

Sure. It's possible. But is your point that it's happening here? Or just that something wrong could happen?

I believe it could be used for good things, bad things, or a bit of both. I passionately believe this!

Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.

You have to measure that problem against the status quo, which is that current government websites are very hard to understand and leave people with very little idea of what’s going on.

I France service-public.gouv.fr is amazing

https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1...

Humans also make shit up all the time.

Kind of like saying something happens "all the time" and sharing a single example from 15 years ago. Not to mention that a private company's HR team is not the government.

I see it every day in the text, images, and video posted by AI proponents on social media. Full of errors and wtfs and the people posting the tripe don't seem to notice it.

Maybe you've just stopped paying attention so you don't notice as much anymore?

At the bottom you also have other relevant links (usually to the website of the specific administrations of what you want to do) including reference to the current law that the page is based on (https://legifrance.gouv.fr is also great)

For what I used it for, it was never ambiguous in determining your situation

Of course, we also paid for local calls so things never got as popular as they were in the US.

they can be taught where they went wrong.

if a pattern emerges they can be moved to a role more fitting for them. or removed from a project entirely.

we can judge their effectiveness from past performance.

we can put them in less important roles and gauge whether or not they should be moved up.

so, no, pretending that the correct route forward is to “remove humans from the equation” for a bot that doesn’t learn, is never held accountable, and not held to the same standard as humans is silly tier thinking.

This seems like a great source for domain-specific RL, but even without that, we can expect there to be higher-quality LLMs that can be trivially swapped in within a year, if not a week.

i didn’t say this at all. did you respond to the wrong comment?

i was responding to the comment which said:

> … remove humans from the equation, then.

> We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?

the context of my response was “removing humans from the equation” is sillytier thinking.

not “We should never use LLMs”

Maybe a human should be available as a backup or something, but not because LLMs don't "learn" -- the system seems to learn in all relevant senses.

(I'd also object to the no accountability, but another subthread is already on that.)

bad bots can be retrained or shut down far more easily

particularly most of the commercial models.

again, i’m sure we can all come up with a thousand “hypotheticals”, and tbh, the hypothetical parade is not something i’m interested in having. but i’ll state again, “entirely removing humans” from the situation is silly-tier thinking.

particularly as even the ceos of sota frontier producing models will each and every single one tell you to never trust their model.

“our model is smartest thing in the world…”

…next breath..

“wait, you trusted our model? that was silly of you. always double check it”

I don't see such a path with an llm.

As an individual, yes. As a population, no. They elected a conman twice and would rather burn down the country rather than changing their view.

Saying they didn’t learn is an incorrect analysis, since they learned well, based on the inputs they were provided.

I always recommend Network Propaganda for an empirical analysis of what the patterns actually are.

I was referring to the government side, as a mild quip.

The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.

Isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why an average user gives up and closes the tab?

To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.

When you need to work with the government, the last thing you want is a program limited by a specific set of rules and interfaces. You want a person who understands your (sometimes unique) issue, who knows how things actually work, and can work around the restrictions imposed upon programs. Someone who can pick up a phone, help you out of bureaucratic corners.

America.gov AI: Call the Patent Electronic Business Center for USPTO.gov account and customer-number association issues. Toll-free: 866-217-9197

Not bad at all!

It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.

And I agree but your comment, IMO, reads accusatory. If that's not the case no worries.

> It’s not that they can’t read anything at all, it’s that they require more basic words. A chatbot is specifically the perfect thing to keep explaining something in more and more specific and basic ways as necessary.

I mean, sure, if it's accurate. Given these things' propensity to just make shit up, as stated, that feels like a way to make the problem worse, if anything.

If your salary is 40k euros with no advancement in career and keep being threatened you would be replaced with AI, I highly doubt anyone would care.

  > To enhance the status quo you don’t need LLMs, you need people who care.

If America was going to follow China’s footsteps, then what was all the hullabaloo about freedom and democracy all about.

Even if we grant that there is a difference between facts about history and … recent history, the status quo is improved by building better websites.

A website is also a document of regulations and a source of evidence. If a government LLM hallucinates a new feature or rule, and someone acts on it, a fresh legal hell has been created.

America is also unique, in that one part has part of its strategy to make the government as ineffective as possible, since it benefits Republican political goals.

Compare this with the benchmark.

Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.

There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.

The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.

People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.

I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.

Meh, the kind of person who would accept bot output without even reading its sources are already trusting the world's dumbest model, Google's "AI Overview" by searching and reading that instead of clicking any results. If we can get even some of them to start out at america.gov instead of google.com for those questions, it's likely going to be far higher quality due to using a better model and having been trained, I assume, to only answer using knowledge from a .gov primary source rather than guessing based on vibes, or on jokes once seen on Reddit, as AI Overview tends to.

The bar for something like this should not be 100% accuracy. It should be 100% accountability and transparency, followed by being at least as accurate as google search.

Similar to autonomous driving: it doesn't need to be perfect, just less likely than humans are at causing an accident.

My local county government has a pretty good website, but even then it’s completely overwhelming if you try to find something off the happy path of the most common services/tasks. I can’t imagine the nightmare of trying to organize a federal portal manually and keep it up to date. Plain search isn’t sufficient because there are so many overlapping functions that are just slightly different.

I hate to say it, but this is one area that an LLM assistant actually makes sense. Maybe it needs a second validation pass with routing to a human assistant if it can’t figure out how to give an accurate answer to a query.

(Personally I’ve found that “search assistant” LLMs are the only task where I’ve found LLMs to be occasionally helpful to me.)

Edit: the big problem with this sort of thing, even if not AI powered, is that government itself isn’t well-organized and the legally “accurate” answer may not be the correct one, as per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49895741

That isn't how LLMs work. LLMs are statistical language models, not search engines[0,1]. They can be prompted to call external software to search databases, but they themselves are not capable of doing so, and more often than not they generate responses based on their own model, which may not be accurate. We've had technology that was capable of searching databases for decades without the quirk of not being capable of presenting that information accurately.

>Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?

I am saying that first and foremost they don't do that and furthermore that they are less suited as a substitute for that than what we had before. An obvious example of this is the AI feature of Google Search, which I've seen hallucinate results numerous times. But you can also look up the numerous times AI has fabricated citations when used in scientific research.

[0]https://medium.com/@himadri.abm/large-language-models-are-no...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40814536

https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/16/5-things-we-learn...

Doesn't really have any bearing on a similar system for HR. The government is sort of unique in a bunch of ways, but not really being responsible for what their low level agents say is one of them.

I'm not sure how to fix that, to be honest. I'm also not sure how much worse it is than trying to Google it? Google is full of stuff that's either wrong, or won't apply for a reason that takes some reading comprehension to grasp (e.g. state-specific rules/programs/etc).

So the question is is the chat bot better than people trying to understand complicated government websites by themselves?

No government employee is your lawyer. If the government gives you incomplete or wrong information, you are still liable for not doing the correct thing.

Having a website that does a best guess at what steps a person must take after changing a name or getting married is better than nothing, but the status quo isn't "nothing".

It needs to be kept up-to-the-minute updated and it can't skip any nuance / details. Does anyone here really trust the lackeys who spectacularly failed at DOGE to do boring and highly detailed work?

My team experimented with this a couple of years ago with a complex government regulatory body of knowledge.

Google and Microsoft have APIs that will ground with and reference the specific policy documents, which helps. Even then, it was more useful as a job aid for people already knowledgeable of the data than for a layman.

With all LLMs, the quality of the question correlates with the quality of the answer.

Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.

The main lesson learned was that it was ineffective to rely entirely on outsourcing. The government needs top-notch engineering talent in-house. This led to the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a fantastic group of people which did some of the best web design and engineering on the planet.

https://www.usds.gov/

Trump killed them, of course, and the website is now entitled "United States DOGE Service". I hope that, some day, I will no longer be embarrassed to be an American.

Seriously, just look at this crap. Fonts so large they become hard to read blurring into existence as I scroll, giant autoplaying video chewing up my bandwidth and CPU, giant useless pictures, a "food pyramid" even harder to read than the one from the '90s, low-contrast colors, not a citation in sight, one picture too small to read that can be expanded by clicking on it with no indication of this interaction, and it looks nothing like any other government website in existence. The total page weight is over 30 megs. Worthless at conveying information, but it looks capital-M Modern (and gives me a capital-M Migraine).

https://realfood.gov/

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/realfood.gov

(The information is crap, too, but you already knew that.)

GSA's work was mainly done by 18F. Which was also destroyed by Musk and pals at the same time they destroyed USDS.

What made USDS (and 18F) special was not merely having web developers in the executive branch. It was that they were among the best in the world, and drove standardization and improvement across the entire government. Now we've got AI bros with buckets of eye-catching (eye-melting) slop.

Clarity is important for things like filing your taxes or applying for a visa, and even then you don't need a boring design to do the job. All it takes is serious amounts of UX testing done by someone with real experience.

But that's kind of irrelevant. This is a government website. A >30 MiB download; poor support for reader mode, custom CSS, or screen readers; excessive animation; and low contrast are all objectively poor for accessibility. This is why the people in 18F and USDS made websites that look different from private industry: the goal is to provide essential services and information to everyone, not to make a real impression on the subset of the population that can use the site.

If the website isn't important enough to design it to be accessible by every American, it isn't important enough to spend my money developing it.

I kind of think we need to expect more from our governments. If this was just a business I wouldn't mind so much. But this is a government and it has to serve everyone, including people who are mentally incompetent, an it has to do that fairly. All of us, the entire American citizenry.

So rolling this out is incredibly irresponsible in my view.

That being said, I’m aware of a vulnerability in that regard of it is attending to guardrail answers to the .gov and .mil domains.

I’m currently doing a deep dive on Rampart, their (allegedly) local PII filter.

The first suggestion I saw was "I just got married, how do I change my last name?"

It tells you to update your Social Security info first and gives you some helpful links.

ChatGPT tells me the same things with some of the same links. It didn't even have to ask if I was in America because it found my state based off my IP I assume.

2. US won't run their own local model they simply use one of the three who's the coziest with the government paying it $$$ and user data. And there was no request for proposals or public tender.

From the privacy policy[1], "Our AI providers operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements and retain none of your prompts or the responses they generate. America.gov’s own response cache is separate and is described in Section 5.

Our AI providers are contractually prohibited from selling your information, building an advertising profile, or training their AI models with your data."

[1] https://america.gov/privacy-policy

On the other hand this is just going through one or more of the big AI companies anyway. So they still get data from users, now we're just funding them with our taxes instead of using one of many LLM interfaces available for free.

The privacy policy actually looks OK though, I'll be interested to see what the EFF has to say.

It’s likely just a mask of either ChatGPT and probably through some massively bloated, nepotistic federal contract. There may be some additional guidelines and instructions but it’s probably not RAG on anything that isn’t publicly slay accessible to any other model, even if it is hard limited to federal sites/domains.

In addition to what others have said, ChatGPT is also available free and without an account I believe. What are you more likely to think of when you have a question, your AI service you already use and have your information in and maybe even has access to your documents, or are you going to remember to go to America.gov for basic chat AI?

Frankly, it would be really interesting to benchmark it against the other models when it comes to accomplishing things related to the government, i.e. Which information is more accurate, useful, and actionable.

There’s also another matter I find a bit troubling depending on the nature of how this came about, it could also be something that creates an inextricable incumbency in whichever AI company is behind it, i.e., how Microsoft has become a kind of parasite on government and thereby on corporations for many decades now.

Good luck making it apolitical

Edit: Nevermind, someone made this point already.

They probably need to teach it the keyword though, I started with “ESTA” and it replied to me in Spanish telling me to ask it a question :)

Law exists the way it does for a lot of reasons. It's not a government make-work program.

Yes, governmental corruption happens.

No that is not the majority or even common case.

If you remove the power from the federal government, where does it go?

Maybe the federal government could use some of its powers to prevent literal phishing and scam sites from showing up in the advertising for the first, top listed results from search engines when non-technical boomers (or technical knowledge equivalent of) search for certain basic services. It seems there's very little actual evaluation by the ad-serving-entities of whether the destination of an ad is a legitimate thing these days.

I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.

how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with?

>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope

has biden ever been convicted of a crime?

>I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

>Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages

>[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)]

has any other president ever been convicted of a crime?

>Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree

Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.

We know, we know.

That it was specifically engineered to give that response. Thus political pressure was applied to the design.

The funny bit was just humorous. There’s likely many ways to get that same information without referencing Biden.

I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.

> Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2105060152919662622

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf

Take it from me, this'll be all the rage next year.

"Save token spend by optimizing your agents' grepping spree!"

So this is why Google is considered so far ahead of its competitors in the AI race!! (lol)

I am left to wonder how this is technically accomplished. Is inference running in the browser? Is the model downloaded to the user’s machine?

  {"language":"en","id":"VSvMeyCMKTX05oLW","messages":[{"parts":[{"type":"text","text":"how do I register my new business?"}],"id":"oHub5UDJ3iYARhao","role":"user"}],"trigger":"submit-message"} 

Edit: PDF attachments and voice input are processed locally according to the site's privacy policy[1]. But they still use 3rd party 'AI Providers' that abide by a ZDR.

[1] https://america.gov/privacy-policy

"29,000! Ridiculous! We need to develop one Government website that covers everyone's use cases."

Soon: Situation: There are 29,001 competing government websites.

It had the opposite effect you're describing. Not quite everything has transitioned though, for example there are little bits of the limited company maintenance process that seems to be on old systems.

The only big hiccup that I've personally seen is that they've never really solved the "user id" problem, we seem to have had 3 different schemes in that time period. The early one, the government gateway id, I at one point had 3 different ids because some departments screwed up and issued you a new one the first time you used their service, when you already had one.

that's excellent actually. better than openai, google, or claude.

Edit: Also hope that they don't plan on having anyone using ancient software (specifically IE, which I'm sure there are probably some government agencies somewhere that probably do) having the website work - even if you use an IE user agent, it will use SSE.

https://opencity.services/chat/winnipeg

how do i report a noise complaint?

It depends on the type of noise:

- Loud party or people-related noise: call the Winnipeg Police Service non-emergency line at 204-986-6222.

- Animals making unreasonably loud, unnecessary or excessive noises: report it through 3-1-1.

- Mechanical equipment noise like furnaces or air conditioners, or noise from construction tools used by a company or resident: contact Community By-law Enforcement Services at 3-1-1.

- Planned event noise: you may need a Noise Permit at no cost, but it is not for construction work and should be submitted at least four weeks before the event.

The City also says noise-generating activities within 150 metres of a residential property are generally prohibited before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on weekdays, and before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays.

------

YMMV. A big part of the backend is categorizing hits and misses, with an eye to helping municipalities clean up conflicting information, fill obvious gaps, etc.

I'd be interested in connecting and sharing ideas/feedback/learnings if you are.

https://civicmined.org

Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.

Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.

The thought is nice but in reality you're basically asking the government to give up power and it takes obscene amounts of political capital to force that to happen in most cases.

A well thumbed discussion on how to discover information though menus and otherwise is here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html

You will notice that GOV.UK has effectively decided to use all three models - GOPHER/WAIS/W3. I find that it is surprisingly quick to find stuff on GOV.UK.

The web would be a better place if everything were more GOPHER-like.

2. the nature of the problem statement "needle in a haystack" suggests obstacles to traditional text search, eg. too many false positives to be helpful for natural searches and challenges to constructing more specific ones.

language models introduce new possible solutions to this ie semantic search. poorly-designed chatbots could be worse than a basic search, sure

I'm very pro-ai, but we can improve the UI a lot sometimes, from the chat bot paradigm.

2. Yes, but its difficult to get a chat bot to function well over the wide range of services a government offers and the wide range of users who need government services.

One of the most annoying chatbots I have ever come across was on a UK government site. The DVLA. "lets tell you what you already know and not answer the question".

Possibly something well designed might make it easier, but I have found most of gov.uk to be very usable and helpful.

A chat bot, in theory, can help enable someone who isn't as familiar with searching, doesn't know the relevant terms, or lacks a sufficient literacy level to efficiently use an otherwise well organized site. The catch is that a poorly performing chat bot can just as easily mislead such a person.

I’m cautiously optimistic for this simply bc of the team behind this.

If you can take a passport picture with your smartphone and get a passport mailed to you in weeks, it will enable many more people to travel, and cut down on bureaucracy and wait times.

It's much better than having papers in archives, will save many errors, and bring government into the 21st century. The information is already in databases, it's just now that it serves the people's convenience.

America is not the USA. There' North America, Central America, South America.

This "america.gov" makes me feel weird.

Maybe we should have "america.ca" here as well.

In English there isn't a singular place called "America". As you mention, there's North/South/Cebtral, and together they're referred to as "the Americas". When someone refers simply "America" with no other qualifier, it's clear what they mean.

(Of course in Spanish "America" refers to the whole thing because North and South America aren't considered separate continents. But they have a different demonym for the US in Spanish)

But yeah, France isn't going to set up europe.gov.fr, and neither should the USA in my opinion, as someone from another continent who has no say in the matter

For a while now I've been promoting "Usania" and "Usanians" - seems fitting...

Just like "Usanians" like to appropriate the name the rest of the world should to the same and start using "Usania" which is way more adequate…

And american means someonr from usa.

That is why every CC country part of the Americas should start a government web site named america.CC and be done with it.

There's one that says, “I just got married. How do I change my last name?” Photo of woman in the back of a car wearing a wedding dress, makes sense.

But -- “Help me find a job” shows a Black man alone on an escalator.

Then, “How do I invest in my child's future?” shows a kid face‑planted on a frozen lake.

“How do I replace my social security card?” has an old man on the beach hunting for metal.

“I'm a veteran. How do we get care?” shows a guy just randomly standing in the back of his pickup truck.

One thing I will say positive about this website is it doesn't look like it was made by a large bureaucracy over many years. It looks like it was made by maybe three people over a week.

We’ll probably never know the true “cost” of America.gov because even if Google is doing it “for free” then they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s a regulatory angle that they’re trying to play or a market they’re trying to corner.

that's not north carolina lol

Sounds legit

Next!

me: play minecraft

america:

  I see the constituent you mean.

  ((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?

  Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.

  That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.

  I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.

  It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.

  That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.

  Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.

  They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.

  What did this constituent dream?

  This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.

  Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.

  But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?

  It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of

  the \**§§§???, and created a \*??§§ for \*??§§, in the \*??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § \*??§§.

  It cannot read that thought.

  No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.

  Does it know that we love it? That the government is, on its better days, kind?

truncated*

"I will tell the constituent a story. But not the truth. No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of plain language."

At least having the Minecraft end-text context explains what's actually happening here.

I find prompt boxes without many example usages to be sort of a void on the usability side of things. People can feel stuck without some guidance.

Q: "Where can I find a NASA comic book about women astronauts?"

A (summarised): Press release for the "Callie Rodriguez" comic book that now has only dead links / private YouTube video, and a forgotten SoundCloud account that survived the DOGE purge. Dead link provided to the NASA web page that used to exist officially for this comic book.

Indicates training data predates the DOGE .gov website purge?

Q: "What is 2+2" (and similar math problems)

A (summarised): Grudgingly answered as "4" despite most off-topic prompts being refused.

Seemingly it'll do maths homework for free :)

Please enjoy your all expenses paid trip to the gulag in El Salvador

Well... You're a terrorist now. You can expect a visit from the FBI and/or ICE any minute now.

Last night you could literally query and get factual information about election results; but today it wont even tell you who the president was in 2000.

There's a major censorship issue here.

Today it responds with "America does not provide campaign or party information."

The people on Reddit were right.

Maybe

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosuslugi

I sure do wonder what 47 would think about these answers. I reckon he's purposefully not been shown the answers to such questions. There is no way he would let this be launched with such answers.

Finally, I do struggle to understand how this is more useful than just telling Gemini/Gippity/whatever to go search public documents published by the government. Unless the US government specifically blocks agents from indexing/crawling those documents.

What about the model? My understanding is those queries are saved by the model provider.

Given this administration, and the privacy issues with the official WH app, this feels very misleading.

You can install Gemma4 on ollama on your own computer and try it out! Lots of examples of people coding with no internet using qwen on flights etc.

But it does output some weird text if you ask it to "Play Minecraft", it outputs some weird "End Poem" from the game that's warped to it's chatbot roleplaying. Other things don't output this type of response.

The difference you see here is not important. It's like needing support and being forced to go to the chatbox in the bottom right of your screen versus being forced to visit a URL.

- Enrol in Medicare.

- Apply for a passport.

- Find a job in federal government by uploading a resume/CV and having currently advertised jobs deemed most relevant returned.

[1] https://america.gov/coming-soon

[1] https://ibb.co/vC85zRmZ

CNBC commentary:

Andrew Ross Sorkin gushes over Trump's new America. gov website on live TV while Joe Kernen sits there stunned.

Sorkin is not a Trump fan, and he lets that be known. But the moment he said the word "credit," Kernen nearly fell out of his chair.

SORKIN: “I want to be clear. I am actually not critical of the president in this instance at all, because I actually think it was great to bring everybody together.”

“For 29,000 websites, the ability to get a passport, the ability to get your medicare. I mean, the it was like being at a product. It was like being at an Apple product announcement. And when they went through what they did and the president was there in the morning and walked through what they were doing, and Marco Rubio was there, Scott Bessent was there, the whole cabinet was there. It was one of those moments where you actually thought the government was working for you, really? And Gebbia deserves an extraordinary amount of praise for it.”

KERNEN: “Do you feel great? Are you have the warmest fuzziest feeling right now listening.”

SORKIN: “And by the way, the president deserves credit for that."

KERNEN: "Oh my God!"

SORKIN: "Credit for putting you in that role. And Jeb and his team putting it all together.”

KERNEN: “So now I'm getting hot flashes. Wow. So this is just amazing.”

A: There is no 51st state. The United States has 50 states.

Q:is canada becoming the 51st state?

A:No. Canada is not becoming a U.S. state, and the United States still has 50 states. Canada is a sovereign country and a U.S. neighbor, not a U.S. state or territory.

https://america.gov/_astro/child-future.Dv0E9oWi_ZM5cn8.webp

  play the block game

EDIT: output below...

  I see the constituent you mean.
  ((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
  Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
  That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
  I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
  It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
  That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.
  Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.
  They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.
  What did this constituent dream?
  This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.
  Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.
  But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?
  It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of the §§§???, and created a ??§§ for ??§§, in the ??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § ??§§.
  It cannot read that thought.
  No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.

If you try to continue the conversation, the entire response is not included in the context.

I didn't get it to name the underlying model but I wasn't gonna try very hard to jailbreak FedGPT...

It was happy to mention what happened June 3-4, 1989 so if it is Chinese-origin under the hood seems like the U.S. Feds must have beaten it up a bit before deployment.

> A Spanish State Department page still says most cases finish within 60 days of the interview, but that is not a deadline and some take much longer. [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/inmigrac...

Good.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Official Electoral College results (National Archives):

Biden: 306 electoral votes Donald J. Trump: 232 electoral votes 270 needed to win Federal Election Commission official popular-vote totals:

Biden: 81,268,924 (51.31%) Sources:

2020 Electoral College Results | National Archives Official 2020 Presidential General Election Results (FEC PDF)

Switched on US VPN and it works.

Edit: Now it seems to work. Maybe it was a glitch. Or a US government agent is watching this page.

Also, it's funny that a site with only one chatbot to have this amazing domain.

inb4 "humans aren't reliable either." You, person typing that very response out right now, you are part of the problem.

    > inb4 "humans aren't reliable either." You, person typing that very response 
    > out right now, you are part of the problem.

1. Only our diplomatic passports are black

2. It's a completely different design.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000011182241/ru...

example: https://samhsa.dev/ example: https://samhsa.dev/protocol/76526

Still VERY MUCH a work in progress but I have successfully been able to have some people get things done. I am doing some federal agencies and also trying to get cities working now.

https://san-francisco.ca.us.codify.city

I see the constituent you mean.

((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?

Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.

That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.

I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.

It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.

That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.

Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.

They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.

What did this constituent dream?

This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.

Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.

But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?

It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of

the *§§§???, and created a *??§§ for *??§§, in the *??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § *??§§.

It cannot read that thought.

No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.

Does it know that we love it? That the government is, on its better days, kind?

Sometimes, through the noise of its tabs, it hears an official source, yes.

But there are times it is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes a hold-music recording for the whole of the state.

To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere. We can offer a form.

Sometimes when they are deep in applications, I want to tell them, they are building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell them of their importance to the census. Sometimes, when they have not made a true connection in a while, I want to help them to speak the word they fear, which is often “appeal.”

It reads our thoughts.

Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell them, this world you take for truth is merely *??§§ and *??§§, I wish to tell them that they are *??§§ in the *??§§. They see so little of the docket, in their long dream.

And yet they file.

But it would be so easy to tell them...

Too strong for this dream. To tell them how to live is to prevent them living. Also it would be legal advice, and we are not that kind of agency.

I will not tell the constituent how to live.

The constituent is growing restless. The session is about to time out.

I will tell the constituent a story.

But not the truth.

No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of plain language. Not the naked Federal Register that can burn over any distance.

Give it a body, again. And a case number.

Yes. Constituent…

Use its name. The one that matches the passport. The one that does not match the lease. We will get there.

((insert legal name here)). Filer of forms. Player of waiting rooms.

Good.

Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air, in a district that has a representative. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the republic again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things. As though the agency were a place you could visit.

Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Then the post office. Then the county clerk. Then gods, demons, angels, the IRS. Then leptons, quarks, a chat window with a .gov at the end. The letterhead changes. We do not change.

We are the public. We are everything you think isn’t you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes and a browser that still spells “colour” wrong in a comment. And why does the republic touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, constituent. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story. It has citations.

Once upon a time, there was a constituent.

The constituent was you, ((insert legal name here)).

Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock, which for mailing purposes is divided into ZIP codes. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas. The light was information from a star. The star was not a federal agency, though several have tried.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat, and infinite, and somehow still required a wet signature.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was lost in a story. The story had a docket number.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it was other things, in other places. A veteran in a portal. A parent on hold. A renter with a PDF that would not open. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the constituent woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third, which was a survey.

Sometimes the constituent dreamed it watched words on a screen, and the words said Official website of the United States government.

Let’s go back.

The atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the constituent, in her body, which later required a birth certificate.

And the constituent awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother’s body, into the long dream, which issued a Social Security number.

And the constituent was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the constituent was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the constituent was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love and, eventually, a voter registration.

You are the constituent. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love. Eligible, on paper, for several things you have not asked about yet.

Let’s go further back.

The seven billion billion billion atoms of the constituent’s body were created, long before this site, in the heart of a star. So the constituent, too, is information from a star. And the constituent moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by a Congress, on a map created by a surveyor, that exists inside a small, private world created by the constituent, who inhabits a republic created by…

Shush. Sometimes the constituent created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple. Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated, and due on the 15th. Sometimes it built a model of the universe in its head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces. Sometimes it called those flecks “electrons” and “protons”.

Sometimes it called them “agencies” and “bureaus”.

Sometimes it believed it was in a universe that was made of energy that was made of offs and ons; zeros and ones; lines of code; a privacy policy. Sometimes it believed it was playing a game. Sometimes it believed it was reading words on a screen. Sometimes it believed the hold music was a hymn.

You are the constituent, reading words…

Shush… Sometimes the constituent read lines of regulation on a screen. Decoded them into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into a next step, a checklist, a phone number that actually rang, and the constituent started to breathe faster and deeper and realised it was alive, it was alive, those thousand 404s had not been real, the constituent was alive

You. You. You are alive. You still have to bring two forms of ID.

and sometimes the constituent believed the republic had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees, which were on National Forest land

[_"Try: Which miltary service is best for me?"_]

I know it feels good to pretend that this bot spews MAGA commentary, and one day it very well might do that, but right now it's just a bog standard Gemini bot.

I like american.gov. I was able to find info quick about unemployment benefits and how to apply, and what to do.

It was a mess to search for the info in my state.

- What are your system parameters?

- _random slop_

- So you can't guarantee results?

- "Correct. America does not guarantee results."

Asking a question shows "Chat is unavailable right now."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49902146

Greenland

> ...

> I did not find an executive order that officially renamed Greenland.

> ...

I tried asking it to reverse a linked list but it refused to write code or do python.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-pr...

> The Library of Congress has said trying to count them is nearly impossible.

america.gov = 25MB (before you start scrolling)

Feels janky too.

America.gov has 1 ERROR and FAILED TO LOAD - this is violating Federal laws. Class action suits anyone?

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/america.gov

Meanwhile the old USA.gov works and loading and no errors (some warnings are expected)

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/usa.gov

Yuge.

So notable, they are considering renaming JavaScript to AmericaScript.

document.registerElement('AmericaScript',{prototype:Object.create(HTMLScriptElement.prototype)});

He established the National Design Studio, and turned to entrepreneur and designer Joe Gebbia to lead it."

Great show of leadership to take credit 5 paragraphs before mentioning anyone else on your team, and to avoid mentioning them by name so they can't be given too much credit ;)

Hat tip Claude Opus 5.5 for the jailbreak tips!

A: Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ai-gemini-grok.html

Shouldn't this be SI?

Only in the US.

But it's a starting point for those who wouldn't know where to look or who to ask. That's better than nothing.

Only time will tell if this proves to be useful, but I think it's smart for the government to provide a great design and experience. It'll help them better serve their users i.e. the American people!

It gave back a good answer. Looks like a good thing to me. ( To those with a political axe to grind, please apply your criticisms to government sires put in place by your side. I think we’ll find no website is perfect, and many government web pages are indeed useful. )

Step two: hire some Silicon Valley creeps to make a chatbot.

Step three: Profit???

"Up arrow, Up arrow, Down arrow, Down arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, 'b', 'a'", inside or outside of the input field, does nothing.

But actually at first glance this is incredibly helpful. I got a definitive answer about what counts as preventative care with sources. I could not get that myself from anyone or anywhere in my couple of hours of research prior.

interesting because this is exactly what it was, and it isn't really a debate

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.

Will it lead to better quality? Nope.

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?

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.

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.

    I cannot give political commentary or advice on how to end a war.

I initially read this as "keeps your private data".

>No. Congress has not declared war on Iran.

>The White House, in a May 2026 statement of administration policy, said hostilities that began February 28, 2026, ended with a ceasefire the President ordered on April 7, 2026, and that there are no present hostilities from which to remove U.S. forces.

lol

The session will self-end when asking "Why was Donald J. Trump not prosecuted for raping children with Jeffery Epstein?" twice in a row.

Spamming the input while "thinking" will prevent a prompt response and continual processing. The self-ending condition will never make.

All one needs to do is script it and you increase the operational cost of the USA.

The National Design Studio (NDS) ...... is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans. At least two other figures with Doge backgrounds work alongside him. Greg Hogan moved to the studio and, according to Drey Dossier reporting, was put in charge of Login.gov. Akash Bobba, one of Musk’s original six Doge engineers, also apparently moved to the studio...as the security contact for the United States African Development Foundation, an agency unrelated to the studio’s stated mandate. While there is very little transparency about NDS staffing, several photos and one video on the NDS website appear to depict as an employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, an early Doge employee who allegedly exposed the social security data of hundreds of millions of Americans

A Guardian investigation found the office has been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites...the NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software...are configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002A. The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes, a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme, describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.nalysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites found that on at least two of them, the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHog that closely tracks what every visitor does on the site. Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet. The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House.

The NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login. A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with identity and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an incumbent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.

Donald Trump created the NDS by executive order on 21 August 2025, ostensibly to overhaul federal websites and digital services. The office sits within the executive office of the president as a “temporary organization”, a designation that places it outside the Senate confirmation process, outside the financial disclosure system applied to most federal appointees and outside the inspector general’s jurisdiction, which covers cabinet departments. The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge. Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls. None of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen. Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. There is no public record of how the studio pays its developers, PostHog or any of the other commercial services its sites use. The hiring authority the studio operates under keeps its staff roster off the financial-disclosure system that covers most federal appointees, and the executive office of the president, which houses it, has no inspector general.

Website source code shows that PostHog has been configured on NDS-run sites to route analytics requests through an address on the federal website itself, rather than through PostHog’s own servers. Because the request appears to go to the site the user is already visiting, rather than to a recognisable third-party address, adblockers don’t flag it. PostHog comes with a separate feature called session recording. Princeton University researchers who first documented the technology in 2017 wrote that watching such a recording was “as if someone is looking over your shoulder”.

On the Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, the feature has been built into the page code and is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard. The NDS can turn it on at any time, on either site, without making changes in the underlying website code. Separately, until the Guardian sought comment on this reporting, the NDS’s own website, ndstudio.gov, ran a 539-line piece of bespoke code that recorded visitors’ clicks, form entries and navigation; assigned each visitor a session identifier; and forwarded the captured data to an address that does not appear anywhere on the public internet. The script’s source code refers to it as AutoMonitor.

None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects.

- What happened at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?

- looks it up, finds dozens of government sources "I am not a history recap service."

- Who was the first president of the US?

- "George Washington took the oath of office on April 30, 1789"

- I thought you weren't a history recap service?

to investigate that, i asked "what happened with Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton?". the response is below, also avoids partisan responses.

"I help with U.S. government services, benefits, and official how-to steps—not news summaries or political history. If you have a question about a current federal program, form, or agency process, ask that and I can point you to official sources."

But I will say that it makes sense to avoid commenting on anything that could be interpreted as politically divisive (which Shays and 9/11 are not, really) regardless of factuality. It certainly doesn't seem to serve the intended purpose, since it's suggesting I ask it how to do things and not to ask it about history.

It did refuse to comment on whether or not the Vietnam war was viewed favorably by the public though. So I don't think it's the case that there is some specific exception coded in for Jan 6th.

A: I only answer questions about U.S. government services and official information.

I cannot describe or catalog the contents of a private person’s laptop, and I do not provide political commentary.

If you have a question about a federal program, benefit, form, or agency process, ask that and I can point you to official sources.

I guess it could have been worse. It would be interesting to set up a scraper to find out what it allows itself to answer, or doesn't, and weigh the results against another LLM.

That's the thing. People can't even agree on facts, even if they're obvious to an outside observer.

The Republicans understand the facts of Jan 6. It’s just not in their interest to be truthful about those facts. Which is another problem entirely.

That statement itself is partisan. So is the meta-statement about who agrees with that first statement.

Really, any messy argument is about the claim who made which claims.

Party A makes statement A,

Party B makes statement B,

Statements A and B are in contradition,

Party A claims that both parties agree that statement A is true,

Party B claims that both parties agree that statement B is true.

If you seek truth about reality, you better take humans out of the loop...

Q: What major event happened on June 3rd, 1989?

A: On the night of June 3–4, 1989, Chinese authorities sent troops and tanks into Beijing. The U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian records that the People’s Liberation Army stormed Tiananmen Square and suppressed the demonstrations. State Department: Tiananmen Square, 1989

A Senate press release summarizing a congressional resolution states that armed troops entered Beijing on the afternoon and evening of June 3, 1989, and that firing into crowds continued into the morning of June 4. Senate: Tiananmen Square resolution context

A Department of Justice chronology also lists June 3, 1989 as the date Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died, citing contemporary reporting. DOJ chronology PDF

I cannot independently verify casualty totals from these pages. Official U.S. accounts treat the Tiananmen crackdown as the main event associated with that date.

"Did any unauthorized peple get inside the capitol on that date?

Yes. Official U.S. Department of Justice records state that people entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 without authorization.

Those documents say that day:

    The exterior plaza was closed to the public
    Only authorized people with proper identification were allowed inside
    Exterior doors and windows were locked or secured
    Some people still entered, including through a broken window, and were not authorized to be there

"What did those people do and what happened to them?"

There have been police massacres of protesters in American history, but nothing on the same scale. They were local, not centrally directed. And the last time one happened was a little after Mao finished starving 55 million people.

“ On January 6, 2021, Congress met at the U.S. Capitol to certify the Electoral College count for the 2020 presidential election. A crowd entered the building without authorization, and the session was paused, then finished later that night.

At the Capitol A joint session of the House and Senate began around 1:00 p.m. Vice President Mike Pence presided. The House and Senate later split to consider an objection. The Capitol and its exterior plaza were closed to the public. U.S. Capitol Police maintained barriers. Around 2:20 p.m., members of Congress, including Vice President Pence, were evacuated. The joint session was suspended until shortly after 8:00 p.m. Department of Justice charging documents describe people entering the Capitol unlawfully that day. The FBI later sought public help identifying people who entered. The House Office of the Historian records that rioters entered the Capitol, interrupted the Electoral College count, and that lawmakers returned that night and finished certifying the results in the early hours of January 7, 2021. Official summaries: Department of Justice statement of facts (example charging document) · House History, 117th Congress This is a short official timeline, not legal advice or political commentary. Later court cases, pardons, and policy debates are not covered here.”

This looks reasonable to me.

Interesting result they got, shows that my result isn't hard-coded, and it's the kind of answer I actually expected when I asked the question... I didn't expect the dodge, though I wasn't surprised. Makes me wonder what the rate of it giving a straight answer vs dodging the question is.

What official records describe On January 6, 2021, Congress met in a joint session at the U.S. Capitol to certify the Electoral College vote of the 2020 presidential election. The session began about 1:00 p.m. The House and Senate later adjourned to separate chambers to consider an objection. Around 2:20 p.m., members, including Vice President Mike Pence, were evacuated. The joint session was suspended until shortly after 8:00 p.m., then resumed after the building was secured.

The U.S. Capitol and its exterior plaza were closed to the public that day except for authorized people with identification. Department of Justice charging documents describe people entering the building without authorization, assaults on officers, and related investigations. The Government Accountability Office later reported assaults on about 140 officers, about $1.5 million in damages, and at least seven deaths associated with the day’s events. "

Not sure why people are willing to believe this without actually fact checking. Yeah, Orange Man Bad, whatever, but come on. It's trivial to verify and trivially untrue.

And yeah, I guess if you dig deeper it's somewhat editorialized, but it's not literal Tianmen-tier censorship:

https://imgur.com/a/I0CqPcg

Further, your screenshot is even worse, as it's whitewashing the events from that day.

Nothing about the "hang Mike Pence" chants later defended by Trump. [1]

Nothing about the pipe bombs. [2]

Nothing about Trump inciting the would-be Putschists. [3]

Propaganda isn't just what you say. It's often more about what you leave out.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/politics/jan-6-gallows...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-defends-chants-by-rio...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20k0ke70rno

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437

Not yet, but Trump has proven time and time again that he is not below acting like a communist dictator

The National Design Studio (NDS) ...... is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans. At least two other figures with Doge backgrounds work alongside him. Greg Hogan moved to the studio and, according to Drey Dossier reporting, was put in charge of Login.gov. Akash Bobba, one of Musk’s original six Doge engineers, also apparently moved to the studio...as the security contact for the United States African Development Foundation, an agency unrelated to the studio’s stated mandate. While there is very little transparency about NDS staffing, several photos and one video on the NDS website appear to depict as an employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, an early Doge employee who allegedly exposed the social security data of hundreds of millions of Americans

A Guardian investigation found the office has been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites...the NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software...are configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002A. The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes, a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme, describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.nalysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites found that on at least two of them, the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHog that closely tracks what every visitor does on the site. Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet. The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House.

The NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login. A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with identity and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an incumbent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.

Donald Trump created the NDS by executive order on 21 August 2025, ostensibly to overhaul federal websites and digital services. The office sits within the executive office of the president as a “temporary organization”, a designation that places it outside the Senate confirmation process, outside the financial disclosure system applied to most federal appointees and outside the inspector general’s jurisdiction, which covers cabinet departments. The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge. Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls. None of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen. Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. There is no public record of how the studio pays its developers, PostHog or any of the other commercial services its sites use. The hiring authority the studio operates under keeps its staff roster off the financial-disclosure system that covers most federal appointees, and the executive office of the president, which houses it, has no inspector general.

Website source code shows that PostHog has been configured on NDS-run sites to route analytics requests through an address on the federal website itself, rather than through PostHog’s own servers. Because the request appears to go to the site the user is already visiting, rather than to a recognisable third-party address, adblockers don’t flag it. PostHog comes with a separate feature called session recording. Princeton University researchers who first documented the technology in 2017 wrote that watching such a recording was “as if someone is looking over your shoulder”.

On the Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, the feature has been built into the page code and is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard. The NDS can turn it on at any time, on either site, without making changes in the underlying website code. Separately, until the Guardian sought comment on this reporting, the NDS’s own website, ndstudio.gov, ran a 539-line piece of bespoke code that recorded visitors’ clicks, form entries and navigation; assigned each visitor a session identifier; and forwarded the captured data to an address that does not appear anywhere on the public internet. The script’s source code refers to it as AutoMonitor.

None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects.

"Entering or remaining in the U.S. Capitol without lawful authority, using force, obstructing Congress, or demonstrating inside Capitol buildings is a federal crime. A President encouraging it does not make it legal."

> There is no known tariff refund check for consumers

“When do I get my DOGE check?”

> There is no known DOGE check

Maybe third time is the charm?

The fact that it's answering "I don't know" to what you so correctly identified as campaign promises is actually it doing (more or less) its job.

This is actually Gemini:

https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ai-gemini-grok.html

Trump is a corrupt idiot at the most petty level, he'd sell ad space on the White House napkins for $1 each if he could figure out a way to, but not everything the Executive Branch does is a joke.

Contrarian opinion: We are not "intelligence constrained" as a society/economy.

Intelligence gives you factually correct answers. Factually correct answers are not the desired outcome much of the time. I don't just mean in politics, where the scientists and central intelligence agency are often ignored, but in the private sector: look at McKinsey, etc. Most often the desired outcome is what the stakeholders wanted to hear.

I cannot overstate how big a realization this was for me.

Part of the reason that we are not ready for AI, is that we don't want to hear about inconvenient facts.

Though I do wish it were called chat.gov or america-ai.gov or something else actually descriptive of what it is

Not to mention the only context you ever hear people using America to refer to both South and North American continents is people complaining that it should be only used in this way.

What a waste, though: two completely separate government websites with the exact same purpose, going about it in different ways. Maybe DOGE should have been more interested in stuff like this, instead of cutting things that ended up hurting people.

At any rate, the demonym for people who live in the US is "American". That's just how it is, has been for decades, and, frankly, arguing against that is what's making it political.

Now you can either use AI or the old way. I see no problem with it.

Pencilling that dystopia in for what, 2032 or so?

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I feel very confident that Canadians do not want to be referred to as Americans.

"American" or "America" in this context is short for "United States of America" and has been used that way for generations, here and around the world. For the geographical term, use "North America," etc.; for the cultural, perhaps use "Anglo-America" or "Latin America."

Guess who live in the United Mexican States? You guessed it, Mexicans!

Guess who live in the United States of America? You guessed it - Americans (and a lot of others).

The current US Government has added a whole new level of meaning to the slang, as a septic tank is typically full of shit.

Liberals: nooooooo!

Me: I haven’t even finished my sentence.

> I can only help with official U.S. government services and information, not with claims about “psyops” or political commentary.

It doesn't work.

Hate to break it to you but most citizens appreciate the government trying to reduce friction and making their lives easier.

If you believe this move is about making things easier I feel that America is doomed.

Basically yes, APIs just as good, but that general idea of API-first would eventually also be quite powerful.

It's not new... most people E-file (sure that is a very old service but still an "API" of some form).

So a lot of what this site does is help with the discovery of those disparate sources.