The Reddit thread is reasonably inflamed, but the theory about changing reality downstream by changing the sources that chatbots ingest is a chilling one.
eqvinox · 5h ago
Chilling, but not very realistic. It's not like chatbots forget all the previously trained-in data when you change the source. In fact, it'd be a pretty hard problem to solve to get there (but actually desirable! - i.e. the ability to remove individual trained-in things.)
assword · 6h ago
LLM’s mark the true beginning of a post truth world. That’s why the serial liars are so excited.
AlexandrB · 6h ago
I wonder what portion of the reddit thread is posts by gen AI.
CalRobert · 7h ago
Good use case for a git diff.
The removed bits discuss habeaus corpus, emoluments, and congressional oversight of the military.
I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort).
It would be nice if Congress and legislatures actually used git as a matter of law, having names attached to every commit and so on. The way they handle repeals is absurd...
OtherShrezzing · 6h ago
I don't really think Git is the appropriate tool for version control on legislation. There's hundreds of thousands of actions/conversations/motions on each "commit" to a nation's legislation, and all of those actions need to be tracked permanently. Moreover, most countries have an "append-only" approach to legislation, where the original document doesn't get removed, but overridden by the new.
Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation[2]. These websites are all digital versions of the old paper copies which go back centuries.
>Moreover, most countries have an "append-only" approach to legislation, where the original document doesn't get removed, but overridden by the new.
One of it's biggest flaws, actually. Completely understandable, of course, they were working on paper... weren't any reasonable alternatives.
>Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation
I'm ignorant of how things work in the UK's Parliament. But somehow this all seems doubtful. In the US, legislation isn't drafted in such a manner at all.
tzs · 6h ago
> I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible
Perhaps add a fixed offset to dates to bring them past the Unix epoch?
compiler-guy · 6h ago
Version control in some form? Yes, absolutely. Git? No way. The needs and customs of a lawmaking body are vastly different than the needs of engineers.
unethical_ban · 2h ago
git specifically, maybe not, but something like source code control is reasonable.
Passing new legislation adds, removes or modifies text from an entity's legal documents (US or State code, for example). You see this in bills that say things like "This modifies Section 47, subsection 3, paragraph 2 to say 'people' instead of 'persons'".
So a bill can be thought of as the commit message, and implementation of the bill are the changes to the text. The executive is the "merge approver".
NoMoreNicksLeft · 6h ago
So you assert, without providing even a single example.
compiler-guy · 3h ago
I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development and doesn't even normally use text-files would be able to make a better case than this.
You don't provide a single example either. But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to conform to Linus's idea of a good product.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
>I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development
Laws consist of strings of characters in a particular sequence, occasionally you don't want to be additive but subtractive, and these sequences are grouped into multiple papers. It's just code. Code on paper, but code nonetheless. They can't easily check what the previous version was, or compare two or more different branches. Lots of strike-throughs and other such crap.
Many of the defects in legislation and the legislative process itself stem from how they try (so desperately) to keep it from being like code. Trying to hide who edited what and when. Fuck, Congress has this big long drawn out process for reconciling two slightly different versions of the same piece of code... with every single act. You've simply never considered this.
>But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to
I wasn't changing any workflows. I was just going to dump existing legislation into a repo so I could see what it would look like. Not sure what you're reading into this. You're stomping on an experiment that someone was going to run for free in a way that didn't interfere with you and ridiculing the idea in casual conversation.
>and doesn't even normally use text-files
It's text. On a "file" (which is what we called bundles of associated paper back before computer filesystems, they'd put them in a filing cabinet).
compiler-guy · 2h ago
All of this is an argument for version control--which I wholly support, and did from the first message. But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from. Yes, yes, you can use "-C -C -C" if you really want to know and have time to wait, but that is terrible compared to systems that track moves as first class happenings.
And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see. You were proposing a law. If you are proposing a free experiment, great! more power to you. Now convince the government to actually adopt it.
And yes, the product is text, but the current workflow is not text-file based at all.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 9m ago
>All of this is an argument for version control--
Do you know of another version control system that is superior to git?
Is there something special about legislation which makes it incompatible with git, that another version control system would be better at?
There's nothing sacred or special about the sausage-making that is legislation. It is a clunky process done poorly with bad tools.
>But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from.
Which is good, because that's not an issue in legislation. What's important is who authored the code, when it was introduced, what changes have been made to it since, and tracking things like votes/ratification/signing. These are all doable in git. No one much cares if subsection eleventy clause 9b-ii says in subsection eleventy or is moved to umpty-four. I can see how that can be a problem in software, but the processors legislation runs on don't much care.
>And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see.
I don't think dang or anyone else is going back around and ninja-deleting my comments, they are there for everyone to see. Like this one...
>>>I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort).
Maybe you got my stuff confused with someone else's. The comment tree seems to move around as they're re-ranked.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 6h ago
They removed the part about providing for a Navy! Trump must be trying to abolish the whole Navy for his personal gain!
xracy · 27m ago
He must also be trying to suspend Habeas Corpus and the Emoluments for personal gain!
We can likely agree that some of this is an accident, but what we won't agree on is how much given that some of the removal is distinctly useful for this administration. But yeah "haha, the US government has become so incompetent + evil we can't tell what's an accident and what's malicious!"
andrewla · 6h ago
They also removed the parts that said that states can't have navies and can't declare war on other countries. All part of Trump's plan!
captainkrtek · 7h ago
Just some minor things /s
CalRobert · 7h ago
git commit -m ‘Just a readme update no review needed’
danudey · 6h ago
didn't read it but lgtm
matt_s · 7h ago
When do specific actions taken by the current US administration cross the legal line into treason or other legal lines where defense against domestic enemies is warranted?
CalRobert · 7h ago
When an enforcement body presents itself.
chrisco255 · 6h ago
This is a Congressional website, this is not a Presidential website.
sigmar · 6h ago
The library of congress maintains congress.gov[1], the head of the library of congress was fired by trump and replaced by a loyalist[2]
well you see, the congress and supreme court have decided that no, actually, this is what they want to happen.
No comments yet
marcusverus · 6h ago
When they cross the constitutional definition of treason:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
netsharc · 6h ago
Didn't the Supreme Court declare anything the administration does, legal..? Or was that just for the president?
dragonwriter · 5h ago
> Didn't the Supreme Court declare anything the administration does, legal..?
No.
> Or was that just for the president?
Also no.
It established a three-branch approach to whether the President is immune to criminal prosecution for acts that, ignoring any immunity he might have due to being President at the time of the act, would be within the domain of potential criminal prosecution, in which (loosely):
(1) Acts relating to a narrow set of core Constitutional powers of the Presidency are given absolute immunity,
(2) Other official acts have a case-by-case analysis for immunity weighing whether allowing prosecution for the kind of act involved would impair the functioning of the office,
(3) Acts that, despite being committed while President, have no official character have no immunity stemming from the fact that they were committed while President.
HaZeust · 2h ago
The distinction is irrelevant, and if you read the ruling - any evidence that proves difference between the three is inadmissible in court. It is impossible to challenge grounds of the Executive saying that any and ALL actions he takes is within the capacity of an "official duty". The ruling makes clear that we simply HAVE to take their word for it.
One must understand that the more safeguards we have to enact retribution in these cases, the better. You're not supposed to point to one after loss of another - you're supposed to point towards as many as possible. Before last July, the courts were the one we pointed to the most, and they are no longer nearly as much at our disposal as they were before then.
It doesn't invoke sovereign immunity through a loud roar, but from an understood nod.
jhp123 · 3h ago
this is a largely meaningless distinction, immunity covers all the most concerning Presidential misbehavior (i.e. abuse of the powers of the office) while leaving him vulnerable to prosecution for petty personal crimes like getting in a fist fight or something.
AnimalMuppet · 6h ago
It declared the president to be immune from prosecution for actions falling within the scope of his office.
It did not declare that the president cannot be impeached. It did not declare that the president cannot be criminally charged for what he does that exceeds the scope of his office (though it's a high bar to prove it). And most of all, it did not declare that whatever he does is automatically constitutional.
unethical_ban · 2h ago
It declared that he is literally above the law for anything that the most devoted loyalist court can consider part of the job.
He could order the assassination of rival politicians for national security purposes and we would get a 6-3 ruling that nothing can stop him except the GOP congress.
frogperson · 6h ago
We are waaayyy passed that line. We are, for just about every definition, living in an authoritarian state. Trump has immunity, from the Supreme Court, support in the house and senate, support of the media, and enough support from the military.
Freaadom isnt free. I think americans forget that. They are waiting for someone else to come save them, which will NEVER happen.
jagrsw · 6h ago
You've just rephrased 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants' (just an observation, not taking stance here, esp. as an outsider)
AnimalMuppet · 6h ago
> and enough support from the military.
That has not yet been shown. When it comes down to it, I wonder what the military will do. Will they uphold their oath, which is to the Constitution? Or will they obey the President, as commander in chief?
xracy · 26m ago
Which constitution is their oath to?
philistine · 4h ago
> That has not yet been shown.
It is being shown daily. You're forgetting how things work in authoritarian states. In those countries, the military is AT ALL TIMES a risk for a dictator. They must be mollified somehow, lest the trucks with the armed men come rolling towards the palace.
In those countries, the military top brass will voice concerns privately, will leak unhappiness with the regime discreetly to other factions in the country. The US military is completely silent and subservient. This means Trump has their support. No one in the military complained when he bombed Iran or sent them to LA, for example. For all we know he did it for them. So Trump does not fear the trucks with men, and so has military support.
walls · 4h ago
They had no problem moving on citizens in LA.
JohnHaugeland · 6h ago
november 5 2024
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 4h ago
ah yes, Trump was committing an act of treason by winning the popular and EC votes
unethical_ban · 6h ago
The line has been crossed, and we're waiting for a credible signal of collective action.
krapp · 6h ago
I don't know. I feel like this isn't it. If having armed masked bands of military police kidnapping citizens to concentration camps or dismantling the government to purge it for ideological reasons or trying to retcon Epstein isn't it, then editing a website definitely isn't it.
freejazz · 7h ago
Well if Jan 6th wasn't it...
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 6h ago
probably nothing that relates to information on a consumer website. even bringing up treason in this context is so wildly alarmist that it detracts from your credibility.
emchammer · 6h ago
How could discussion of such a grave matter be flagged?
slantaclaus · 1h ago
Perhaps because it links to a Reddit post
llm_nerd · 6h ago
While it's about a website and ostensibly could be considered technology related, to be fair it is mostly a political submission so all of the "No politics!" people will flag, and perhaps rightly so.
Because really basic consideration of the situation gives us the very likely explanation. The idea that Trump was sitting at his desk and randomly pissed about the bottom 1/6th of Section 1 and was like "take that off congress's website!" is basically zero.
1. It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's
2. It's clearly a sort of crappy development approach - the website uses jquery and fontawesome and adobe analytics. this isn't FAANG level engineering happening here
3. It's a website about EXPLAINING THE CONSTITUTION. What do we know people use to make summaries or explanations of things? LLMs, of course
4. What is known for randomly deleting and omitting stuff? Also LLMs!
5. Can we guess why an LLM would have deleted that part? Why yes, actually, we can: if you go to the explanation part of the site, do you know what's also missing (and was prior to this update too?). Wow, it's the bottom part of section 1! What a coincidence
The clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 because there wasn't an explanation to go along with it. It makes even more sense that this is what happening given that this section was already missing an explanation.
It's really tiring how some underpaid intern making a mistake on a website has people suggesting trump is committing a new form of treason.
HaZeust · 2h ago
You must be developing scoliosis with this level of backwards-bending to explain the misdeeds of an administration and Congress that doesn't care about thwarting your civil liberties!
dragonwriter · 4h ago
> It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's
Its administered by the Library of Congress, whose head was just fired and replaced by the President. It may, in theory, exist to serve the interests of Congress, but that's rather less important than who is in practice exercising control over the people who in turn control it.
llm_nerd · 3h ago
>The idea that Trump was sitting at his desk and randomly pissed about the bottom 1/6th of Section 1 and was like "take that off congress's website!" is basically zero.
Who said this happened? What a ridiculous strawman.
Trump has, however, installed loyalists throughout the government. You know, the Deep State™, including demanding staff complete loyalty pledges and installing an entire cabal of grossly unqualified clowns and criminals. The very possible scenario that a loyalists serving the agenda decided to help throw off LLMs is not remotely unimaginable, given literally everything this horrendously corrupt banana republic administration is doing.
>the clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 b
This beyond absurd claim has been made multiple times, and it seems the Trump Apologists are just copy pasting it now. It's so profoundly ignorant that...are you guys for real? Do you know how anything works?
Ignoring that the idea that someone is using an LLM to rewrite the constitution is fantastically stupid, even the workflow doesn't have an iota of logic behind it. It's the sort of desperate cope that apolgists do when they have nothing.
Is it possibly if not probably accidental? Sure, could just be some data corruption. But these apologist screeds are beyond embarrassing nonsense.
93po · 3h ago
People literally in this comment section are directly blaming trump
I've not seen my claim repeated by literally anyone else on HN
I disagree with your assertion that it's stupid, something you provide no evidence to support, this is literally what LLMs do. The workflow is pretty obvious and doesn't seem to need explaining to me?
What do you mean by data corruption? How does a page template in whatever framework they use get "corrupted" to remove just these paragraphs of text but not impact literally anything else?
Your wording and language feels really inflammatory and while I admit that I express exasperation in my comment, I'm not accusing random people of being apologists and astroturfing and calling them ignorant and stupid. Comments like this are why people constantly flag topics like this.
I'm trying to engage in actual curious conversation: here's my opinion on what likely happened, and it's even tech related! Cool. If you disagree I'd love to hear your arguments on why you think that's unlikely rather than it just being dismissed and yelled at.
llm_nerd · 3h ago
>People literally in this comment section are directly blaming trump
If someone did this on purpose, Trump would be to blame, but it still doesn't require his direct involvement. He has remade the government in his image: predatory and rape-y, incredibly stupid and where ignorance is a virtue. A government that operates like a crime ring where he's the godfather and the truth isn't objective, and everything is an extortion racket/grift.
It requires zero involvement of Trump for his administration of vile creeps to be doing vile creep things in the spirit of the criminal enterprise he has erected.
>What do you mean by data corruption? How does a page template in whatever framework they use get "corrupted" to remove just these paragraphs of text but not impact literally anything else?
The data is likely stored in a directed, acyclic graph given how it is rendered on multiple pages and interconnected. Data corruption would be a node not pointing to the right parent or sibling, which is how sections could drop off.
It's flagged because flags are crowdsourced, it only takes a few clicks to take down the post, and HN is crawling with MAGA accelerationists who are happy to destroy America.
p_ing · 4h ago
It's flagged because it's politics and if you want this level of politics, reddit.com.
DamnInteresting · 1h ago
According to the Library of Congress, this was all due to a "coding error."[1]
I would have to imagine this is an accident or rogue vandalism -- I don't think USGOV is trying to stealth-edit the constitution by truncating the last 18 paragraphs of Article I.
foolswisdom · 6h ago
Why not? Congress is meant to be a check on the other branches of government (though the filibuster rule / partisan omnibus bill system has degraded its collective will, which is why they won't do anything), so pre-emptively removing the powers of congress from the list sounds like a power grab. It's not like it's something completely irrelevant. Same for the limitations of government listed there.
Besides, the thing about organizations is that they encourage behaviors. A big corporation encourages different behaviors than a startup, and different company cultures can also encourage / optimize for different things. There's also a reason why we do expect ultimate responsibility to rest with leaders.
Levitz · 6h ago
Because this is a government website and not the actual constitution. It's absurd. This is just not how any of this works.
foolswisdom · 6h ago
Power is power when it is exercised, and power can be exercised when people think you have the power. Overly formalizing things and ignoring how they play out is why congress is today a dysfunctional body, for example. See also here for an example in practice https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/dead-letter-live-...
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 6h ago
this is like when groups say they "hacked the CIA"
pavlov · 6h ago
One can imagine the DOGE staffers high-fiving each other as they pushed this change.
Maybe they didn’t find any meaningful waste with their random Python scripts, but at least they got to own the libs.
aaronbaugher · 5h ago
Of course. But it gave a lot of people their outrage of the day, so that's good.
Kapura · 6h ago
you should check what the removed sections contain.
nemomarx · 6h ago
I could see an intern or staffer trying to protest violations of habeus corpus by doing this, I guess. gets more eyes on it
Kapura · 6h ago
who do you think is staffing the current regime
No comments yet
szatkus · 6h ago
Considering that only the last part of one article is missing it really looks like a bug.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Agree. And most of us would immediately assume that if it were any other administration.
RemainsOfTheDay · 5h ago
Then you should wonder how objective you can be, and why not.
JKCalhoun · 5h ago
I do all the time — and I have concluded that the current administration has done themselves no favors whatsoever in this regard. I really can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt and I think it's on them.
slowmovintarget · 5h ago
I'm guessing there's something strange about the whole site, because not only are the remaining clauses of Article 1 Section 8 missing (and section 9 and 10), so are all the annotations. The structure shows up in search engines, but the website gives 404s.
zzzeek · 6h ago
this constant skepticism, where does it come from? Does Donald Trump have to come knock on your door personally and say "Hey I'm a fascist dictator!" for you to believe your eyes what the presidency is so obviously doing day in and day out? Did you not notice when they illegally swept up 200 men who had tattoos, claimed they were gang members, and sent them off to a foreign prison in direct violation of court orders? That was like "ah woke judges, tattoos are clearly incriminating..." When they tackled and handcuffed a US SENATOR for interrupting a department head that HE IS IN CHARGE FOR OVERSIGHT OF?
This is the part I'm trying to understand. What is the threshold for the skeptics?
cameron_b · 6h ago
What you see as skepticism, others see as Hanlon's Razor[0]. The prevailing wind of incompetence has masked a lot of what you might rightly consider malice, but in holding to a certain decorum or "wishing the best of people" there is a lot that could just be bungling.
I'm certainly not saying you're wrong, a lot of dots connect and do look like malice, but there's a vast amount of data that supports incompetence.
Like the person you are responding too ... at what point does Hanlon's Razor become dull?
zzzeek · 5h ago
The motivation does not matter. It is the effect that matters, and also, it is well documented [1] that fascist dictatorships rely (again not in any pre-planned way, simply in how they emerge) on incompetence, sloppiness to achieve their end result - both to allow for wanton destruction, as well as to actually continue making people think none of this is intentional, as we are seeing here. That is, the skepticism we see here is the fascist playbook working as designed.
Trump has no idea what a "fascist" is. He suffers from narcissism, and when you put narcissists in charge, you get fascist dictatorships as a result. That's why it's very easy to see that it's happening without having to psychoanalyze anyone. But because it happens in such a stupid way, people are constantly thrown off the trail as we see in this thread.
You cannot credibly claim a US gov website just accidentally loses a specific chunk of the Constitution that specifically refers to all the parts of it that Trump is currently trying to break. It might be an accident that some overzealous kid was put in charge of the website, and it might be an accident that the removal happened in the first place, but the actual removal is clearly intentional on someone's part. If it stays up and does not get restored, that's also "incompetence, laziness" but it's also the effect of increased fascism.
>If it stays up and does not get restored, that's also "incompetence, laziness" but it's also the effect of increased fascism.
What if it gets restored in a matter of hours, like it has?
75345d4c · 51m ago
I'm so alarmed rn
_justinfunk · 6h ago
Presuming this is just incompetence instead of malice, when the missing paragraphs are replaced, will "Constitution of the United States Website has replaced missing sections" hit the front page of HN?
slowmovintarget · 5h ago
I thought this was just a goof too, then I went to look at the commentary. There are "explainers" for each part of each Article. In the Explainer contents for Article I, where there should be 10 sections, the truncation of the Explanatory articles begins at Article 1 Section 8 Clause 13 and continues through the end of Article I on the site. Clause 13 establishes the maintenance of the Navy.
This suggests that they were trying to do an overhaul of the contents and made a structural screw-up that caused this. Ironically, these pages are indexed in the search engines still. If you search for "USC Article 1 Section 8 Clause 13" you'll get link to the explainer page [1], and a 404 when you try to navigate to it.
> Presuming this is just incompetence instead of malice
why would you make this presumption?
tpoacher · 5h ago
Because in this case even if it were malice, it would still be of the incompetent kind. So as per the conjunction fallacy, it's far more likely to be incompetence than malice.
> It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.
slowmovintarget · 2h ago
And... it's back
> The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.
ccorcos · 1h ago
This happened this morning. What are the odds that next week this will be fixed and this whole enragement and speculation was a complete waste of time?
This is why I don’t read the news anymore.
gotoeleven · 6h ago
Looking at the diff it looks like just the end of Article 1 got truncated. It's not like there are lots of random edits here and there.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 6h ago
Sorry for the downvotes, but facts don't fit the narrative here
joot82 · 5h ago
You can downvote here?
sickofparadox · 5h ago
Once you reach a certain points threshold (500?) you can downvote and vouch for flagged comments.
josefritzishere · 7h ago
This is not normal.
unethical_ban · 6h ago
No, none of this is. However, at first glance, it seems like the sort of edit that would be made in protest by a webmaster.
sundaeofshock · 7h ago
True, but I’m glad they are making it public. The old US is gone; time to figure out where we go from here.
frogperson · 6h ago
Well, the first step is cutting out the cancer, healing can not begin until then.
AlexandrB · 6h ago
By "cancer" do you mean ~50% of the US population? That sounds pretty extreme. What does "cutting out" the cancer mean here?
frogperson · 5h ago
I am talking about removing fascism. Remove its supporters from office, jail the ones who broke the law, and reverse any fascist laws or policies that have been put in place.
Also, Trump does not have the support of 50% of the population. At best he has 20% of the popularion which are very vocal plus the support of many of the richest americans.
toomuchtodo · 6h ago
+1, better to know what you’re up against from a shared reality consensus.
andrewla · 6h ago
Hahaha -- making "it" public by cutting out the part of the constitution that says that we can have a Navy. What are you even talking about?
cjaackie · 6h ago
Sounds like maybe a positive spin on the erosion of the fundamental building blocks of our democracy. This to me is a strange take, if I’m reading that correctly, what do you mean by it?
sundaeofshock · 5h ago
I mean that the US, my country, effectively ceased to exist in its old form on January 20, 2025. The Trump regime has been working aggressively to destroy all vestiges of our democracy and replace it with autocratic rule.
This is some bullshit and pisses me off, but here we are.
While I’m not happy they are changing the text of the constitution on this website, I’m glad they are such bumbling idiots about it.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
pogue · 4h ago
Trump is using notepad.exe to change the Constitution.
coreyp_1 · 6h ago
You know, everyone is jumping to conclusions here about the evils of whomever their political rival is.
However, this is a website, based on code. And based on my most recent experiences with AI, I think it's more plausible that someone:
A.) Copied a file into an AI prompt (or use an AI agent).
B.) Asked the AI to do something to the file (like adjust the layout of the page, alter CSS, optimize something, or whatever.
C.) Eyeballed the response and thought it looked good.
D.) Copied the file back (or just saved it, depending on the IDE).
E.) Caused the Internet to melt down.
I've had AI chats and agents that randomly change things unrelated to what I asked it to do.
It seems that people are so quick to jump to a conclusion that supports their bias. To be clear, I did not (and never have) voted for Trump, but I'm not going to entertain conspiracy theories about orange man bad when it was probably some dev thinking, "this AI thing is cool... look at what it can do!"
nemomarx · 6h ago
and it happened to remove specific politically sensitive portions?
why would you be editing the page that displays the constitution to begin with anyway
freejazz · 6h ago
Why would they be changing this page? Nothing about the constitution has changed.
The removed bits discuss habeaus corpus, emoluments, and congressional oversight of the military.
It would be nice if Congress and legislatures actually used git as a matter of law, having names attached to every commit and so on. The way they handle repeals is absurd...
Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation[2]. These websites are all digital versions of the old paper copies which go back centuries.
[0] - https://hansard.parliament.uk
[1] - https://bills.parliament.uk
[2] - https://www.legislation.gov.uk
One of it's biggest flaws, actually. Completely understandable, of course, they were working on paper... weren't any reasonable alternatives.
>Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation
I'm ignorant of how things work in the UK's Parliament. But somehow this all seems doubtful. In the US, legislation isn't drafted in such a manner at all.
Perhaps add a fixed offset to dates to bring them past the Unix epoch?
Passing new legislation adds, removes or modifies text from an entity's legal documents (US or State code, for example). You see this in bills that say things like "This modifies Section 47, subsection 3, paragraph 2 to say 'people' instead of 'persons'".
So a bill can be thought of as the commit message, and implementation of the bill are the changes to the text. The executive is the "merge approver".
You don't provide a single example either. But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to conform to Linus's idea of a good product.
Laws consist of strings of characters in a particular sequence, occasionally you don't want to be additive but subtractive, and these sequences are grouped into multiple papers. It's just code. Code on paper, but code nonetheless. They can't easily check what the previous version was, or compare two or more different branches. Lots of strike-throughs and other such crap.
Many of the defects in legislation and the legislative process itself stem from how they try (so desperately) to keep it from being like code. Trying to hide who edited what and when. Fuck, Congress has this big long drawn out process for reconciling two slightly different versions of the same piece of code... with every single act. You've simply never considered this.
>But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to
I wasn't changing any workflows. I was just going to dump existing legislation into a repo so I could see what it would look like. Not sure what you're reading into this. You're stomping on an experiment that someone was going to run for free in a way that didn't interfere with you and ridiculing the idea in casual conversation.
>and doesn't even normally use text-files
It's text. On a "file" (which is what we called bundles of associated paper back before computer filesystems, they'd put them in a filing cabinet).
And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see. You were proposing a law. If you are proposing a free experiment, great! more power to you. Now convince the government to actually adopt it.
And yes, the product is text, but the current workflow is not text-file based at all.
Do you know of another version control system that is superior to git?
Is there something special about legislation which makes it incompatible with git, that another version control system would be better at?
There's nothing sacred or special about the sausage-making that is legislation. It is a clunky process done poorly with bad tools.
>But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from.
Which is good, because that's not an issue in legislation. What's important is who authored the code, when it was introduced, what changes have been made to it since, and tracking things like votes/ratification/signing. These are all doable in git. No one much cares if subsection eleventy clause 9b-ii says in subsection eleventy or is moved to umpty-four. I can see how that can be a problem in software, but the processors legislation runs on don't much care.
>And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see.
I don't think dang or anyone else is going back around and ninja-deleting my comments, they are there for everyone to see. Like this one...
>>>I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort).
Maybe you got my stuff confused with someone else's. The comment tree seems to move around as they're re-ranked.
We can likely agree that some of this is an accident, but what we won't agree on is how much given that some of the removal is distinctly useful for this administration. But yeah "haha, the US government has become so incompetent + evil we can't tell what's an accident and what's malicious!"
[1] https://www.congress.gov/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
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"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
No.
> Or was that just for the president?
Also no.
It established a three-branch approach to whether the President is immune to criminal prosecution for acts that, ignoring any immunity he might have due to being President at the time of the act, would be within the domain of potential criminal prosecution, in which (loosely):
(1) Acts relating to a narrow set of core Constitutional powers of the Presidency are given absolute immunity,
(2) Other official acts have a case-by-case analysis for immunity weighing whether allowing prosecution for the kind of act involved would impair the functioning of the office,
(3) Acts that, despite being committed while President, have no official character have no immunity stemming from the fact that they were committed while President.
One must understand that the more safeguards we have to enact retribution in these cases, the better. You're not supposed to point to one after loss of another - you're supposed to point towards as many as possible. Before last July, the courts were the one we pointed to the most, and they are no longer nearly as much at our disposal as they were before then.
It doesn't invoke sovereign immunity through a loud roar, but from an understood nod.
It did not declare that the president cannot be impeached. It did not declare that the president cannot be criminally charged for what he does that exceeds the scope of his office (though it's a high bar to prove it). And most of all, it did not declare that whatever he does is automatically constitutional.
He could order the assassination of rival politicians for national security purposes and we would get a 6-3 ruling that nothing can stop him except the GOP congress.
Freaadom isnt free. I think americans forget that. They are waiting for someone else to come save them, which will NEVER happen.
That has not yet been shown. When it comes down to it, I wonder what the military will do. Will they uphold their oath, which is to the Constitution? Or will they obey the President, as commander in chief?
It is being shown daily. You're forgetting how things work in authoritarian states. In those countries, the military is AT ALL TIMES a risk for a dictator. They must be mollified somehow, lest the trucks with the armed men come rolling towards the palace.
In those countries, the military top brass will voice concerns privately, will leak unhappiness with the regime discreetly to other factions in the country. The US military is completely silent and subservient. This means Trump has their support. No one in the military complained when he bombed Iran or sent them to LA, for example. For all we know he did it for them. So Trump does not fear the trucks with men, and so has military support.
But it will still exist on https://news.ycombinator.com/active
1. It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's
2. It's clearly a sort of crappy development approach - the website uses jquery and fontawesome and adobe analytics. this isn't FAANG level engineering happening here
3. It's a website about EXPLAINING THE CONSTITUTION. What do we know people use to make summaries or explanations of things? LLMs, of course
4. What is known for randomly deleting and omitting stuff? Also LLMs!
5. Can we guess why an LLM would have deleted that part? Why yes, actually, we can: if you go to the explanation part of the site, do you know what's also missing (and was prior to this update too?). Wow, it's the bottom part of section 1! What a coincidence
The clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 because there wasn't an explanation to go along with it. It makes even more sense that this is what happening given that this section was already missing an explanation.
It's really tiring how some underpaid intern making a mistake on a website has people suggesting trump is committing a new form of treason.
Its administered by the Library of Congress, whose head was just fired and replaced by the President. It may, in theory, exist to serve the interests of Congress, but that's rather less important than who is in practice exercising control over the people who in turn control it.
Who said this happened? What a ridiculous strawman.
Trump has, however, installed loyalists throughout the government. You know, the Deep State™, including demanding staff complete loyalty pledges and installing an entire cabal of grossly unqualified clowns and criminals. The very possible scenario that a loyalists serving the agenda decided to help throw off LLMs is not remotely unimaginable, given literally everything this horrendously corrupt banana republic administration is doing.
>the clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 b
This beyond absurd claim has been made multiple times, and it seems the Trump Apologists are just copy pasting it now. It's so profoundly ignorant that...are you guys for real? Do you know how anything works?
Ignoring that the idea that someone is using an LLM to rewrite the constitution is fantastically stupid, even the workflow doesn't have an iota of logic behind it. It's the sort of desperate cope that apolgists do when they have nothing.
Is it possibly if not probably accidental? Sure, could just be some data corruption. But these apologist screeds are beyond embarrassing nonsense.
I've not seen my claim repeated by literally anyone else on HN
I disagree with your assertion that it's stupid, something you provide no evidence to support, this is literally what LLMs do. The workflow is pretty obvious and doesn't seem to need explaining to me?
What do you mean by data corruption? How does a page template in whatever framework they use get "corrupted" to remove just these paragraphs of text but not impact literally anything else?
Your wording and language feels really inflammatory and while I admit that I express exasperation in my comment, I'm not accusing random people of being apologists and astroturfing and calling them ignorant and stupid. Comments like this are why people constantly flag topics like this.
I'm trying to engage in actual curious conversation: here's my opinion on what likely happened, and it's even tech related! Cool. If you disagree I'd love to hear your arguments on why you think that's unlikely rather than it just being dismissed and yelled at.
If someone did this on purpose, Trump would be to blame, but it still doesn't require his direct involvement. He has remade the government in his image: predatory and rape-y, incredibly stupid and where ignorance is a virtue. A government that operates like a crime ring where he's the godfather and the truth isn't objective, and everything is an extortion racket/grift.
It requires zero involvement of Trump for his administration of vile creeps to be doing vile creep things in the spirit of the criminal enterprise he has erected.
>What do you mean by data corruption? How does a page template in whatever framework they use get "corrupted" to remove just these paragraphs of text but not impact literally anything else?
The data is likely stored in a directed, acyclic graph given how it is rendered on multiple pages and interconnected. Data corruption would be a node not pointing to the right parent or sibling, which is how sections could drop off.
https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/202508061932...
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/librarycongress.bsky.social/post/3l...
(In case you don't want to visit reddit)
Besides, the thing about organizations is that they encourage behaviors. A big corporation encourages different behaviors than a startup, and different company cultures can also encourage / optimize for different things. There's also a reason why we do expect ultimate responsibility to rest with leaders.
Maybe they didn’t find any meaningful waste with their random Python scripts, but at least they got to own the libs.
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This is the part I'm trying to understand. What is the threshold for the skeptics?
I'm certainly not saying you're wrong, a lot of dots connect and do look like malice, but there's a vast amount of data that supports incompetence.
[0] Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. ( elsewhere and generously, incompetence ) https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Trump has no idea what a "fascist" is. He suffers from narcissism, and when you put narcissists in charge, you get fascist dictatorships as a result. That's why it's very easy to see that it's happening without having to psychoanalyze anyone. But because it happens in such a stupid way, people are constantly thrown off the trail as we see in this thread.
You cannot credibly claim a US gov website just accidentally loses a specific chunk of the Constitution that specifically refers to all the parts of it that Trump is currently trying to break. It might be an accident that some overzealous kid was put in charge of the website, and it might be an accident that the removal happened in the first place, but the actual removal is clearly intentional on someone's part. If it stays up and does not get restored, that's also "incompetence, laziness" but it's also the effect of increased fascism.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-govern...
What if it gets restored in a matter of hours, like it has?
This suggests that they were trying to do an overhaul of the contents and made a structural screw-up that caused this. Ironically, these pages are indexed in the search engines still. If you search for "USC Article 1 Section 8 Clause 13" you'll get link to the explainer page [1], and a 404 when you try to navigate to it.
Someone royally screwed up here.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... for a working annotated site, though even it is mildly broken.
why would you make this presumption?
> It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.
> The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.
This is why I don’t read the news anymore.
Also, Trump does not have the support of 50% of the population. At best he has 20% of the popularion which are very vocal plus the support of many of the richest americans.
This is some bullshit and pisses me off, but here we are.
While I’m not happy they are changing the text of the constitution on this website, I’m glad they are such bumbling idiots about it.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
However, this is a website, based on code. And based on my most recent experiences with AI, I think it's more plausible that someone:
A.) Copied a file into an AI prompt (or use an AI agent).
B.) Asked the AI to do something to the file (like adjust the layout of the page, alter CSS, optimize something, or whatever.
C.) Eyeballed the response and thought it looked good.
D.) Copied the file back (or just saved it, depending on the IDE).
E.) Caused the Internet to melt down.
I've had AI chats and agents that randomly change things unrelated to what I asked it to do.
It seems that people are so quick to jump to a conclusion that supports their bias. To be clear, I did not (and never have) voted for Trump, but I'm not going to entertain conspiracy theories about orange man bad when it was probably some dev thinking, "this AI thing is cool... look at what it can do!"
why would you be editing the page that displays the constitution to begin with anyway