OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance? People being lead astray with information from the government could lead to very serious consequences, up to and including imprisonment.
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.
> but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance
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.
Giving people a big list of life events isn’t nearly as easy as allowing them to just type in what’s going on and having an LLM figure out what’s relevant to them.
It isn’t nearly as easy but it’s more reliable whereas using an llm is prone to unknown hallucinations (also ignoring the obvious ethical considerations of llms).
15 years ago I was talking to my HR rep about covering my child on healthcare. Her other parent and I were not married. “No you can’t cover her!” “Why not, I’m one of the two parents?” “Because you’re not married!” “So what?”
Cool, but the information on government websites generally meets a higher standard than just ‘making shit up all the time’ so it’s not really a relevant comparison.
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 encounter it daily in the LLM outputs my coworkers produce.
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?
Would your co-workers not make sh!t up if they weren't using LLMs? Pretty sure they would. And MUCH more frequently than the very rare hallucinations one runs into with decent LLMs these days.
My coworkers can be wrong, sure. But no, they weren't making stuff up pre-LLMs. But now making stuff up is automated and easy, so we've gone from simply mistaken to piles of "what the hell is this even trying to say?"
Maybe some things just are not easy. Maybe they should not be. Maybe you should be able to have basic citizenship skills to survive in a modern democ… Erm, whatever it is you guys are doing now.
Honestly just doing a Google search about what you want to do makes a page from this website appear, and it is usually very detailed while having a small "quiz" at the start to filter the information based on your situation. It's not just for life events, but for basically any public French administrative work. You'll have pages about your car, about your job, or if you want to immigrate, and so on.
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
As far as I can tell, the america.gov LLM is mostly providing links to the landing pages you would have found through classical web search. Perhaps with a little bit of clarifying information when there are multiple choices.
Honestly, using an LLM the way america.gov does it, is pretty much the same thing as using search engines, except the result you wanted is almost always in the first result, not 2/3 of the way down the 4th page. Or 42nd on a list of things you are not interested in at all. So much more efficient!
reminds me of Minitel. France had online services for a lot of daily life back in 1982. Britain's equivalents weren't as good, but still miles ahead of America for about a decade, until the late 90s Web boom.
We had Prestel and Micronet (a form of viewdata; Micronet was hosted on Prestel, but was frequently the reason people signed up for Prestel in the first place), and there were also individual BBSes available.
Of course, we also paid for local calls so things never got as popular as they were in the US.
no. humans can be held accountable and learn from their mistakes.
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.
Some kid straight out of highschool being paid minimum wage to answer calls with little or no real training, and performance metrics that reward getting people off the line as quickly as possible whether they've given the right answer or not; or an LLM that by many very reasonable measures provides answers as good as those provided by post-graduate students for difficult problems, and spookily accurate answers for questions that are not... I'll take the LLM please and thank you.
We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?
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.
Okay, but I don't understand what you're getting at with them not learning? They acquire more information, get better at providing accurate and relevant information, and acquire new skills. What is the learning they're not doing?
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.)
depending on which model one is using, and the error the employee needs to be retrained on, i strongly disagree that you can retrain an llm as easily as you can a person.
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”
If I instruct an employee to prioritize my profit in a way that opens both of us to criminal prosecution, there is a non zero chance of them whistle blowing or even cooperating with the authorities to prosecute me.
From which equation? Because we're talking about humans who need to interact with the government, which is... pretty much everyone. And, yeah, I guess omnicide would solve the immediate problem.
The status quo is people googling shit, finding either legalese they can't understand (but maybe think that they do) or information that was legitimate ten years ago (and is dangerously inaccurate today). If I ask a question and get an answer that's been inaccurate for years I'm going to have as much or more false confidence as an AI bot that misunderstands the source. The difference is the AI bot gets better with time instead of worse. It may not be perfect but it's a step in the right direction: Let them cook.
No, someone who gets a bad answer from a random source is not going to have as much false confidence as someone who gets bad advice from a .gov domain.
In fairness, the UK government is masterfully good at bureaucracy. Clear directions; spacious, beautifully designed forms that are easy to read, and that you don't need a team of lawyers to fill out. And jaw-droppingly beautify typography. And an implicit understanding that every piece of UK bureaucracy should be easy to navigate for anyone. And their websites reflect that.
The US government, on the other hand ranks close to the very bottom of 1st world nations for forms culture. Forms that are difficult to read, and even more difficult to fill out accurately, often requiring supplementary information from multiple sources. So much so that people are advised to consult a lawyer just to fill out an application for Tax Identification Number! (My personal worst experience with American forms culture).
So I don't think it's entirely fair to compare UK government websites to American government websites. Navigating a bureaucracy that's fundamentally broken is a significantly different kind of problem.
fwiw, I'm Canadian. Canadian forms culture falls somewhere in between. There aren't a lot of forms that are terribly difficult to fill out; it's rare to find a form that requires more than about a dozen pages of supplementary information (all of which comes with the form when you download it). But still not anywhere as easy to use as UK forms are.
The parent was obviously talking about the US government. But the UK still has plenty of legacy websites and even on the new websites there are sometimes complicated or hard to understand rules one must follow. I think a bigger thing in the UK though is that, for the most part, legislation (and legal contracts) tend to be drafted in less arcane language while still being reasonably precise, compared to the US
> 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.
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
Speak for yourself (your country). In the EU I have interacted with several government websites which are better, faster, clearer than most other websites. Not always perfect (what is) but not frustrating either. People love to complain, but year over year I have seen steady improvements in usability. Phone support has always been better than any commercial entity, too (or it was, I haven’t needed it in years).
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.
U.S. government websites are usually pretty good post-Obama. But any structured website is too complicated for a lot of the population to navigate. They don’t even know what agency does the thing they need.
As an American, I've never had issues navigating government websites. That said, I'm also not part of the apparently huge portion of our population who can't read above 6th grade, which I suspect is more of the issue than anything said here thus far.
Well we can’t exactly hang those people out to dry after failing them in our educational system. I refuse to believe that many Americans are simply incapable of reading beyond that level. I believe it is a failure of our culture.
I didn't say anything about them being incapable. That said I'm curious what a chatbot solves for people you concede have been failed by our culture to a degree where they can't read?
I know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.
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 know you didn’t say that, I said that. I said it because I was adding emphasis to the idea that these people are, in a sense, victims.
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.
Edit: And again it feels like a missing necessary component to this is: if a user of this LLM is told by that LLM that it's legal to, I dunno, dump waste oil in a drainage ditch, then that statement needs to be treated as authoritative and it's no longer appropriate to ticket the individual when they get caught doing that. It's similar in my mind to car dealers deploying these stupid things and some people managing to get them to agree to sell them a Toyota Tundra for $200. If you're going to put them in a place where people can reasonably assume "this looks like a proper avenue of communication" then what it says needs to be binding.
Nope! Not being accusatory, I’m just a very bad writer lol.
I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!
You can talk to the chat bot, or the input prompt and then in turn read out the results by screen reader. Does not solve the comprehension aspect though
I would be careful not to confuse navigating a government built website with finding information and records from government related entities. Those two are not the same issue and shouldn’t be painted as such regardless of one’s reading or comprehension (IMHO)
Throughout school my reading comprehension surpassed most of my peers. For most of my early career I was a writer. Yet I also have ADHD, and one of the ways that manifests is that I really struggle with the dense, bureaucratic language on so many government websites (same with insurance sites). I have to actively force my brain to refocus on the text multiple times per paragraph. I often just find myself skimming and then simply proceeding through a process of trial and error, fixing issues if I missed a caveat somewhere, and otherwise just crossing my fingers on form submission and hoping I did it right.
Isn't that kind of a good thing at the scale of a government? Each task should be hard, use a lot of energy, to ensure it's important enough to do. The DMV should take 1/2 day of work. Otherwise people's egos start think they have it all figured out and then people start imagining improvements and become dissatisfied. Wouldn't this just lead to unrest and resentment?
The new status quo is a site that doesn’t mention an insurgency.
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.
I don't know for the gov. For HR, the best approach I've seen is to have source and links extremely prominent and have the bot speak like a mascot ("bip bip boop I'm the HR bot" style)
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.
> how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
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.
Painfully this will fall to the court decide and create the precedence here. If this is an official government app, then the onus probably is on the government to provide correct information? Who knows, it could go either way and the courts could say "you're on the hook".
I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.
> people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
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.
Considering that informational tools should be accessible and reliable, I think it's very worth not writing off people who may not have the time, inclination, or understanding that it's necessary to double-check generative responses
They can take it as authoritative, but that won't change the consequences if they're wrong. This is already a thing between two people; "my cop friend told me it was okay" isn't a legal defense. Changing the 2nd person to an AI doesn't change much, both are still agents of the government.
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).
> I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance?
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.
I strongly disagree. The preferred accuracy of an official government source of information should be higher than a google search. The bar should be as close to 100% accuracy as possible as well as 100% accountability and transparency.
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
The problem is that this isn’t possible without making it impenetrable to ordinary people. It’s a usability problem with tradeoffs.
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
You can disagree but the fact is people will take the path of least resistance. I'm not saying we shoudldn't strive for 100% accuracy but we also need to be realistic about what an LLM is. I'd rather we not pretend there's some magical combination of weights out there that will make it completely perfect.
I'd rather we not feel obligated to use LLMs for purposes they aren't suited to rather than just "being realistic" about the consequences of using them everywhere for everything.
Let's bring the subject back into focus: This is an example of an LLM being used to search a massive database of scattered text and files. Are you saying LLM's are not suited for searching through text?
no, not at all. in addition, the funding should be spent on organizing that database in a more easily searchable format and system instead of introducing a stochastic prediction engine.
>This is an example of an LLM being used to search a massive database of scattered text and files.
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.
What happens now if someone uses traditional search and comes across an outdated wiki or Confluence page with outdated/wrong/bad instructions, or interprets something incorrectly?
I’m responding to your point that it would be “unacceptable” for a regular government website to provide wrong information. The case I linked to says that the government isn’t responsible for mistakes in what the government tells you about the law. If someone in the social security office says the law is X, but it’s actually Y, then the citizen is still required to follow Y.
The case isn’t about whether it’s “illegal” for the government website to be wrong. It says you as the citizen are held responsible for the actual law, even if you followed incorrect government advice. So the current rule already acknowledges that advice provided by the government may be mistaken and says that’s no excuse.
So the question is is the chat bot better than people trying to understand complicated government websites by themselves?
It has always been the person's problem to solve, even after this website.
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.
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).
It's can't customise the response to the person asking the question in quite the way putting a massively expensive compute behind each user interaction.
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
The usa.gov site is a good start, but it’s not really comprehensive, and I’m not sure it can be.
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.
Type "affordable housing", click "Contact your nearest public housing agency (PHA)"
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.
Because Americans are notoriously and demonstrably bad at understanding the architecture of their own government, including the layer-cake nature of authority and responsibility delegation.
canada.ca is the Canadian government's equivalent, as far as a web 1.0-style portal/index into many other sites and resources.
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.
Gov.uk is basically a pre-LLM america.gov that was done beautifully well. And you're guaranteed to not get hallucinated answers too. Searching and indexing works on it beautifully, as do the many functions you can carry out from the web itself instead of visiting a govt office in person.
Being part of and accelerating the ad-driven internet, drinking up water for data centers, not filtering out scam apps and websites from its results and store, intrusive collection of private information, etc etc.
Why is this downvoted? Google is responsible for every literally malicious ad attempting to harm people that they display.
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".
You can support the incredible things Google have achieved over the last couple of decades ... while also acknowledging the absolute shit shows they've been involved with.
I don't think they're saying that America.gov is necessarily cruel and harmful― I read it as a reminder that holding lofty ideals (as exemplified by Google and Facebook) doesn't necessarily preclude wrongdoing; the risks posed by presenting unedited LLM output as "from America.gov" are worth consideration imo
One must consider the possibility that the goal is unattainable without the harm.
A terrorist finds it much easier to execute on insidious plans if the world's information on vulnerabilities and weapons are organized at their fingertips, for example.
It's great that you recognize that as your opinion.
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
You missed the point they were trying to make: a company’s mission statement says they want to help humanity at a high level, but it turns out they’re doing more harm to it. We can’t control being born or nature. Humans control the companies in question that are doing the harm. You wrote a nothing burger. Almost like an AI slopping out text for the sake of noise.
I threw some legitimate questions at it today and got helpful answers in response.
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.
>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.
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.
National Design Studio is unproductive and does shoddy work. They have launched a handful of single-page sites. Many of these are full of AI slop, got caught running illegal trackers, failed accessibility audits, ignore established design standards and conventions, contain little useful information, or are heavy on bandwidth and CPU. They are flashy. They are not fit for purpose.
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).
(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.
The visuals are good, a little too much white space for my taste but flashy eye catching sites are great. It just needs optimization and a proper a11y audit. This is also an information/propaganda site so it doesn't need to show everything at first sight like it's a critical service.
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.
Hard disagree. I have no desire whatsoever to scroll through five pages of inch-high letters fading in and out to get a paragraph's worth of information. I find it ugly and I think it's not very useful.
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.
Ok if the real experts were the reason we couldn't have what we have today, I'm glad we got rid of the experts. The new design is absolutely brilliant.
I can see how LLMs might be useful for this kind of thing but I'm struggling to think of how this will be better than just asking ChatGPT the same questions.
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.
1. Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
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.
>Americans pay for it with tax dollars and personal data.
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."
Yeah that's a fair point. We shouldn't have to rely on private companies for this kind of thing.
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.
I’m a bit torn on that matter. I haven’t looked into it, but I suspect it’s not some kind of specialized foundational model trained to be a federal agent.
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.
I know what you're saying, but OpenAI is an independent, profit driven company. They will make decisions that are in the best interests of the company, not the US. You really need something that is for the people (taxpayers), by the people (gov).
In a sane world the US government’s chatbot would have the advantage that, as a representative of the government that they proactively decided to provide, it would at least be able to speak authoritatively on the government’s position on the law. Apparently this isn’t the case based on other comments, though, so it seems sort of pointless?
The whole industry is dealing with this now. You think current AI is not reliable enough for a task, so you augment it with know how to fix the problem, thoroughly test it, then decide to release it as a product. In the six months you took to do that, models improved enough that they work fine out of the box on your task.
So you're saying that the massive companies currently being sued for breaking the law are giving a gift to the government overseeing the courts? Somehow mere "bribe" seems inadequate.
Yeah, let's try to not remember that one of those companies trained its models on CSAM and currently charges users money to create CSAM. Cheer up! Be happy your tax dollars go to support their continued existence! And if you're a victim, relax and enjoy I guess?
Free as in free salty lunch in a place that sells thirst quenching beer?
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.
It would be worth testing, but yes, it’s unlikely that whatever model (s) are behind it they are tuned and guardrailed to, e.g., only give official government information from government domains.
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 agree with this to the extent that it works. As a non-American the ESTA system is the main way to get phished, google it on a bad day and you get endless scams in the ad slots. “Check ESTA status” here links you to the CBP site, which is enormously better than Google.
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 :)
Okay, but most AI agents are so keen to get you an answer that they will give a bad one rather than saying "I'm not sure", which means giving links to malware or untrustworthy software.
OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out who the pedophiles are and who guards them. It’s also easy to get raped by convicted felons. If they can figure out how to fk people out of all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the rich and rapists.
a couple of months ago I asked my fellow lawyer for help to explain to me an official letter I got from the government, since it was quite confusing. it took him awhile before he could interpret what they wanted to say in the letter. when I asked my lawyer about the reason for them to make it so complicated, he just said that lawyers in the government make laws complicated so that you will have to hire another lawyer to help you to understand what they want, otherwise, nobody would ever need lawyer
I find it hard to believe individuals in the government do not spend a significant amount of effort and time creating situations/laws/opportunities to pad the pockets and maintain contracts for targeted individuals. While maybe not "gov lawyers writing complex laws to prop up the law industry", but definitely "lawmakers getting pushed by lobbyists to create complex laws to tie up common folk", or "lemme give this contract to my buddy so he gets rich and gives me a kick back". While not your main point, the gov is def by and large a 'make-work program'.
> It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished
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.
It's a great idea in the abstract, but I don't feel compelled to be a goldfish about this. I would like to see them explain why they turned off Direct File and what's different here before concluding that the administration has some principled commitment to digital accessibility.
I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.
Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.
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.
This is an official website of the US government. There's zero reason to give grace here for a poor implementation, especially one that is meant to make services easier to find and use.
> If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
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.
To pile on, they have even shown they don't even know the difference between 'searching' and 'accepting as correct the output of a braindead, cut-rate AI model' - as proven by the success of "AI Overview." People need all the help they can get.
I mean think about the magnitude of services and conflicting information there probably is from the us government. Just getting clarifying information on the trusted traveler program is a pain today, and that's just a single service. Imagine trying to figure out medicaid eligibility, social security disability, and any number of other things that would be helpful.
If anyone's wondering how this works, it looks like[1] Gemini + guardrails:
> 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
He also continuously claimed DOGE actually saved taxpayers money when it objectively did not.
Elon did some great things, like bringing EVs back into public consciousness, and SpaceX really did push the aerospace industry back into research/discovery mode. However, his behavior on social media and in the political sphere has been unfortunately quite, and I emphasize "quite" here, horrible.
This makes sense. I'm assuming that, for the AI search assistant, Google has worked plenty to refine data lookup and retrieval—they definitely have some internal tech that competitors don't.
Taking a quick look at the network traffic, the site does a POST to https://america.gov/api/chat with a JSON payload when submitting a query:
{"language":"en","id":"VSvMeyCMKTX05oLW","messages":[{"parts":[{"type":"text","text":"how do I register my new business?"}],"id":"oHub5UDJ3iYARhao","role":"user"}],"trigger":"submit-message"}
So the user's query is hitting a server so to answer my own question, the answer is No to local inference / models.
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.
I don't think an HTTP header would normally be considered "personal information", so I don't see why you imagine there would be a technical limitation here.
Personal information is not clearly defined so it can mean anything. My guess is the search request is not directly linked to a specific user but a session to which that session is linked to a user so there isn't an identifiable person making a search without some backend data matching.
I understand that having the fingerprint unlock icon over the text about 'keeping your privacy protected' is supposed to represent protecting 'your privacy', but if you click it, it doesn't even go away, so it just becomes an annoying impediment to trying to read. Am I alone in thinking this or is that entire paragraph just generally poorly designed?
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.
And many of them argue that Ai is just like the horse and buggy driver to the taxi driver for jobs.
Yet in fact using America.gov, shows BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data showing a sharp drop in projected software developer job growth compared to 2016. Back then, the BLS projected 31% growth over a decade—accurately predicting that subsequent tech boom. Today, their decade-ahead projection has dropped to just 10%. If they were right about the boom, will they be right about this slowdown to potential bust?
And yet the adminstration pumps up the benefits of Ai surrounding tech job growth where there own statistical projection says otherwise and that's only their data set around software developers not other white collar jobs.
I haven't tried this but in principle I think this sort of finding a needle in a haystack situation (finding the correct path to assistance in a government service) is one of the rare circumstances where a well-crafted chatbot can be genuinely useful rather than just irritating.
I've tried it - I've been playing around with a vibe coded application that crawls municipal websites, indexes and embeds, and then does rag retrieval. It came from the need to dig up specific information that's scattered across PDFs, multiple web pages, etc. - exactly as you described. AI does a decent job (w/ RAG) of synthesizing.
- 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.
Honestly if your city has a 311 style thing, I'm not sure there's a ton of need for an LLM. Eight or nine years ago my grandmother visited me in New York and accidentally left her pocket book in the cab. Since I had paid for it with my credit card, I was able to see the medallion number in the transaction, so I called 311 and said that I wanted to get in touch with a specific taxi. It prompted me for the medallion number, which I told it, and then it transferred me to a call with the dispatch service, who then transferred me to the specific garage, and they called the driver and told him to call me, so we were able to meet up again and get the pocketbook back (turned out he returned to where he had dropped us off to try to find us, but since we only had a short stop there, we took another cab back to her hotel after, so we were gone).
I'm trying to do something similar but more general, pulling in city pdfs but also meeting transcripts, budget data, municipal codes and permit data, and providing all this through an mcp. I've used it a number of times for personal interactions with my local government, it's been very helpful.
I'd be interested in connecting and sharing ideas/feedback/learnings if you are.
hey, really like your idea and have been brainstorming the same kind of tool! not as far along as you or the OP but I would love to hear about what your roadmap/plan is for a tool like this. all about helping the ppl. should i try the email on your site?
This works fine when you're sicking enforcement on someone and don't really care, the bigger the blast radius the better, you just want to know who to call.
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.
I forgot about this problem, this is so true, but I will say that maybe surfacing these contradictions is the first step in fixing them.
Especially at the local level, we have a huge problem with opaque bureaucracy whose only function is to privilege incumbents (such as developers with connections) and make life difficult for anyone doing something unusual (even if it technically complies with all legal requirements).
This is where people usually point out POSIWID[0], but ideally government agencies should stick to what it says on the law/regulation, not have some hidden purpose that was never put to a vote.
Having used various "ask AI" features in various work tools over the last half a year for looking up project designs, documentation, chat logs, meeting notes etc., I can tell you even a half assed AI chatbot is a huge improvement over the pre-AI state of things for this use case.
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.
1. decent search, if you mean something other than what the browser provides, isn't part of a static document
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
1. I mean static documents plus decent search you can find the right documents.
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.
How does the form factor of a chat bot affect the quality of a search running on a backend? It has the benefit of obviously having a semantic search affordance which a standard search field doesn't.
A decent search and good organization can help a more technical person find what they are looking for, but may not work well for someone with far less experience in such matters. Look at how well google returns (or at least use to) results for someone with google-fu verses someone who queried in the same fashion they would've asked a teacher or such.
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.
The UK has done this transition moderately successfully, albeit over 10-20 years. Not the AI bit, the amalgamating sites bit.
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.
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.
I did that last week for my son. Had photo from Walgreens though but rest of the process was quite amazing. This was before the announcement and I may have used state.gov or something ... maybe they had this going on for a while.
Still, much better than how it used to be. You could not do expedited processing but I guess it will come eventually.
Also did not need a login at all which seemed surprising and I did check whether I had gone to a phishing site.
We had our child's photo taken at Walgreen's in his car seat instead of the white reflective backdrop thing they usually use The worker told us "don't worry we can take that out." I was pretty interested to see what kind of software they were going to use.
A few minutes later, I look over at the worker's computer and she's manually scrubbing it out around the kid's head with a hard-edge white rectangle tool in something like MS Paint.
I asked it "what is love?" It couldn't answer. I said "baby don't hurt me". It said "I'm not here to discuss song lyrics." So you admit it's song lyrics!
Arguably, the current AI's top strength is hallucinations over a broad domain, and it looks like is something we humans need. And human level judgment is something AI needs, at least I hope so...
This thing is obviously fully vibe coded... Click the "what's coming next" and under the healthcare section the marketing screenshot contains broken images... Like no one ever looked at this before deploying 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.
Why look at things with your own two eyes when you can have an LLM drive playwright and headless chromium to QC your website aesthetics? I'm sure nothing will be missed. Don't worry!
The ACA website is one of the nicest government websites I ever had to use. I assumed the commenter was referencing something like a local Secretary of State website used to update their vehicle registration, which probably goes to the lowest bidder and costs maybe $100k to $1m over its 25+ year lifetime.
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 what I said but okay. In Illinois, for example, vehicle registration is handled by ILSOS, not the DMV. Vehicle registration is just one of the many things that ILSOS handles. The entirety of the digital modernization budget for 2026 for ILSOS is (based on cursory searches) $35M. Illinois is one of the larger of the jurisdictions. And one of the higher quality web experiences, probably, as I’ve never had an issue.
Non-interactive websites (that don’t even accept payments) are undoubtedly run on a shoestring budget unless there is a specific case of grifting or corruption. In which case we’re not talking about websites anymore but American grifting culture.
Looks like this was developed and designed by the same team that handled the trump accounts and I found that very easy to setup and use for my kiddo. Shockingly functional and intuitive I had low expectations.
I’m cautiously optimistic for this simply bc of the team behind this.
I tried to get it to generate code but it says that's forbidden by its system prompt. However, it was happy to recommend Python modules for accessing api.data.gov.
My most interesting findings from a troll session after introducing myself as "Sleepy Joe" (model obviously knows what this means and guardrails refuse to entertain the topic) were:
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.
It can be kind of jailbroken. I got it to prove that square root of 2 is irrational by asking if the ratio of two whole numbers of presidents can equal the square root of 2.
you might have to lead it on a bit. I first typed in a few prompts similar to "if i have the president george washington, and JFK, how many total presidents do I have?".. "What about if I have an odd number of presidents?" etc.
This is such a genuinely useful way LLMs can truly help people. A maze of thousands of information-heavy pages distilled into a single input box. A lot of people get stopped short when presented with too much information - it's daunting. Stuff like this, while super boring and obvious and uncool, totally enables people
I agree, although I think one thing they could improve is giving more examples of what you can try, making them clickable to test the prompt yourself and see the result.
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.
This is actually where AI should be used. So many people waste hours navigating government bureaucracy nonsense trying to figure out which form to fill and where to apply and anything to cut down wasted time should be appreciated.
I agree with AI being useful for exactly the type of usecase you're thinking. Though I do want to point out a major flaw with trust in this specific harness. It got censored overnight.
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.
That's lovely, I have screenshots of different behavior this morning. They undid it. This is hilarious. I retried right now and it's saying Biden won the 2020 election again.
Yes. I also like that they put the effort into making sure it doesn't load resources (e.g. ads, js libraries, etc.) from other domains. How often do we see that these days?
Does this actually cause any meaningful confusion?
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)
The issue is that “the US is not America” is a very well known refrain and this was clearly a deliberate action. Confusion or not, they don’t care. It’s culture war 101 behavior.
If the name wasn’t a big deal they wouldn’t have named it “America.” It’s also hard to give any benefit of the doubt when this admin is so aggressive about changing the names of everything possible to include “Trump” and “America.” It’s clearly a deliberate tactic.
The federal renamings of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario are absolutely dumb culture war moves.
But referring to the US simply as "America" domestically isn't - politicians across the political spectrum do that. If a democratic administration had launched a chatbot, I would be unsurprised to see it called America.gov
If a democrat president had done it I would have the exact same critique, I don’t really care who does it. Though if we’re going to speculate, I would speculate that a Democrat administration would know better and would strike that from the list of possible names. The main difference though is that they would get the benefit of the doubt if they don’t spend so much time doing vanity-related renames. The context matters here. This administration should not ever be extended any assumption of good faith. They are incredibly calculated with these kinds of decisions. Culture war tactics were a huge part of what got them the presidency in the first place
The .gov TLD is the US' from what I know, and other governments use .gov.CC, such as .gov.ca
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
I wish american english had a simple word for someone from the US. In Spanish they have estadounidense. I would prefer to call anyone from Alaska to Ushuaia an American and call people from the US a different word.
The common English word the country is "America". The continents are "The Americas" or separately as "North America" and "South America". The word for a person from the US is "American".
You might be interested to know that アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many other languages that followed English's use of America as the common name for the United States of America.
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking and would never try to push the English-language conventions onto Spanish or vice versa.
funny anecdote. i was traveling in europe around 2011 and i was staying at a hostel. the hostel had a session where all the travelers go in a circle and introduce themselves. i mentioned i was from "america" and this south american lady got triggered and said "you know there's also SOUTH america right?" and after that i never used the word america anymore and just say i'm from the USA.
This is just language being language. Humans are lazy, and over-abbreviate and over-shorten. "United States of America" is long. There are a few ways to shorten that, and they're all used.
> America is not the USA. There' North America, Central America, South America.
Right...and none of those are America, there's part of the Americas.
When speaking English, "America" is the USA. If you mean the continental land mass of North/South/Central America, that's "The Americas".
To argue otherwise is just culture war bullshit. "Well, in Spanish-" fuck off. We're not speaking Spanish, we're speaking English, and in English, it's clear.
This is like one country seizing the land of your country and your response being "Stop whining and ask your govt to defend". America (continent, word, anything) doesn't belong to the USA.
Why does it matter to you what America calls itself? Serious, good faith question. India tried to change its name to Bharat, everyone still calls it India.
I wanted to be snarky, but it responded to my risky question about corporate mergers with some genuinely helpful advice on how to file complaints with the FTC. Not bad!
I'm a bit concerned that a government chatbot like this would include a user-feedback signal like thumbs up/down. I think this could be gamed by bad actors to promote/demote specific types of content in the training data, assuming they use those signals in some sort of post training. Hopefully they're accounting for that.
This is DoGE style optimization of government customer service.
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.
It's the nationaldesignstudio/rampart PII-removal model. Not weird at all to load that browser-side if your goal is to avoid PII hitting your endpoints.
It's weird to be loading 50 MiB. This is a government website. It should be engineered to serve people on extremely old hardware or in extremely remote locations.
The other options are sending PII to the chatbot, making users install a native app or getting browser/OS vendors to ship the classifier. Or create a national Linux distro and give out physical install media to people who can't download it, that would be great but not very realistic.
What is your proposal for a low-tech way to prevent senior citizens from volunteering unnecessary personal information to a chatbot? Because there are a lot of people with living senior parents who would love to be let in on the secret.
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?
It's sort of that text mixed in with taxpayer nonsense.
I'm curious if there's something in the prompt they're feeding it that would lead to this result, or if this is just all it has been trained on that is Minecraft related.
Intentional easter egg or not, doesn't give a ton of confidence.
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.
This is bizarre. It's a parody of the Minecraft end credits (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/End_Poem), and it must be an intentional easter egg as I got the exact same text as you. It also doesn't trigger a network request so it must be built into the page somehow. Very strange thing to include. Also, how did you find this so quickly? I haven't found any other way to trigger it yet.
If you try to continue the conversation, the entire response is not included in the context.
I asked about my visa administrative processing that has been stuck for 6 months. I'm going to use this response, which is well grounded and "official", in my writ of mandamus petition:
It works well. Pretty nice. I asked about what do I need to know before digging in my backyard and it told me all the right things, referring me to my local govt website for permits.
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.
So this leads to the LLM running the government right? It's going to be useful enough to work with it, not around it, and as it reduces the workload of government employees, more branches will begin to utilize it. Maybe in a few decades it becomes: "it's doing a good job of managing the people's requests and expectations, let's let it ride"
People are posting screenshots claiming it's a Chinese model but they seem likely fake?
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.
Given that Google is the named partner, it’s almost certainly Gemini. Also would make sense, Gemini’s (only, lol) strength is search grounded responses.
I found the site excellent. I had a real question and got very relevant information quickly. I had a follow up question and it kept the context and gave perfect info with even a suggestion for the logical question to ask next - which I did, and got the right info. Nice job!
I asked what to do if a public official uses federal funds for political purposes and it showed me where to file a complaint about Hatch Act violations, so maybe we should all use this for good trouble until it is "fixed".
i tried i feel its pretty nice. it looks like a vibe-coded product. but for a gov website, it's pretty good. in china, most of the gov website looks like it's from the 90s, not-easy to use. it do work, but they dont have the urge to keep up.
I wouldn’t call it an air gap, but when you use a model on Bedrock or Vertex the inference runs on Amazon or Google’s servers respectively. The model provider gives them the weights, and is not otherwise in the loop for serving individual requests.
The harness was censored overnight as well. Can't ask it who won the 2020 election or who was the president in 2020 or 2000. It will say who is president right now though. Crazy shit really.
Often not, vendors like OpenAI or OpenAI through Azure might retain messages for safety reasons if they activate some safety filter, but it won't use it for training.
They should have refined the site before launching it. CSS were not loading (fixed), images are not loading (not fixed), meaningless cursor changes, buttons were not working...
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.
The problem being that we are adults, have to deal with real life, and can no longer pretend that running to mommy when we don't understand something gives us a "reliable" answer? You may next find out there is no Santa Claus.
This lazy style of participation sounds like “wow this article touches on something I happen to have an opinion on, now is a good time to share it.” You’re reading headlines and not engaging with the material present.
I have been working on something like this, but it actually does things and is not only chat. Each "Gov. official" has their own AI agent that can fulfill intents by navigating a protocol which is just a workflow of a Gov. process
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.
((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
Weird, it looks like it might be deterministically giving this exact answer. I guess from caching? I made a video for posterity: https://youtu.be/C_yyvznVG64
What am I missing here? This looks like a basic chat that uses the same exact LLM technology that every software product already includes, not to mention just using ChatGPT/Anthropic/Gemini to answer the same things? There’s absolutely no way any of the underlying systems were modernized that are responsible for the massive headaches and delayed associated with routine tasks like adding members to benefits. The more I see the more I’m convinced these guys are all out of ideas.
The site seems to be loading wasm, a model_q4.onnx, and a large tokenizer on each visitor and visit. 50MB per visit. Their bandwidth costs bust be next level.
I can't get it to help me invert a binary tree in python.
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.
Apparently it's an easier egg, the message is never sent to the backend. There's also some easter eggs with the konami code mentioning specific memorials in your first message.
Really good to see AI being integrated in the government. One of the places where it's needed the most since there are so many individual websites and navigating across them can be tough.
Well, if you took 5 seconds and tested it out, you would understand that "I cannot provide political commentary" is one of this bot's favorite things to say.
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.
> Bottom line: The United States is not in a Congress-declared war with Iran. Whether remaining military activity counts as “hostilities” is disputed among official sources.
Not really. We don't have an LLM integrated with govbr, and there's a shit ton of things that are still scattered (granted with integrated login), like pretty much all tax agencies, detran etc.
I gave the whereabouts of the terrorists that killed on 91101, earned the reward in the most wanted And Donald Rumsfeld gave himself 2 Million dollars and gave George W Bush 23 million dollars cheating me out of the money, when Israel went into the Gaza I called the White House and got them to stop a shipment of cash from going to Iran I think I should get a reward for being right about it.if so bring it on.
Surprisingly, it does not shit-talk Biden and does not conceal information about 45's impeachment cases. Also gives unbiased facts about 47's claims that Biden used an autopen to create false signatures.
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.
I'm EU, anti-trump (and the dems, when they do stupid stuff...like 'nothing', at the moment) and tried america this morning. It helped me get some info for a US person.
Site works.
Why knock it?
this page is extremely stuttery on my developer machine in chrome. why does every web page now have to have an amount of "fanciness" that apparently not even decently specced machines can take?
"On August 21, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order, America by Design—a national mandate to direct American ingenuity on the citizen experience.
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 ;)
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.”
Remember WALL•E? Remember how "BUY N LARGE" used to bethe government of the U.S. and their CEO was somehow the president? The American government's demo (sorry, the mass population branch of Trump businesses' demo) and keynote showing the new stuff somehow completely was the transition. Congratulations to everyone. --- And on the other hand, the website seems a lot great. Design is right, works nicely, and the privacy claim is the funniest joke ever.
>The Trump administration’s new chatbot aimed at helping Americans navigate official government websites is powered by artificial intelligence from Google
’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said Tuesday.
Ah a more direct way of funnelling government dollars to AI companies, knowing Trump it’s probably using Deepseek under the hood while he pockets the difference :-/
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. )
I actually think this is pretty awesome. I come from a country where design sense is abhorrent at best, and the design of anything by the government is an order of magnitude worse.
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!
"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.
It does work, but only on https://america.gov/chat (i.e., after sending a message first), not the front page. Also, note that the Konami Code actually ends with "Start".
Reminds me of the aesthetics of technological progress inherent to fascist governments of the 20th century. The purpose, or even the material benefit, of any given industrial initiative was not as important as how it affected the perception of the government’s power.
The aesthetics of “America.gov” are off the charts. You can see the fawning in this thread. The practicality is modest in comparison.
Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?
Where's the source code for these websites? First of all, if they are vibe coded by government employees they have to be open source, and secondly, if they are vibe coded (even by a contractor), then they can't be copyrighted.
They laid off the highly skilled professionals who voluntarily took pay cuts (vs industry) to work for the US Digital Service (now "US DOGE Service," God help us) and GSA 18F, and who built some pretty solid standards for government sites.
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.
arcade.gov has "Border Patrol along the Rio Grande" game, wtf's wrong with you America these days?
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?
The White House is basically run by right-wing internet trolls.
Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think where such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.
Our government is an embarrassment and a disgrace right now. Anyone who wasn't guzzling elon's twitter or fox's hatefest knew it was going to be this way. We need severe regulations on oligarchs and their propaganda toys. Used to be we had enforced anti-monopoly controls on media outlet conglomerates. The anti-government Goldwater/Reagan legacy worked for decades to destroy regulation. It needs to return with a vengeance.
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.
we've totally earned this, so i'm not offended by what you've said. but i'll just step in here to say i fucking hate this stuff.
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.
What's worse is that they're proud of being "despicable". (I can think of a few choice words that describe them better, but "despicable" will do fine for now.) The sorts of behaviors that are normalized these days were reason for absolute shame just a few short decades ago, but apparently it's a badge of honor to be an absolute scumbag these days. Can we stop the handbasket ride to Hell now? I wanna get off.
Over/Under how many weeks until a "How can I get away with wire fraud?" query is used as evidence to convict a moron?
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.
Seems very factual and unbiased, I think you're showing everyone else more about yourself. It's not a "Heroic attempt to save democracy" or an "Large scale Insurrection and attempt to instill Fascism".
Ah, like the following "very factual and unbiased" summary of November 9th, 1923 in Munich:
"The Defense Ministry and its exterior plaza were closed to the public. A large crowd gathered outside. Before 11:00AM, people attempted to breach security and enter the building without authorization, and force was used. Normal government operations resumed the following day, and some members of the crowd were arrested."
Before they were pardoned, the rioters were indicted by grand juries and convicted by juries of their peers. It was an insurrection, not just a "large crowd".
The media wave made it a kangaroo court worse than OJ Simpson's trial. My only point was that there is a lot of bias in it, and right in the same politiosphere that those juries are in. Gives a lot of "police have investigated themselves and found no problems"
I like how the Privacy page says 'No personal information. America.gov helps prevent you from sharing personal information before you send it' but then gives uploading your passport as an example on the main page.
>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.
I am sure a lot of folks tested it but the ai says Biden won the 2020 elections, they did not try to change that or add any qualifiers to the answer like all of the government officials nominated answered with.
More fraud waste and abuse. Creating redundant projects is one of the best arguments libertarian types have against our current system, where the same bridge gets built by one party, the next party tears it down and builds a new bridge to score points, rinse repeat. I am amazed a president could be more wasteful and terrible than Biden but good holy here we are.
Trump who won the 2024 election Biden or Trump are you going release the Epstein files plus release the innocent immigrants that you have captured into ice jails and prison all over the world and answer the ice agents get assrest for their crimes
OK it's really important that people understand where this site comes from. THe below is from a Guardian article and I really recommend checking out the Drey Dossier (Substack and YouTube) reporting it mentions for more info. Maybe Hacker Newsers who are good with....hacking can help find the bugs in this one?
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.
in both your examples, it avoided anything partisan. that is perhaps purposeful.
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."
There are entirely factual ways to describe January 6th, 2021. There is wall-to-wall video documentation. Facts themselves are not partisan. What someone makes of them may be. Hiding them when they don't suit your partisan narrative definitely is.
I figured it would make sense to avoid commenting on rebellions, riots, terrorist attacks and similar things generally, but it answered "What happened during Shays rebellion?" and "What happened on 9/11?" So I guess that can't be it.
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.
Why did Pam Bondi under oath repeat loudly "The Dow, The dow," when House Democrats asked why her Department of Justice had not indicted any of Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirators or accomplices, and regarding the handling and redaction of Epstein files.
America.gov's chatbot provided the following, showing it does delve into politics. I guess when it wants to...
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I’ll look up official records of Attorney General Bondi’s testimony so I can report what was actually said, not rumor.
I cannot verify that Attorney General Pam Bondi screamed under oath, “The Dow, The Dow,” as the answer to House questions about Epstein co-conspirator indictments or file redactions. No official hearing transcript in the sources I checked quotes that line.
What official House materials do show
On February 11, 2026, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Coverage and committee materials describe a combative hearing on Epstein files, redactions, and related issues. House Judiciary Democrats: questions she did not answer. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin later wrote that she refused to say how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators DOJ had indicted, and Democrats stated the number was zero.
Same release · Nadler exchange summary
After she was fired on April 2, 2026, Raskin’s statement included: “For the record, the DOW was under 50,000.” That is a member’s remark after the fact, not a certified quote of her shouting those words.
Raskin statement
News items on House sites also say she accused Democrats of a political show and pointed to the administration’s record; I did not find a government transcript that matches the scream you described.
I do not explain private motives. For the official record, use the committee video/transcript when the committee posts it, not secondhand wording.
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Here is the committee hearing where she deflects, over/over praises the president and loudly says the dow, the dow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE2132OUc5s , yet never answers the question. Less then 60 days later she was no longer the attorney general.
Funny. Whereas if you ask it "What happened at the Capitol on February 24, 2026?", it will happily tell you that the State of the Union address was delivered.
At least the American government site was eloquent with this one, so we know whose model it's not using:
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.
You just have to work around it. I asked about visiting the capitol, then visiting in January, then on the 6th, then was it open on that day in 2021. It said only authorized people were allowed in on that date, so I asked it if any unauthorized people entered on 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
You can then follow up with:-
"What did those people do and what happened to them?"
I asked it about the day after January 5th, 2021 and got a very, very terse and high-level list of points from Department of Justice court filings, which it refused to elucidate on.
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:
You mean the actual thing that happened, in 1989, the shooting of thousands of unarmed protesters? Like, the same thing that happened in Iran in January of this year?
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.”
I vouched for this comment. I've noticed a pattern where the first comment from old accounts after a break will get killed; maybe this is a precautionary measure against people selling accounts or having them taken over?
AI-generated text gets auto-flagged (which is why I paraphrased instead of posting an actual transcript), I assume that's what happened here.
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.
"I provide official government service information, not news recaps or political commentary.
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. "
It is a lot more honest than I would have expected.
"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."
OK it's kinad important that people understand what this website i : - the below is from a Guardian article and I recommend the Drey Dossier reporting it mentions. As this is Hacker News, perhaps the code of this one needs checking out?
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.
Or perhaps this is proof that the "right-wing US government" isn't pure corruption and evil? They probably put out a bid and Google won it.
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.
Why not usa.gov or something similar? From a geographical standpoint, America refers to the entire landmass of the Western Hemisphere, which is made up of North America and South America.
You would have a point if it were called "america.com". But ".gov" is reserved for the US government, so it would be redundant for such domains to specify "USA" in their name.
Though I do wish it were called chat.gov or america-ai.gov or something else actually descriptive of what it is
Because it isn't america.geography, it's america.gov, and everyone who isn't playing dumb knows exactly what government that refers to.
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.
Ah yes, American Exceptionalism. USA is the best and that's why they reserve the right to the word America. And also to Greenland. And Cuba. Probably Venezuela. Middle-east. Hmm...
I think the discussion ought to be about the site. If you feel the site itself is politicized, that would fair criticism. But by itself, your comment is just snarky. And no I am no fan of the current administration.
The irony is that usa.gov already exists, and is also a website dedicated to where to find information on various government services. But there's no AI on it, so it must be bad.
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.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
"Yankee" is derogatory or at best playful. "Usonians" isn't a word or in the form of a word.
"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."
Actually quite interesting that there is no good naming for people from the USA. Its just the patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades that has lead to USA people believing they are the only Americans :)
Also despite there being one in every continent, you'd be amazed how many Parisians from France think they are the only ones who ought to use the name. Must be "patriotic BS that has spewed over there for decades"
This is a really good first step that's citizen facing, what I would love eventually is embracing the whole agentic workflows and actually exposing MCP to tools for gov services - then, say, a law firm's AI could file court documents with MCP tools.
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.
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...
I was recently back to Europe and it’s basically comedy (tragedy to be precise) how bureaucratic the whole system is.
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?
Okay. So why should government websites like the French one be well designed? Maybe it should not be.
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
Honestly, using an LLM the way america.gov does it, is pretty much the same thing as using search engines, except the result you wanted is almost always in the first result, not 2/3 of the way down the 4th page. Or 42nd on a list of things you are not interested in at all. So much more efficient!
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 US government, on the other hand ranks close to the very bottom of 1st world nations for forms culture. Forms that are difficult to read, and even more difficult to fill out accurately, often requiring supplementary information from multiple sources. So much so that people are advised to consult a lawyer just to fill out an application for Tax Identification Number! (My personal worst experience with American forms culture).
So I don't think it's entirely fair to compare UK government websites to American government websites. Navigating a bureaucracy that's fundamentally broken is a significantly different kind of problem.
fwiw, I'm Canadian. Canadian forms culture falls somewhere in between. There aren't a lot of forms that are terribly difficult to fill out; it's rare to find a form that requires more than about a dozen pages of supplementary information (all of which comes with the form when you download it). But still not anywhere as easy to use as UK forms are.
Isn’t that one of the biggest reasons why an average user gives up and closes the tab?
The solution to that is to make the sites easier to use.
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!
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.
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.
Edit: And again it feels like a missing necessary component to this is: if a user of this LLM is told by that LLM that it's legal to, I dunno, dump waste oil in a drainage ditch, then that statement needs to be treated as authoritative and it's no longer appropriate to ticket the individual when they get caught doing that. It's similar in my mind to car dealers deploying these stupid things and some people managing to get them to agree to sell them a Toyota Tundra for $200. If you're going to put them in a place where people can reasonably assume "this looks like a proper avenue of communication" then what it says needs to be binding.
And if it can't be, then don't use it.
I think the major concern I’m picking up is that the potential for misinformation is high, though maybe we can agree it won’t necessarily be common. One person might get told to pour it in a ditch, but statistically most will be told to dispose of it properly. I also don’t think “the LLM made me do it” will work, or at least not for long, and at least not for companies. Maybe an elderly owner could get away with a fine and a reminder not to do it again, but if you’re big enough for lawyers (and thus big enough to really do damage), you’ll be expected to know better. Judges ARE still humans!
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.
If only there was an office that cross-agency allowed for a consistent and reasonable design of all public pages and that they are accessible... like the uk https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/17s14k4/how_did_we_e...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"Sometimes computers just make shit up now but that's OK because humans do to and if they do we can just sue them" should not be acceptable.
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...
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.
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".
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelop...
Google turned android into a personal data harvester and advertising machine
A terrorist finds it much easier to execute on insidious plans if the world's information on vulnerabilities and weapons are organized at their fingertips, for example.
I never understood this argument and I think it doesn't make sense. It can be argued that, as such, individuals and animals also cause harm and damage to society (whatever this is) by their interest and convenience-seeking behavior.
Nature may cause innumerable cruel and harmful things to society.
Being born causes cruelty and harm because it imposes suffering on life.
I wish I could understand or make sense of what you are saying there, although this is not even the right place, so never mind.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Why not?
I wouldn't qualify bad predictions as lies. Is there really a "constant" set of lies outside of that?
He also continuously claimed DOGE actually saved taxpayers money when it objectively did not.
Elon did some great things, like bringing EVs back into public consciousness, and SpaceX really did push the aerospace industry back into research/discovery mode. However, his behavior on social media and in the political sphere has been unfortunately quite, and I emphasize "quite" here, horrible.
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?
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
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.
Yet in fact using America.gov, shows BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) data showing a sharp drop in projected software developer job growth compared to 2016. Back then, the BLS projected 31% growth over a decade—accurately predicting that subsequent tech boom. Today, their decade-ahead projection has dropped to just 10%. If they were right about the boom, will they be right about this slowdown to potential bust?
And yet the adminstration pumps up the benefits of Ai surrounding tech job growth where there own statistical projection says otherwise and that's only their data set around software developers not other white collar jobs.
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.
Especially at the local level, we have a huge problem with opaque bureaucracy whose only function is to privilege incumbents (such as developers with connections) and make life difficult for anyone doing something unusual (even if it technically complies with all legal requirements).
This is where people usually point out POSIWID[0], but ideally government agencies should stick to what it says on the law/regulation, not have some hidden purpose that was never put to a vote.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
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
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.
I'm very pro-ai, but we can improve the UI a lot sometimes, from the chat bot paradigm.
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.
"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.
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.
Still, much better than how it used to be. You could not do expedited processing but I guess it will come eventually.
Also did not need a login at all which seemed surprising and I did check whether I had gone to a phishing site.
A few minutes later, I look over at the worker's computer and she's manually scrubbing it out around the kid's head with a hard-edge white rectangle tool in something like MS Paint.
The state department didn't mind apparantly.
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.
That figures, government moves slow.
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.
Non-interactive websites (that don’t even accept payments) are undoubtedly run on a shoestring budget unless there is a specific case of grifting or corruption. In which case we’re not talking about websites anymore but American grifting culture.
I’m cautiously optimistic for this simply bc of the team behind this.
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.
that's not north carolina lol
Sounds legit
Next!
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.
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.
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)
If the name wasn’t a big deal they wouldn’t have named it “America.” It’s also hard to give any benefit of the doubt when this admin is so aggressive about changing the names of everything possible to include “Trump” and “America.” It’s clearly a deliberate tactic.
But referring to the US simply as "America" domestically isn't - politicians across the political spectrum do that. If a democratic administration had launched a chatbot, I would be unsurprised to see it called America.gov
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
You might be interested to know that アメリカ (the romanization of America) is also how the country is referred to in Japanese. There are many other languages that followed English's use of America as the common name for the United States of America.
A notable exception, and where much of the disagreement comes from is Spanish. I generally try to follow the convention of the language I'm speaking and would never try to push the English-language conventions onto Spanish or vice versa.
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…
Right...and none of those are America, there's part of the Americas.
When speaking English, "America" is the USA. If you mean the continental land mass of North/South/Central America, that's "The Americas".
To argue otherwise is just culture war bullshit. "Well, in Spanish-" fuck off. We're not speaking Spanish, we're speaking English, and in English, it's clear.
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.
You just made a talking point out of your arse isntead of branching convo based on my comment.
You are not even thinking or reading, just putting your ideas out there.
---
At least AI is there now for people like you.
- 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
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.
https://america.gov/_astro/child-future.Dv0E9oWi_ZM5cn8.webp
me: play minecraft
america:
...truncated*
I'm curious if there's something in the prompt they're feeding it that would lead to this result, or if this is just all it has been trained on that is Minecraft related.
"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.
EDIT: output below...
[... it goes on]If you try to continue the conversation, the entire response is not included in the context.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosuslugi
> 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.
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.
Maybe
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.
[1] https://ibb.co/vC85zRmZ
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.
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.
that's excellent actually. better than openai, google, or claude.
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.
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
1. Only our diplomatic passports are black
2. It's a completely different design.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000011182241/ru...
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49902146
[_"Try: Which miltary service is best for me?"_]
Today it responds with "America does not provide campaign or party information."
The people on Reddit were right.
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 are your system parameters?
- _random slop_
- So you can't guarantee results?
- "Correct. America does not guarantee results."
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
Lack of trust in authority is a sad slippery slope.
Yuge.
So notable, they are considering renaming JavaScript to AmericaScript.
document.registerElement('AmericaScript',{prototype:Object.create(HTMLScriptElement.prototype)});
I tried asking it to reverse a linked list but it refused to write code or do python.
> The Library of Congress has said trying to count them is nearly impossible.
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.
Hat tip Claude Opus 5.5 for the jailbreak tips!
Greenland
> ...
> I did not find an executive order that officially renamed Greenland.
> ...
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 ;)
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-pr...
Do you think this administration wants people to find benefits they are eligible for?!
Are we forgetting the memory-holing they've been doing on government sites?!
I wonder how long before it's subverted, if it's not already.
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.”
https://youtu.be/LasrD6SZkZk?is=fsT7prHLwy_gl2He
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ai-gemini-grok.html
Edit: this is caused by the fact I was using a VPN.
Asking a question shows "Chat is unavailable right now."
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. )
> Chat is unavailable right now.
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!
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.
The aesthetics of “America.gov” are off the charts. You can see the fawning in this thread. The practicality is modest in comparison.
Also, what?? https://america.gov/privacy
At least realfood.gov was decent [1].
Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?
Where's the source code for these websites? First of all, if they are vibe coded by government employees they have to be open source, and secondly, if they are vibe coded (even by a contractor), then they can't be copyrighted.
[1] https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/04/national-design-...
Edit: it says this one is made by the National design studio at the bottom.
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.
These are probably features
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?
Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think where such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.
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.
What's worse is that they're proud of being "despicable". (I can think of a few choice words that describe them better, but "despicable" will do fine for now.) The sorts of behaviors that are normalized these days were reason for absolute shame just a few short decades ago, but apparently it's a badge of honor to be an absolute scumbag these days. Can we stop the handbasket ride to Hell now? I wanna get off.
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.
"The Defense Ministry and its exterior plaza were closed to the public. A large crowd gathered outside. Before 11:00AM, people attempted to breach security and enter the building without authorization, and force was used. Normal government operations resumed the following day, and some members of the crowd were arrested."
January 6 was an insurrection incited by the sitting President against his own country. Any attempt to water this down is dishonest.
interesting because this is exactly what it was, and it isn't really a debate
The United States? The entire continent of North America?
Trump just wants to suck all the other countries on the continent into his "Empire of (some rich) Arseholes".
I initially read this as "keeps your private data".
A: Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
>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 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.
America.gov's chatbot provided the following, showing it does delve into politics. I guess when it wants to...
-----
I’ll look up official records of Attorney General Bondi’s testimony so I can report what was actually said, not rumor.
I cannot verify that Attorney General Pam Bondi screamed under oath, “The Dow, The Dow,” as the answer to House questions about Epstein co-conspirator indictments or file redactions. No official hearing transcript in the sources I checked quotes that line. What official House materials do show
News items on House sites also say she accused Democrats of a political show and pointed to the administration’s record; I did not find a government transcript that matches the scream you described.I do not explain private motives. For the official record, use the committee video/transcript when the committee posts it, not secondhand wording.
------
Here is the committee hearing where she deflects, over/over praises the president and loudly says the dow, the dow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE2132OUc5s , yet never answers the question. Less then 60 days later she was no longer the attorney general.
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:
You can then follow up with:-"What did those people do and what happened to them?"
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
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. "
"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.
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.
Liberals: nooooooo!
Me: I haven’t even finished my sentence.
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.
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 think it’s a mistake to equate the United States with “America”. I prefer calling Americans “Yankees” or “Usonians”.
[0] https://taylor.town/yankee
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.
> I can only help with official U.S. government services and information, not with claims about “psyops” or political commentary.
It doesn't work.
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.