Totally Human Emdash User

I agree, that is a better way of putting it.

Actually, he completely admitted to and took full responsibility for his mistake; at no point did he offer an excuse, only an explanation.

To the extent I was defending him, it was because people insisted on painting him in the worst possible light, and on misinterpreting his explanation as an excuse, not because I think that everything that he did was okay.

I agree that these things do not excuse his actions, but there was a tendency in that thread to paint him in the worst possible light, which I felt was uncalled for.

I am said to have seen him be fired from Ars because I think there were mitigating circumstances—it is troubling that he felt the need to work while sick!—but on the other hand, given how badly he violated the trust placed in him, it is hard to see how Ars could have made any other choice.

I did not downvote you—my instance does not allow or show downvotes, which is really nice!—but he was sick, and he did make a mistake, and him being fired does not make either of those things false.

Also, a ton of people were piling on him in that thread, so you had plenty of company in calling him to be fired.

I was the one who wrote that comment, and it was not an attempt to excuse all of his actions but a response to the following comment:

Someone deserves to be fired. Just imagine you’re paying someone to do a job and they just 100% completely outsource it to a machine in 5 seconds and then goes home.

Here is the full comment that I wrote, including the part you snipped off at the end:

He wrote the article himself, he just got mixed up when experimenting with using an AI tool to help him extract quotes from a blog entry. (He is the head AI writer, so learning about these tools is his job.) It was nonetheless his failure to check the quotes he was copying from his note to make sure that he got them right… but an important bit of context is that he had COVID while doing all this. Now, arguably he should have taken sick time off instead of trying to work through it (as he admits), but this would have cost him vacation time, and the fact that he even was forced into making this choice is a systemic problem that is not being sufficiently acknowledged.

Only Congress can change the name of the Department of Defense, and not only has it not passed any legislation to do so, but the most National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed after Trump’s executive order, only mentions the “Department of Defense” and never the “Department of War”.

So, no, there is not officially a Department of War, there continues to only officially be a Department of Defense.

I would.

The fact that the Trump administration can create web sites saying whatever it pleases does not make the name change legitimate.

Yeah, there are all sorts of ways in which standing up to the administration is hard, but calling something by its actual name should be a relatively easy thing to do!

I am a simple man: I see a fascist attempt to impose his will on the rest of us, I oppose it.

In fact, for this reason DOGE was not a brand new department but the result of Trump taking over the United States Digital Service, hollowing it out, and turning the shell into the United States DOGE Service. This was a tragedy because the USDS was doing genuinely useful work by bringing in people from the industry to use their experience to improve the incredibly crappy government digital services that exist. I was fortunate enough to see a talk by one of the founding people of the USDS (before it had official existence), and it was inspiring hearing how much of a difference he was able to make and how it made a real impact on the lives of veterans who were dependent on the service that was collapsing.

Additionally, this was also a tragedy because other departments had essentially been gradually coaxed into granting the USDS access to their data so that USDS could make improvements to their systems, which DOGE immediately took advantage of to get direct access to all of this data after it took over the USDS.

Be that as it may, its name is the Department of Defense, and Trump does not have the legal authority to change that name. Calling it the Department of War, like calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, is a form of giving in to the administration. That is what I am objecting to.

Department of War Defense

Ah, I was not paying much attention to the distinction; my bad, then.

Building on what you said, I think that the sum is actually pretty significant if you think of it as being roughly $100 million per person, and then multiply by the number of people hurt by the supposed “Autopilot” who now have incentive to sue.

It is not clear to me why archive.today is so important given the continuing existence of archive.org.

In fairness, the swastika was important to Hinduism long before Nazi Germany started using it, and one could argue that Indians should not feel that they need to give the symbol up just because some Europeans misused it.

On the other hand, do you think this would be giving them too much benefit of the doubt? Hindu nationalism seems to be pretty scary, after all.

I had forgotten how big of a deal it was at the time! Thank you for the reminder.

That is so cool! Thank you for sharing this. 🙂

It is worth noting that this paper was submitted in October of 2024, so it predates the current administration.