This was the feeling!!! I couldn't put my finger on just how this entire thing felt to me, you've cleared the skies and allowed the light of recollection to meet my shores!
Well good luck to you guys in the US. This AI government will be extremely dangerous.
An all knowing advertisement algorithm reaching deep in government data with an unsafe LLM on top? Ouch.
This reminds me of an interview with a Ukrainian soldier, who said of the Russians “we are lucky they are so fucking stupid”. If only that translated into less air superiority by Russia, because that's where Ukraine struggles.
That’s actually why I’d say the GOP is the “lesser evil” compared to Dems, because they ultimately want the same thing but the Dems are competent enough to pull it off without people noticing.
For example, everyone’s rightly going after Trump’s deportation schemes, but very few of them realize Trump is still isn’t keeping up with Biden’s deportation numbers. So the Dems end up being better fascists by doing it quietly.
I don't remember when the Democrats deported my neighbor or when they called self-proclaimed Nazis good guys or when they wanted to take away food stamps from single mothers or when they wanted to make voting harder or when they didn't want to ban child marriage or when they wanted to take away the only source of food and housing for children, people with disabilities, and the elderly or when they wanted to ban vaccines or when they wanted to ban abortion or when they wanted to make being queer a child sex crime or when they ignored all of science, but I guess they were just too smart to do any of that.
...are they? They're just incompetent in different ways. Not sure competent is how I'd describe them, they are a mess: The last election is proof of that.
I'm really shocked by the confidence people have here with clearly zero knowledge.
".env_example" is literally just the example/template which is only updated if new "config" items are needed and it doesn't contain actual secrets.
Developers copy ".env"/prod and ".env_local" files, which are used for the specific environments. These are in .gitignore so that they're not accidentally pushed to .git.
For production the ".env" is generated during deployment from secrets in a locked up environment. (I mean they COULD fuck this up, but there's no evidence of this AFAIK)
The example postgres password is simply a "hello world" type password that is often used when running a local docker image of the DB so you can get a full dev environment running in a couple minutes, as mentioned in the readme.md:
https://github.com/gsa-tts-archived/ai-gov-api
It's not even a testing environment, it's a temporary local/dev DB just so you can test your code.
I am NOT defending this project, but holy shit this thread is full of misinformation and I had to correct this.
Postgres, SQLite, etc are tools for database management, things like user data, application data and so on are collected here.
Edit: the DB_PASS=“postgres” is the default password when setting up a Postgres database.
Take Reddit’s Karma system or Upvotes/Downvotes for example, they’re stored in a database and however Reddit wants to utilize that data Postgres makes it easy to call upon it.
I’m sure others can give more detailed responses, I’m typing this out in a rush.
The person you replied to doesn't know what they're talking about. It's just an example password used for running a local empty DB for development and has nothing to do with production or even test databases.
The stupid is intensifying. They both a) know they can’t run a government and b) are in a rush to make something that will do all the work so they can sit back and rake in the money. No, this is not about actually making the country better because objectively LLMs suck and were never intended for such tasks.
"all-in-one API" that will allow agencies to connect their systems to models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
This is a huge red flag to me.
It means:
They are ignorant of existing APIs and standards that are exactly this. Uh, MCP or OpenAI API? Which everyone already uses?
They have zero interesting in models they can host themselves, or from cheaper providers. Or, heaven forbit, finetune for their own work.
They have zero interest in actually useful tools. Like, say, SGLang's cached hosting and fast fill-in-the-blanks formatting which is perfect for say, processing government forms.
In other words, it's just full corporate AI Bro capture. And shitty.
One of the consequences is that it will be very bad, unfortunately.
What's sad is that this is a consequence not just of this admins shittiness but of a long enshittification of our government.
Not only do government jobs pay a mediocre salary until you get really really far in the org, a fact that only gets worse as the idea of a middle class lifestyle gets gutted, but for decades now, working a government job has become less and less prestigious. It used to be that there were always plenty of loonies who found pride in being a "public servant" and thought the best place to use their genius was in government.
Now, as we see, there's no one in these positions with even cursory knowledge of how these programs work.
And there's definitely no millennials or zoomers fresh out of tech school that would debase themselves to working in government who would be able see these flaws in two seconds.
Long term enshitification is a feature of our capitalistic way of thinking. i/e never thinking beyond the next financial quarter.
Edit - And that is why we will 100% lose to China. Central planning will always outperform market chaos. Literally 100% of the time. Better, faster, cheaper. They plan ahead. They look ahead decades. We look ahead only 1 quarter. Just 1. They'll make 5 year plans and be very public about it to attract VC money to the rugpull. But 1 bad quarter and the whole enterprise is parted out and sold off to the highest bidder.
Can't wait for some serbian hacker with Xx69 in their name multiple times to destroy the US government because one of Elon's script kiddies left 42,069 security holes in the fucking system.
Edit: this was meant to be a reply to a comment on here about how the Dems/Republicans are the same where dude threw in a bunch of links to "show" stuff that the links didn't actually show. So deserved down votes I suppose but will leave this here.
Not sure if they have a terrible memory, I think you just have poor reading comprehension. Just glancing through a few of the articles you sent trying to "gotcha" some poster(s) here shows you didn't even read them. If you did read them you did a bad job understanding the material.
Just for the deportation example: Biden's deportation and immigration enforcement was not the same as Trump's now. Biden was aggressively going after actual criminals and he was working to create a path to citizenship for folks that have been here illegally for years and put down roots and contributed to our economy. Now we're seeing ICE rounding up people for nothing more than their skin color and a "suspicion" they're not documented. So, just straight up racism.
You included an article where the Dems wanted to keep the green party off a ballot, ok ... And? They're not trying to keep people from voting or suppress the vote. They were trying their best to not have a spoiler candidate on the ballot and felt that aligned with the state's election laws.
Anyways, I wouldn't call the parties the same when you can just look at what policies and legislation passed under Democrats vs Republicans. Easy example - the affordable care act.