Yesterday, I was wondering what Elon Musk would do with 3 million emails describing what every federal worker did last week. We didn’t have to wait long, we now know what the plan was.
Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.
The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.
Nice. Big Brother AI is going to analyze your email to determine whether you should be fired or not.
Trump & Musk don’t care what you write. They’re looking for pretexts to dismantle the federal government.
I loved the response at HUD.
@Hemidactylus the NSFW response at HUD: https://youtu.be/NCf1hJQyg7M
We need to stop using casual terms like ‘wrecking things’ when it comes to Musk and DOGE.
The word we need to use is sabotage.
Can’t really decide if the Mumpsys are actually stupid enough to believe an email with five bullet points fed into a general LLM will actually lead to something even resembling a realistic conclusion or if they just want to fire lots of people and are just putting on a show for their followers.
Both would be very much in character!
I had a hard time limiting myself to 5 on Musk’s long term “accomplishments”. Copied from my reply to a Bluesky comment:
-Saying we live in a simulation
-Pedo guy comment
-Leaving kid on stairs in a hurry
-Nazi salute
-Angry boos at Dave Chappelle show
-Cybertruck
-Herr Pluggs
-Boring
-Jumping on neo-McCarthyism “woke mind virus” bandwagon
-Quiverful-like pronatalism
Xpost from yesterday bur on topic
Latest atrocity from Musk.
Patty Murray is the Washington Senator.
Trump and Musk are just deliberately breaking things as fast as they can without caring what harm they are doing to the USA.
The old tech saying, Move fast and break things.
They don’t have the slightest idea what those people do that they are firing.
They don’t care either.
They just fired a whole lot of Bonneville Power Adminstration employees.
To explain for people not in the Pacific Northwest.
The Bonneville Power Adminstration was set up by Roosevelt during the Depression. It adminsters the 31 dams on the Columbia river system and the Hanford nuclear reactor.
“OPB: Today, a third of all power consumed in the Pacific Northwest comes from BPA, which owns 75% of the region’s electrical transmission lines.
The BPA budget and those salaries don’t come out of the Federal budget.
BPA is a huge generator and seller of electricity.
They are self funded and make enough money to pay those salaries.
Wrecking the BPA will cut off the electricity to 3 million people in the PNW.
A whole lot of those are going to be…Trump voters.
Meanwhile Musk’s lapdog:
“We’re actually going to Ft Knox to see if the gold is there. Because maybe somebody stole the gold. Tons of gold.”
Yep, if we didn’t already know Musk was a complete idiot, he plans to use a “not actually AI” LLM, which numerous people have shown can be tricked into saying any damn thing you want it to, with the right prompting, to determine if government jobs, which he wants to get rid of, are necessary… Mind, there are two sides to this – he really is a tech-bro idiot, and thinks it can think (and way too many of them seem to be in this camp), or he knows damn well LLMs don’t, and plans to rig it, via prompts, to declare anything he doesn’t like as “unneeded”. Either is horrifying.
I read on another site that Musk never had any intention of reading the emails. He was basically trolling everyone, just to see what would happen. Kind of like those old westerns when a gunslinger would shoot the ground at someone’s feet and yell, Dance! He’s a sadistic punk high on ketamine.
Sabotaging these different programs without concern for the consequences is a plan to shake as many trees as possible. The fruit that ends up on the ground will then be reaped the wealthy via tax cuts and redirecting the monies. The Administration is toying with a onetime payout to the general masses is hope of eliciting a pacifying effect. $5000 to $8000 are the numbers I’ve seen floated, while the wealthy will receive long-term monetary benefits. See the tax cuts from 2017. Meanwhile, what gets destroyed can be rebuilt in Trump’s image.
AP: 40% of cancelled contracts produce no savings at all.
great.
the plan was to use a LLM, a glorified spell and grammar checker, that is known to “hallucinate” i.e. create bullshit answers.
elon and the don need to be fired for gross incompetence.
everyone should send those two an email asking what they did last week, and when they don’t send a response, let them know:
“You’re Fired!”
acroyear @3:
@raven:
To add to the issues surrounding the Bonneville Power Administration, the treaty between the U.S. and Canada regarding management of the Columbia River expired in September and didn’t get renewed before Trump took office despite attempts, and losing a number of the negotiators on the U.S. side isn’t going to help. Right now Canada is required to release a certain minimum amount of water downstream even in dry years, which can leave a number of lakes and reservoirs up here pretty low. If we’re not bound by that, a lot of power stations in the U.S. could find themselves rather short on hydro-electric power that they then sell. A number of the people on the Canadian side don’t like the current treaty, and Trump’s threats about ‘turning on the faucet’ aren’t exactly calming the situation. (Especially since, as noted above, the fact that the treaty already requires us to keep the faucet on whether we have the water to spare or not is an issue.)
And considering that a significant chunk of the renegotiation going on has to do with First Nations land rights that weren’t taken into account in the original treaty… well, I think we know how much Trump would care about that, and it’s less than zero.
CBC: For 60 years, this Canada-U.S. treaty governed money, power and a river. With Trump’s threats, what now?
Of course, ‘domestic terrorism’ would also apply.
I’d guessed it was going to an AI the second I saw the original articles about it.
Thing is, it isn’t about firing now. It is about analyzing writing styles, in order to be able to identify an “anonymous” writing later, be it in one those supposedly anonymous surveys, or if there’s a leak, or what “anonymous” sources say to the media.
By comparing their writing styles to the contents of the leak, they might be able to identify the source of the leak and deal with it as one might expect.
I wonder who’s getting the contract to do this LLM gen-AI system, and how big is it.
That was a strongly-worded statement, which ok, most Dems nowadays seems unable to clear even that low bar.
But what is she actually doing?
The felon muskrat doesn’t care about the responses. It’s just an excuse for his ketamine addled brain do what it does best: inflict more harm and for him to make more money, WTF.
@14 jenorafeuer pointed to:
CBC: For 60 years, this Canada-U.S. treaty governed money, power and a river. With Trump’s threats, what now?
I reply: I am sick and tired of these MUMP thugs destroying everything they get their diseased hands on! I say, give them a taste of their own toxic medicine. Canada should just keep all the water, tell the MUMPt admin. to shove it and let this area of the country run dry so the hanford plant shuts down.
Why not follow suit?
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
Nr 1 in popularity at the moment.
Wrecking the Federal government isn’t even half of what the Trump/Musk regime is doing.
.1. They are also wrecking the GOP, at least at the national level.
The GOP controls congress, the House and Senate.
They are the ones that have the constitutional power to allocate spending.
They just gave up that power and walked away and made themselves irrelevant.
At the national level, the GOP is only a rubber stamp on a good day.
.2. They also wrecked congress.
By ignoring the US constitution, with the cooperation of the GOP.
.3. They haven’t wrecked the third branch of government, the US court system yet. But they are working on it.
If they ignore the court rulings, there is nothing the courts can do. And court enforcement is up to the executive branch.
If the Federal courts rulings become optional, then anyone is free to ignore them. If they can get away with it.
.4. That goes for the US Supreme court as well.
The Supreme court may well have ruled themselves out of existence.
.5. They may well wreck the US economy.
This can’t be determined yet because the Trump economic plans change by the day. Tariffs are on, they are off, they are high, they are low, they are nowhere.
It’s not like they have a coherent plan that makes sense.
Headline. “Trump policy concerns send US consumer confidence plummeting to eight-month low
By Lucia Mutikani February 25, 202512:40 PM PSTUpdated 11 min ago
Consumer confidence index dives to eight-month low
One-year inflation expectations highest in over 1-1/2 years
Survey notes mentions of tariffs at levels unseen in six years
WASHINGTON, Feb 25 (Reuters) – U.S. consumer confidence deteriorated at its sharpest pace in 3-1/2 years in February while 12-month inflation expectations surged, offering further signs that Americans were growing anxious about the potential negative economic impact of the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.”
.6. They haven’t wrecked the USA itself yet but they are well on their way.
After attacking science, medicine, education, democracy, and the ecnomy, what is left?
The USA will just slowly decline over the years and decades as what made us a vibrant, progressive society becomes…nonexistent.
.7. What else have they wrecked?
I’m sure I’m leaving things out.
Hope, Respect, Optimism for the future, etc..
A lot of Federal employees lives, Trans people’s lives.
@shermanj:
Unfortunately there are a few issues with ‘keeping all the water’, though there are a number of people definitely thinking along those lines.
For one, there’s a temporary agreement still in place while the treaty is being renegotiated; a full shutdown of the setup would take years. And Canada is not in any hurry to go down the ‘move fast and break things’ route the U.S. is doing. (It might not even be possible, as our structural ‘head of the Executive branch’ is the Governor-General, who normally has only ceremonial levels of power.)
Two, this would mostly hurt Washington State, which is one of the saner states in the U.S. (well, the western half of it is, anyway), and one of the places Trump actually wants hurt.
And three, one of the problems on the Canadian side already is what to do with the water in wetter years when what used to be farmland gets flooded. We’d need to send the water somewhere at least, and new pipelines to redirect it would take time to build.
Who knew faking abstract literacy was the only skill set required to decide the fate of civilization?
@raven #21
7) what you’re leaving out is the media landscape – GOP/oligarch manipulation along with current realignment of social media with Trump means about 75%, maybe more, of Americans are not receiving reliable information about anything. Misinformation is rampant, and that suits Trump and Musk because they don’t want people to know what’s really going on.
To know how the USA got into this mess the first thing anyone should look at is how speculation and deliberate misinformation was legitimized first through legacy media and then accelerated through social media. Most people have no idea that X and FB algorithms are designed to lead people to misinformation.
It’s just another arbitrary tool that the autocrats can use against anyone they want to get rid of. They will tweak the LLM to give the answers they want and, if pushed to justify why they’re sacking someone, they’ll just say the algorithm said so.
Cross-posted from the “My senator is doing the work” thread:
Musk’s demand has no function other than disruption of the essential functions of the federal government and harassment of its employees. He wants to prove that government is useless by making it so, to ensure that it has no way of limiting his power even if Trump tires of him and throws him out of the charmed circle.
@ canadiansteve : I reckon people now realise X is a nazi cesspool full of Musk’s disinfo. Too obvs to ignore now ain’t it?
StevoR, so is Meta (FaceBook). The one you yourself use.
cf. https://www.itweb.co.za/article/compcom-accuses-x-facebook-of-amplifying-misinformation/Pero3MZ3KejqQb6m