Former DOGE engineer says he was 'surprised' by 'how efficient' the government is NPR's Juana Summers talks with Sahil Lavingia, who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency as a software engineer assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about his experience.

IMO a lot of the tech bro/low level DOGE stuff is basically in good faith, like if you look at what the gumroad guy wrote about it - www.npr.org/2025/06/02/n...

There’s a whole website about it (because it’s poorly defined)! I would start here - staffeng.com/guides/staff...

The other thing is I don’t want a big propane or diesel tank at my house. I guess I could hook up to natural gas but then we’re depending on the infrastructure again

I’ve been considering this but my main hesitancy is that I don’t know how much maintenance/upkeep a generator needs.

Generator seems better for backup (unless you have solar/tou rates). Maybe better from a carbon pov too unless you get a ton of blackouts.

Last week I tried to get Claude code to write me some buggy code so I could demo some debugging tools. Basically didn’t work at all, mostly wrote correct code and told me there were bugs

Wow, that’s genuinely shocking. I also graduated in 2014 but 1) I was looking for tech jobs and 2) ended up going to grad school instead so I guess I hadn’t realized!

Mamdani graduated college in 2014 (same as me), the economy had recovered from 2008 by then

I biked past that the other day, its not much bigger than my urban arrow in any dimension

I go by Bella’s in South Medford all the time and I keep meaning to go. I hear it’s good! www.facebook.com/share/1AhMTs...

Wow this cuts deep

My point is that high healthcare costs are not really driven by insurance, it’s because doctors and hospitals are expensive and Americans get a lot of healthcare. Even if you eliminated all the insurance overhead, healthcare costs would only go down a little bit.

It was part of the affordable care act, but its provisions (like much of the ACA, e.g. the prohibition of preexisting condition denials) apply to all insurance plans.

The last 15% goes mostly towards operational costs (usually 1-3% is profit)

Health insurance companies are also for the most part publicly traded so you can look up their SEC disclosure forms (10-K) to see where their money goes

State and federal governments, see www.cms.gov/marketplace/... for details

The remainder mostly goes towards operating costs, profits are usually just a couple percent.

Health insurance companies have to pay out (for healthcare) at least 85% of the premiums they collect. If they don’t they have to write rebate checks to their customers. It’s part of the ACA.

us-east-1 was using 1 gigawatt in 2018, this doesn’t seem way out of proportion to me

No, they counted wrong

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Jo...

It’s crazy to me that they are so motivated to destroy the system that made them this rich!

ChatGPT - Dogs in Somerville 1930 Shared via ChatGPT

It’s also good for random pop-history level research - I was curious about dog ownership in the 1920s and it came up with this pretty detailed/interesting and well sourced explanation chatgpt.com/share/680d4b...

You need to review its output! You need to understand what it’s good/bad at! In that way it’s like any tool.

I use AI for most tasks at my (software development) job and spend probably 20-50% of my workday using Claude Code directly. I use it for writing new code, explaining parts of the code base, finding bugs, code review, etc.

There are only a small number of chipsets and every dock uses one of them. And thunderbolt ports are pretty complex.

It’s also obviously fun, 20% of the population is miserable and takes it out on anyone who’s having a good time

The message from the Left should be: tariffs bad, industrial policy good.
Sure, there are niche cases where tariffs might be useful as part of industrial policy, but it really weakens the message to add qualifiers. Fight unreservedly against the thing destroying the economy.

Every morning the market goes up because maybe this is the day that Trump changes his mind! Every afternoon it crashes because no, it isn’t.

Wouldn’t both of those drive yields down though?

Down less because now you know what the market will do if he reverses?

Google showing “no chart available” every time I search for a stock symbol… chat is this good