The Reddit thread is reasonably inflamed, but the theory about changing reality downstream by changing the sources that chatbots ingest is a chilling one.
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.)
New models are generally trained entirely from scratch, and we're constantly tossing old models into the dumpster and replacing them with the new hotness. Meaning it isn't like GPT-5 is just GPT-4 with some fine tuning, but instead they start an entirely fresh training process on their archive of source material.
Now the archive of source material is a growing corpus, but a canonical source like the government's published version of the constitution will indeed get subbed out in an updated crawl, and that would be used as the basis of the training of the next model. Now the site has reverted to the correct text, but the hypothesis of corrupting models is a valid and real concern.
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...
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.
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.
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!"
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?
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."
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.
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)
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I hate the current regime as much as any reasonable person but this isn't a grave matter.
This website wasn't the Constitution. It wasn't a legal source of truth regarding the Constitution. There are literally millions of other references to the Constitution and its contents in existence, including original documents. Everyone knows what it says, everyone knows what's missing.
There is no possible nefarious consequence that can arise from this, it's just text on a website.
>There is no possible nefarious consequence that can arise from this, it's just text on a website.
In a year where this administration is saying a lot of things that "has no nefarious consequences", only for foul play to occur weeks/months later: that does not fill me with much consequence.
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.
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.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Readit News
Now the archive of source material is a growing corpus, but a canonical source like the government's published version of the constitution will indeed get subbed out in an updated crawl, and that would be used as the basis of the training of the next model. Now the site has reverted to the correct text, but the hypothesis of corrupting models is a valid and real concern.
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
Perhaps add a fixed offset to dates to bring them past the Unix epoch?
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!"
"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."
[1] https://www.congress.gov/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
Dead Comment
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?
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Dead Comment
> 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.
But it will still exist on https://news.ycombinator.com/active
This website wasn't the Constitution. It wasn't a legal source of truth regarding the Constitution. There are literally millions of other references to the Constitution and its contents in existence, including original documents. Everyone knows what it says, everyone knows what's missing.
There is no possible nefarious consequence that can arise from this, it's just text on a website.
In a year where this administration is saying a lot of things that "has no nefarious consequences", only for foul play to occur weeks/months later: that does not fill me with much consequence.
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.
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.
This is the part I'm trying to understand. What is the threshold for the skeptics?
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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
https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/202508061932...