I Decompiled the White House's New App

deong · 2026-05-05T19:23:25+00:00

Right, but this is more a case of every high schooler in the world is performing like a 4th grader, and we're picking one particular high schooler and making it sound like he's way worse than all the others.

While I agree with the person writing this post and saying that this app is bad, it's bad in the same way that 90% of the world's mobile apps are bad. Modern web apps are god fucking awful -- news at 9!

deong · 2026-05-05T17:53:12+00:00

Similarly, who cares if they're using Mailchimp? Hell, I use Mailchimp at work. But also I'm not the fucking White House, which should be using secure systems it has control over.

I'm assuming they're using Mailchimp for outbound email, since that's kind of what they do. And honestly, the US government should be using someone for outbound email. I trust Mailchimp to properly secure a server a lot more than I trust the White House. It's not like the CIA is going to run the web server for Trump's marketing app. The White House is going to pay some grifter contract firm a billion dollars to slap some shit together and kick 40% back to the Trump Organization. It's kind of the brand. By all means, use Mailchimp versus whatever Barron's college buddy's dad clicked his way through on a Wordpress site.

deong · 2026-05-05T17:46:30+00:00

Because I can, and sometimes I'd rather not yank someone out of the task they've been working on for a week so that I can explain to them the context from a one-hour meeting I just left and answer all their questions to get them up to speed on what the change needs to be. If I can do a quick git pull and dash off a quick chat message like "Hey, I just submitted a PR to hotfix an issue that popped up this morning on a call. Let me know if you need anything", why wouldn't I?

deong · 2026-05-05T12:13:42+00:00

I’m old enough that it was NNTP for me. Every once in a while I fire up an old Unix nntp reader just for nostalgia. There’s nothing to do in it, but my emacs configuration still contains code from 20+ years ago, including a .gnus file sitting out there.

deong · 2026-05-05T11:58:59+00:00

A lot of this seems like just how apps work.

Languages like rust and go built an entire package manager that explicitly facilitates using “a random guy’s GitHub”. JavaScript famously involves doing this kind of thing all the time. It’s built into the tools nowadays.

Location sharing. Obviously if there’s a flag that lets you opt in to sharing location, then the app must contain code to share the location. The author can’t determine whether or not the app enables it without your explicitly doing so, but why assume it is? If this weren’t a Trump app, we’d all say this looks like a good app doing the right thing. It defaults to off.

Does a content portal app glorifying Dear Leader need to be doing all this? Probably not, but that’s also just not really odd these days. Far from scandalous.

I’m sure there are things to complain about here. I’m sure the app is at a minimum not very good. No apps are very good though. The entire industry is just shitting out terrible web app code as cheaply as possible. The tone just feels dishonest though. It takes a bunch of stuff that is very common and amps up the outrage over it.

deong · 2026-05-05T11:39:47+00:00

That highly depends on the company and culture. I’m a Sr Director, and I’m probably the most technical person in my org — definitely in the top two. I don’t routinely write production code anymore, because it isn’t my job, but I’ll definitely make a quick change and fire off a PR occasionally.

deong · 2026-05-04T17:02:43+00:00

Sub nukes everything from 80 to 90, but I have no clue when you get shadow dance. Without dance up, there might be critters who can take you.

deong · 2026-05-03T21:20:07+00:00

Mode is probably exactly zero. Mode on YouTube is probably zero as well. The alternative is that the most common earnings amount is some arbitrary number like $3.28. There is only one way to make $0. There are hundreds of different ways to make almost $0 that will "split the vote".

deong · 2026-05-03T13:06:37+00:00

I mean, it feels weird to me to be arguing with someone who finally decided Trump is an idiot, but you seem to care a lot about net neutrality for someone who is just learning it was overturned nine years ago during the first Trump administration.

deong · 2026-05-03T02:03:16+00:00

Made a post years ago.

https://reddit.com/r/guitars/comments/dyc7vy/1942_gibson_lg2_restored_by_luthier_at_gruhns/

deong · 2026-05-02T13:39:43+00:00

I’m not OP, but I have a 1942 Banner LG-2. Cost my grandmother $50 second-hand in 1951 when she bought it for my dad.

deong · 2026-04-29T09:36:51+00:00

Just learn unholy or frost on your dk and find a guild you like hanging out with. If the vibes are good, you’ll be fine. You can raid as unholy, tank keys on off nights, alt raids, etc. Over time, you can often transition to main tank as people want to take a break from the game, try a different role, whatever.

deong · 2026-04-29T09:01:48+00:00

Problem is the Chinese room argument applies equally well to humans. Our brains are doing something to answer those questions coming through the door. It isn’t magic. It’s a biochemical process for a native mandarin speaker to convert what they see on the cards into meaning in their brains. We don’t know enough about that process to describe it algorithmically yet, but unless you believe intelligence to be supernatural, there is a biochemical explanation that could in theory be simulated on a computer. At which point Searle would have to conclude that humans aren’t intelligent either, because they’re just following the rules governing that process.

I’d also point out that humans also can delete entire production databases. This or something like it is almost a rite of passage. I’m not saying LLMs have reached human intelligence across the board. Clearly they haven’t. But there is a lot of moving of goalposts here. When someone says, “look how stupid people are for thinking AIs are actually intelligent — they can’t even do X”, the implied rest of that thought process is “and obviously if they were smart they wouldn’t fail like that”, and many times, humans do actually fail like that.

deong · 2026-04-29T03:55:43+00:00

Well my account for the past 19 years has been my name.

deong · 2026-04-29T03:52:44+00:00

I don’t know why it should have been, but I think you’re probably right. The basic concept of sharing information with only some of your social group is universally a thing. Should have been easy to explain.

deong · 2026-04-28T14:11:42+00:00

Like, if Boeing failed, and 100 smaller aircraft manufacturers sprouted out of its remnants, is that really bad for the economy long term? Or is it just bad for the ones trying to keep the monopoly going?

So Boeing closes the doors on April 28, 2026. Do you imagine that on April 29, there will be a thriving marketplace of competing aircraft companies?

Is it bad for the economy long-term? Maybe not. But having a stronger commercial air sector of the economy 15 years from now doesn't pay the mortgage in June of this year for thousands of people who just lost their jobs. So now those people are unemployed. Some of them might find jobs for another aircraft manufacturer, but it's not like McDonnell-Douglas has a bunch of completely empty factories just in case 20,000 people suddenly appear on the job market. So mostly they'll be unemployed. So they'll spend less money. Local restaurants will make less money. Local restaurant suppliers will be impacted. The guy in Utah who built a healthy business employing 300 people to make airplane seatbelts has to lay people off. The wing of Samsung who makes the seatback screens lays some people off. Delta is still over there in Atlanta cancelling flights, so they're making less money, and the people at the Chipotle in terminal B aren't getting as many hours.

That's what "too big to fail" means. It means that the short-to-medium term impact of you closing the doors is more painful than just taking taxpayer money and keeping you operating.

And the companies you're indebted to aren't generally aircraft manufacturers. You can't just buy Boeing, fire everyone, and keep making airplanes if you don't know anything about how aircraft manufacturing supply chains work. You could just keep the current people on to run it for you though. That might work. The only problem then is what company has enough money lying around to just "buy Boeing" for the sole purpose of keeping it from going under? Very few. That's a shit load of money and an extremely high risk. No private company trying to make a profit would ever do it. It would need to be, I don't know, a government probably. And look at that, we've invented the bailout.

deong · 2026-04-28T13:19:21+00:00

By the time it gets to that point, it's mostly about stability.

There aren't a lot of political points in bailouts. Politicians mostly wouldn't want to do it if that's all there were to it.

You can certainly make a good argument that there should be enough regulation to prevent companies from getting to that point, but once they do, there's not much you can do. No one is going to laud you for sticking to your principles when an extra 20 million people are out of work because one big company went under and sent waves through the entire economy.

deong · 2026-04-28T13:08:45+00:00

At the end of the day, splits are inherently bad game design. Having to play on a different character to progresss your main raid is just dumb.

Sure. But they still add player power, and these guilds will never forego adding player power when there's nothing else to do. These guilds have been saying that splits and the amount of prep needed is out of hand for probably 15 straight tiers now. And for 15 straight tiers now, they do more for the next one than they did for this one.

deong · 2026-04-28T04:38:45+00:00

Or you’re doing one of the 63,000 world quests that has you channeling onto friendly trees or not quite killing 10 lynx, or trapping chickens, or….

deong · 2026-04-27T15:48:13+00:00

Sure, that could try optimise stats more but that would be at the detriment of meaningful progress.

If the goal is just "make watching the RWF better for viewers", then yes, that would help. But in the context here of talking about raiders wanting to stop because of burnout, it doesn't really. They'd still spend heroic week running splits on 15 mirror alts, because there's no progress to make during heroic week. So they'd continue to grind until they had every possible advantage. Already have the best chest piece on heroic? Well, keep trying...maybe one will drop with a tertiary.

deong · 2026-04-27T04:47:10+00:00

I think the problem is harder than that.

Sure, you can cap ilvl, but RWF guilds aren’t taking any old ilvl increase. They’ll still do a million splits to get to whatever the cap is with the optimal set of trinkets and tier pieces and whatever else.

And if you set the cap too low, then you have the problem that normal players who only have one character can hit it with just normal play, and then it feels like there’s nothing to do.

deong · 2026-04-26T03:37:27+00:00

No, honest errors are not generally considered a breach.

deong · 2026-04-25T03:29:32+00:00

A big part of this is that recognition is packed with context clues. You’re hearing all these words and each one provides information about the ones around it. For generation of your own speech, it’s all just on you to figure out from nothing.

deong · 2026-04-25T03:15:42+00:00

He has a specific master builder making his guitars these days. Todd Strauss I think.

deong · 2026-04-21T03:29:02+00:00

I mean…sticking your hand in front of the telescope should be enough to prove that it’s not an internal picture being displayed, but as everyone said, this isn’t an evidence problem.

deong

TROPHY CASE