Sahil Lavingia — an engineer, tech startup founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for content creators
Thanks for the article, now I know what kind of person leads Gumroad: A DOGE lackey.
Edit:
Lavingia wrote that he wanted to work at DOGE to make an impact, noting that he previously canvassed for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run in 2016.
And he has no political backbone.
WIRED previously reported on the alarm bells Lavingia and his work set off for VA employees worried about DOGE’s lack of understanding of the agency and disregard for normal procedures.
“In meetings with the Office of the CTO, I discovered ambitious ongoing software projects like reducing veterans’ benefits claims processing from 133 days to under a week,” wrote Lavingia. “I also learned that several of VA’s code repos were already open-source, and the world’s first electronic health record system, VistA, was built by VA employees over 40 years ago.”
And he is an idiot to boot, with no prior knowledge of the agency he tried to trim down.
That last part: Yep, x100.
A whole lot of these newer techbro types are pretty much just script kiddies: They know one, maybe two languages and have their favorite libraries, and thats it.
They don’t bother to investigate why anything exists the way it does before they start ‘disrupting’ it… which very often results in just a bunch of actual service disruptions, which they then patch up with their new favorite language/library, making more confusing, poorly or undocumented spaghetti.
These idiots very likely couldn’t even pass a job interview to be hired as an actual employee for the actual org they are taking a hatchet to as essentially outside contractors…
But, American tech culture is such that management generally never listens to in house coders that actually know the systems, they prefer to hire outside contractors who have a marketing department and charismatic (read: wildly unrealistic) VP of Sales, not realizing they are getting themselves trapped into a much more expensive cycle of dependancy irt constantly needing contractors.
Now with DOGE, they’re basically a hostile force of ‘contractors’ that more resemble a cyberpunk style hostile takeover… but this culture of worshipping massively overhyped contractors / serial start up types, with more money and confidence than sense… thats a big part of how we got to this point.
They don’t bother to investigate why anything exists the way it does before they start ‘disrupting’ it…
Chesterton’s Fence
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
Don’t change something until you understand why it is there in the first place.
Perhaps ironically, I first learned of GK Chesterton via the inclusion of some snippets of The Man Who Was Thursday… in Deus Ex.
Hey game devs, want some tips for immersion? Just generally good singleplayer game design?
Notice some of the little things, or fundamental design concepts that DX does, even back 20 years ago:
Idle animation loops of just basic breathing. Adds immersion, but doesn’t feel as… formulaic, predictable, pre-scripted, as an NPC cycling through the same set of idle animations, or just… not having any.
Location based damage and healing.
Meaningfully different difficulty modes that result in the player changing their gameplay style, not just making there be 10x as many enemies with 10x as much health.
You can have a regenerating health/shield… but it only works situationally, and is actually costly in terms of requiring actual resource management and thus forethought.
Levels/Missions/Quests that can be approached and completed via a variety of gameplay styles that mesh fairly well with your player’s customizable, modular build.
Skill system and inventory system that actually rewards and encourages off the beaten path exploration… but can accomplish this without a minimap or some kind of giant glowing waypoint on your hud… but also, does not strictly require the completion of a multitude of very low effort, formulaic, boring ‘sub quests’.
Dialogue choice/tree system not based on a speech or charisma skill… but instead based on what the player actually does or does not know due to prior gameplay… and dialogue choices/paths that actually result in different outcomes, not just 3 ways of saying yes, one way of saying no, and all 4 of those tend to result in the same actual outcome.
Note how you can capture the feeling of an immerisve and expansive fictional world… without actually having to fully model a huge empty world that will end up being largely empty and boring, unless you are also very good at procedurally generating a whole lot of your game.
… I could go on.
No, DX isn’t literally perfect in everyway, but good lord, if you want to make an FPS or even TPS game that is single player and maybe has a multiplayer component… probably worth doing your own case study of DX.
WTF is Gumroad? A me-too rehash of a million other shitty e-commerce sites?
Yo, picture this: Gumroad is like the Gumtree for Silkroad
MAGA meets reality
I’ve seen and heard similar news items popping up recently.
How much does everyone else have to suffer while these children rediscover government?
These people are so disrespectful to everyone already working in government. People who already wanted government to be efficient and have been working for years to make it happen.
*worked
It’s like “spaghetti code.” A 50/50 whether the rewrite will actually improve performance
Of course there is spaghetti code. It represents the mass of exceptions on exceptions lobbied for over the years by rich folks and businesses. Tax everyone the same at a simple rate and most of this goes away.
