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Judging from how the DoD currently buys software, lots of money will be spent, many headlines will be written, awards will be handed out, and zero software will
by ungreased0675 1y ago
Judging from how the DoD currently buys software, lots of money will be spent, many headlines will be written, awards will be handed out, and zero software will make it on to user workstations. End users will continue to use Excel for everything.
- tonyhart7 1y ago200 mil is chump change for them, if prototype turned to be good then good for them but if its not then they are not worry
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago200 mil for a government contract is peanuts when you see how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
- raizer88 1y agoDOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoBad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about? You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV. And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS. Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both. This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
- nkrisc 1y agoStep up, throw down some numbers and sources.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoLet's do a thought exercise on your loaded question, considering government waste and corruption has been thoroughly covered by journalists since the invention of the free press and are a Google search away for you. If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you? If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist? Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
- potato3732842 1y ago>If I do post sources, then what? Do you take your words back and admit that stuff documented by the press it is real? If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity. You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
- ethbr1 1y agoIt's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion. If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid. As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended. If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
- zimpenfish 1y ago> "waste and corruption" Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
- transcriptase 1y agoWhat do you call it when the government pays for tens of thousands of annual licenses for software and only a few hundred are ever activated?
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoOh oh I know this one! A rounding error!
- transcriptase 1y agoClose! A drop in the bucket! Which is why it’s important the bucket is always getting larger, that way everything is a drop and no single thing is worth making more efficient!
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoThere are lots of single things worth making more efficient. This isn't one of them. This isn't even remotely close to the top decile of the list. This is probably in the last 5% of things you'd want to fix. It's not principled to solve problems in stupid ways, it's actually just stupid. Here's where someone who has thought about the problem for more than 5 seconds would likely start: gigantic healthcare organizations defrauding Medicare, in particular vertically integrated pay-viders. Literally tens of billions of dollars per year in known, easily detectable fraud.
- transcriptase 1y agoSort your list by dollars saved divided by human-hours required to achieve, and add a column with likelihood of success after 2 years.
- _lvbh 1y agoThe goal of DOGE wasn't really to cut waste and corruption, just stuff they didn't like. I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
- the_sleaze_ 1y agoYour argument is that the government doesn't waste money? Are you sure that's a defensible position? Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000. What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?
- jagermo 1y agoI am convinced that you can find waste (probably not as much corruption) in every modern government. However, you need people to really dive into the processes, ask what and why those have been set up in the past (every rule has an origin story) and if they can be bundled or streamlined. Same with expenses, you need things like forensic accountants and time to understand things. Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.
- overfeed 1y ago> neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste. The Government Accountability Office is a congressional body that's been doing exactly what you describe for years. It's old - so it goes against the narrative that government waste is unmonitored, it's also unglamorous, boring, and not meme-able, and most importantly non-partisan, so it won't reliably dominate the news cycle with outrageous partisan talking points.
- NHQ 1y agoThat 200 Million is chump change only to people who think like chumps. In reality it is total waste, unproductive taxation that doubles as a counter balance to inflation, so doubly wasteful. Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.
- tonyhart7 1y agoUS literally have 1 trillion military budget, if you think 200 mil its a waste for prototyping a next gen weapon then I would have a bad news for you
- potato3732842 1y agoThe nickels and dimes add the F up. Stop acting like they don't. Save perhaps the most extreme "I spend 70% of my six figure income on rent because I want to live alone somewhere trendy" of household budgets this is true for literally everything from the smallest business in the smalles of small towns to the federal government.
- tonyhart7 1y ago200 million is 0.02 percent of 1 trillion. if you don't mind having 1 trillion military then you are not mind for 200 mill contract
- potato3732842 1y agoNow add up all the other 2/20/200mil nickels and dimes across the DOD and what do you get? The budget isn't all aircraft carriers and stealth bombers. Maybe this is a good buy, maybe it's a bad buy. I don't know and I have no way of ever knowing. Just because the budget is big and the money is other peoples does not mean decision makers can be wishy washy about a hundred or two mil here and there. Everyone needs to care all the time. People like you and who share your "it's all pennies in the grand scheme" thought process at scale is the problem and why we're even having this discussion.
- TZubiri 1y agoNot all software is made public and used in workstations, especially not in military
- 0_____0 1y agoWould you mind elaborating a bit?
- Waterluvian 1y ago“Let’s take another whack at real-time object identification built into night vision goggles.” (Made-up but plausible example)
- tough 1y agojust giving the whole DoD chatgpt that's deployed in their servers would be pretty useful i guess for them?
- deletedie 1y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help The physical disconnect hypothesis isn't really borne out by the lack of concern for collateral damage in pre-firearm warfare, when killing was mostly done face to face, compared to today.
- golergka 1y agoPhysical connect means that the person who is making the decision to kill is scared for their life. Physical disconnect means he's only scared for a piece of equipment. Guess which one of those is more trigger happy.
- baxtr 1y ago> End users will continue to use Excel for everything. Wait, I thought AI is killing all these jobs?!
- orangepanda 1y agoIt's Excel's format guessing doing all the killing
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoThey keep saying this, but I'd like to see AI drink 6 beers before lunchtime.
- sillystu04 1y agoQuite the opposite. AI will enable the creation of ever more macros and guide users to make even more elaborate pivot tables.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoObligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1667/ https://xkcd.com/1667/
- egorfine 1y agoSome of the government jobs could be killed by Excel alone but even that did not happen for decades.
- jmsdnns 1y agoWhere did TCP/IP come from? It's on every computer.
- segfaultex 1y agoIs your implication that MSFT will bundle the tool in their windows dist? I wonder how that will work with the networking reqs the DoD has. Probably some direct link to a gov VPC I suppose.
- xpe 1y agoIs this substantive engagement with the earlier comment? I’m not seeing it. You probably know the examples are different (long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption … versus fairly early-days access to a GenAI model tuned for defense contexts).
- ajross 1y agoGenerally a notable counter-example to a broad-brush point stands as "substantive engagement", yeah. Stating that the Pentagon buys software badly in the general case is a less specific and less engaged point than "ARPANET and IPv4 were DoD projects that ate the world". If you want to argue that the examples are different, that's an extra point you need to bring to the table. You're not allowed to assume everyone just agrees with you.
- xpe 1y agoDon’t you think the standard you mention is too low? I do. The comment didn’t advance the conversation. It was a relatively shallow level of engagement; something I’d expect to see in a silly Reddit back and forth. We deserve better here. And to your point: my comment explained my point: “long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption versus…”. Of course I don’t assume everyone agrees with me. (You don’t really think I do, do you?) But I want people to put a certain level effort to reach a quality bar. My problem perhaps is that people don’t want to put in sufficient effort. Or perhaps as a community we are not setting the bar high enough. This level of thinking is attainable here; we just need to set the bar and fight for it.
- xpe 1y agoThis isn’t software to be installed, though, is it? I am likely to think this will be a network service and therefore available via a browser. Connectivity may be better than you think.
- LanceH 1y agoYou almost had it until the end. This will be used to generate even more powerpoint.
- pyman 1y agoGovernment officials were asking Microsoft Clippy (the only virtual assistant with clearance) to create a national defense roadmap for the next five years, but kept getting the same response: "Hi there. It looks like you're trying to write a document. Would you like me to open Word?" This upgrade was long overdue.
- seany 1y agoI want to see the 3pao reports from deploying a large llm inside high or one of the iso partitions.
- VectorLock 1y agoDon't forget "Lt Col. commissions will be bought."
- matchagaucho 1y agoFrom what I understood, usage will be largely async, background, AI batch jobs using the latest reasoning models.
- lazyeye 1y agoNot to mention OpenAI has quite a few foreign nationals working for them anyway so I wonder what new defense tech will stay secret for any period of time.