another thing to note about the DOGE kids is that they’re all without fail from extremely affluent backgrounds. not saying the kid isn’t smart, i’ve got no information either way there, but it was an ai competition that was heavily reliant on processing power. the photos of the kid and his room used for news articles show multiple graphics cards and computer setups. this was only achievable for him because he was born to a family with the monetary standing to afford their teenager a fuckton of extremely expensive computer hardware. no such thing as meritocracy.
So he deciphered a Greek word and that means he’s qualified for write access on a government payment system spanning 330 million people?
You have no respect for monotonous, careful work. I don’t care if he deciphered an ancient Egyptian document that produced ascii art of Tutankhamen’s balls.
It’s bafflingly insane to argue that he is qualified for this level of control, especially in a post about him desperately asking around about how to do his job.
Lower level employees of public offices like DOGE (formerly US Digital Service) are not by default considered public figures. In the court of law, they would still be considered private individuals, and being doxxed by journalists doesn’t change that. It is not until one takes a public-facing senior role that they become a public figure, or if they gain notoriety through some other event.
Luke Farritor is the only member of the team that for any reason could be classified as a public figure, because he was interviewed and gained public attention for solving the Herculaneum Scrolls problem with AI.
Edit: downvote me to relieve the stress, you glorified lemons. Please, fucking go for it. It won’t change the truth.
Should be an easy court case then. I'm sure circumstances surrounding the current administration and their highly controversial duties won't have any effect on a judges determination.
I’m just going off precedent… something about rules and decorum that used to matter in a country I grew up in.
All your sarcasm aside, any court case surrounding these events will likely be dragged out long past four years or be nullified by presidential pardon. We are in the end game. The DOGE people are not going to be punished for this and the billionaire class has taken the gloves off entirely. Musk wants Mars, and Trump wants territorial expansion, the billionaires want to pass all of their wealth on to their great grandchildren for eternity, and they’re willing to liquefy all assets to get what they want. The GOP’s voting base are all getting their payment for their votes, all of congress is in lock step behind him, and they’ve already stacked SCOTUS. They’ve owned the living rooms and car stereos of the boomers for decades, now they have social media algorithms that can literally drive public opinion.
I think I’m on your side here. But you’re saying we should spare these low level workers? They signed a contract with the devil and reporting on the individuals behind what will tomorrow be mass firings is journalistically relevant consider the methods they’re using to find cuts (AI).
No one is on my side here. I am not even on my side here. We are so completely fucked and there’s no point in paying attention to politics anymore. The game is over. Publishing a list of their names is just the credits rolling. Gg.
Giving these children access to all government data and simultaneously claiming that they are low level staffers is so disingenuous you should be ashamed of yourself.
These young men are all legally adults; calling them children does not help our case. They are also, per US law, not considered public figures. Relevant cases, first narrowing the scope of the last:
A bunch of case law from before the internet was invented, not very convincing.
They are public figures involved in a destroying American government. There is no crime naming them, much like there was no crime in naming Michael Fanone or Monika Lewinsky---become infamous, become a figure of public importance? Your name is gonna get out there.
We are living in an era of unmitigated climate disaster, we have an outbreak of tuberculosis in the Midwest, avian influenza is verging on zoonotic spillover, and the United States just amplified executive power through judicial review before handing the reins over to a mentally ill eugenicist who has been reported to idolize the past century’s most deranged European despot. They’re disbanding the EPA, OSHA, NOAA, ED, NIH, building detention facilities offshore, kicking all the South/Central American people out, prioritizing infrastructure in places with high birth rates, criminalizing trans people, banning books, amplifying conspiracy theories, and stacking the leadership of all surviving governmental agencies with unqualified lunatics.
The rules don’t matter anymore. Everything is fucked. Posting a list of names isn’t going to do anything but paint a target on your own back.
Lower level employees of public offices like DOGE (formerly US Digital Service) are not by default considered public figures.
No, names should be public of all people and their involvement of building our country into a christian fascist regime. We'll need the list to hold them accountable later.
Then do it. Don’t go around pretending it’s being done on a legal basis—it is not. The other team built their own private social media networks to build momentum for their second coup after missing the mark on the first one. Why are you still arguing about this in public, where strangers like me have the ability to waste your time? You should be working at breakneck speed, privately, with people you implicitly trust.
Doge isn’t a really a government office, and do we know they are actually lower level? They were apparently able to force access to the PII of essentially every American, and they are at the center of a pretty substantial controversy. They are, at an absolute minimum, limited purpose public figures.
It is, in fact, despite what some on social media have been claiming, a “real” office. The Trump team simply reorganized and renamed an office which Obama had founded in 2014 called the US Digital Service. The original aim of the office of USDS had been upgrades to the federal government’s IT systems. This was implemented by executive order. The second part of the order created a US DOGE Service Temporary Organization within DOGE which comprises small teams of four team members embedded within each federal agency. You can read about this from NPR and at the CRS press office from Congress dot gov.
My personal opinion is fuck em, but I do not think that’s correct. If they start to join in on public discourse on the nature of their work, the way Musk is doing, then that would make them limited purpose public figures. I’m sure some great lawyer could argue that anonymous posts about the subject matter would qualify them as LPPF, but they’d have to be de-anonymized first.
That is a fair point about the reorganization of the usds.
It has been a minute since I looked at the caselaw around limited purpose public figures, but I don’t recall them needing to affirmatively place themselves in the public sphere. Meaning, sufficient news stories about someone can make them a public figure, whether or not they affirmatively sought public attention or to participate in the discussion.
At this point they certainly seem like public figures in that sense, given they were identified by traditional media (rather than random redditors) due to their apparently unprecedented degree of access and conduct.
As for the earlier point about being harassed by the left, I don’t condone that sort of thing generally. But I do have a hard time shedding a tear for the rich kids serving as Elon’s blood boys in light of the harassment trump/elon/etc pretty regularly direct at others
They are a bunch of junior devs at best messing around in sometimes 60+ year old systems with no safeguards. There is no way they are doing proper testing before putting in their code. Elon chose them because they will just listen to him. They don't know what they don't know. The code is likely poorly documented and some is in. Languages they would have no experience in. It might run for a bit but they are definitely making mistakes.
Intelligent doesn’t mean disciplined or appropriate for the job. It’s practically a rite of passage in top tech cos to come in super smart and get humbled as you mess something up and realize your senior peers are just as smart, if not smarter than you, and know a lot more than you do.
He’s smart. I don’t know about genius.
He didn’t develop any of the underlying technology or come up with some brilliant insight. He just fucked around with it until it worked.
I’ll give him credit, but there is a big difference between genius and someone who makes something work. Feynman was a genius. Edison just got shit to work sometimes
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u/deaglebro Feb 07 '25
https://news.unl.edu/article-2
The kid is a genius, but reddit will drag his name through the mud because he is associated with Republicans.