#AI Project Estimation

[nnctales]

Can I use ChatGPT as a Project Estimator?

In an industry like construction where every single decision can have a major impact on the end result, project estimation becomes a significant process. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), innovative solutions have been introduced to aid this process. Among these is ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, which has raised an intriguing question:…

[lostconsultants]

Embracing AI-Driven Estimations for a Smarter Future

Embracing AI-driven estimations for a smarter future is no longer a distant vision—it is a necessary step in modern project management. In previous discussions, we explored the foundation of AI-driven estimations in Rethinking Estimations in the Age of AI and how AI is actively revolutionising estimation practices in Revolutionising Estimations with AI: Smarter, Faster, and More Reliable…

[constructionsoftware]

Discover how construction project management software optimizes project planning, scheduling, and execution. This powerful tool improves collaboration, ensures timely completion, and reduces costs, providing construction professionals with the resources needed for successful project delivery.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024

President Biden announced $3 billion to help replace lead pipes in the drinking water system. Millions of Americans get their drinking water through lead pipes, which are toxic, no level of lead exposure is safe. This problem disproportionately affects people of color and low income communities. This first investment of a planned $15 billion will replace 1.7 million lead pipe lines. The Biden Administration plans to replace all lead pipes in the country by the end of the decade.

President Biden canceled the student debt of 317,000 former students of a fraudulent for-profit college system. The Art Institutes was a for-profit system of dozens of schools offering degrees in video-game design and other arts. After years of legal troubles around misleading students and falsifying data the last AI schools closed abruptly without warning in September last year. This adds to the $29 billion in debt for 1.7 borrowers who wee mislead and defrauded by their schools which the Biden Administration has done, and a total debt relief for 4.6 million borrowers so far under Biden.

President Biden expanded two California national monuments protecting thousands of acres of land. The two national monuments are the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which are being expanded by 120,000 acres. The new protections cover lands of cultural and religious importance to a number of California based native communities. This expansion was first proposed by then Senator Kamala Harris in 2018 as part of a wide ranging plan to expand and protect public land in California. This expansion is part of the Administration's goals to protect, conserve, and restore at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

The Department of Transportation announced new rules that will require car manufacturers to install automatic braking systems in new cars. Starting in 2029 all new cars will be required to have systems to detect pedestrians and automatically apply the breaks in an emergency. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects this new rule will save 360 lives every year and prevent at least 24,000 injuries annually.

The IRS announced plans to ramp up audits on the wealthiest Americans. The IRS plans on increasing its audit rate on taxpayers who make over $10 million a year. After decades of Republicans in Congress cutting IRS funding to protect wealthy tax cheats the Biden Administration passed $80 billion for tougher enforcement on the wealthy. The IRS has been able to collect just in one year $500 Million in undisputed but unpaid back taxes from wealthy households, and shows a rise of $31 billion from audits in the 2023 tax year. The IRS also announced its free direct file pilot program was a smashing success. The program allowed tax payers across 12 states to file directly for free with the IRS over the internet. The IRS announced that 140,000 tax payers were able to use it over their target of 100,000, they estimated it saved $5.6 million in tax prep fees, over 90% of users were happy with the webpage and reported it quicker and easier than companies like H&R Block. the IRS plans to bring direct file nationwide next year.

The Department of Interior announced plans for new off shore wind power. The two new sites, off the coast of Oregon and in the Gulf of Maine, would together generate 18 gigawatts of totally clean energy, enough to power 6 million homes.

The Biden Administration announced new rules to finally allow DACA recipients to be covered by Obamacare. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an Obama era policy that allows people brought to the United States as children without legal status to remain and to legally work. However for years DACA recipients have not been able to get health coverage through the Obamacare Health Care Marketplace. This rule change will bring health coverage to at least 100,000 uninsured people.

The Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules that require LGBTQ+ and Intersex minors in the foster care system be placed in supportive and affirming homes.

The Senate confirmed Georgia Alexakis to a life time federal judgeship in Illinois. This brings the total number of federal judges appointed by President Biden to 194. For the first time in history the majority of a President's nominees to the federal bench have not been white men.

[reasonsforhope]

"The first satellite in a constellation designed specifically to locate wildfires early and precisely anywhere on the planet has now reached Earth's orbit, and it could forever change how we tackle unplanned infernos.

The FireSat constellation, which will consist of more than 50 satellites when it goes live, is the first of its kind that's purpose-built to detect and track fires. It's an initiative launched by nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, which includes Google and Silicon Valley-based space services startup Muon Space as partners, among others.

According to Google, current satellite systems rely on low-resolution imagery and cover a particular area only once every 12 hours to spot significantly large wildfires spanning a couple of acres. FireSat, on the other hand, will be able to detect wildfires as small as 270 sq ft (25 sq m) – the size of a classroom – and deliver high-resolution visual updates every 20 minutes.

The FireSat project has only been in the works for less than a year and a half. The satellites are fitted with custom six-band multispectral infrared cameras, designed to capture imagery suitable for machine learning algorithms to accurately identify wildfires – differentiating them from misleading objects like smokestacks.

These algorithms look at an image from a particular location, and compare it with the last 1,000 times it was captured by the satellite's camera to determine if what it's seeing is indeed a wildfire. AI technology in the FireSat system also helps predict how a fire might spread; that can help firefighters make better decisions about how to control the flames safely and effectively.

This could go a long way towards preventing the immense destruction of forest habitats and urban areas, and the displacement of residents caused by wildfires each year. For reference, the deadly wildfires that raged across Los Angeles in January were estimated to have cuased more than $250 billion in damages.

Muon is currently developing three more satellites, which are set to launch next year. The entire constellation should be in orbit by 2030.

The FireSat effort isn't the only project to watch for wildfires from orbit. OroraTech launched its first wildfire-detection satellite – FOREST-1 – in 2022, followed by one more in 2023 and another earlier this year. The company tells us that another eight are due to go up toward the end of March."

-via March 18, 2025

[draconym]

nightshade is basically useless https://www.tumblr.com/billclintonsbeefarm/740236576484999168/even-if-you-dont-like-generative-models-this

I'm not a developer, but the creators of Nightshade do address some of this post's concerns in their FAQ. Obviously it's not a magic bullet to prevent AI image scraping, and obviously there's an arms race between AI developers and artists attempting to disrupt their data pools. But personally, I think it's an interesting project and is accessible to most people to try. Giving up on it at this stage seems really premature.

But if it's caption data that's truly valuable, Tumblr is an ... interesting ... place to be scraping it from. For one thing, users tend to get pretty creative with both image descriptions and tags. For another, I hope whichever bot scrapes my blog enjoys the many bird photos I have described as "Cheese." Genuinely curious if Tumblr data is actually valuable or if it's garbage.

That said, I find it pretty ironic that the OP of the post you linked seems to think nightshade and glaze specifically are an unreasonable waste of electricity. Both are software. Your personal computer's graphics card is doing the work, not an entire data center, so if your computer was going to be on anyway, the cost is a drop in the bucket compared to what AI generators are consuming.

Training a large language model like GPT-3, for example, is estimated to use just under 1,300 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity; about as much power as consumed annually by 130 US homes. To put that in context, streaming an hour of Netflix requires around 0.8 kWh (0.0008 MWh) of electricity. That means you’d have to watch 1,625,000 hours to consume the same amount of power it takes to train GPT-3. (source)

So, no, I don't think Nightshade or Glaze are useless just because they aren't going to immediately topple every AI image generator. There's not really much downside for the artists interested in using them so I hope they continue development.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The almost overnight surge in electricity demand from data centers is now outstripping the available power supply in many parts of the world, according to interviews with data center operators, energy providers and tech executives. That dynamic is leading to years-long waits for businesses to access the grid as well as growing concerns of outages and price increases for those living in the densest data center markets. The dramatic increase in power demands from Silicon Valley’s growth-at-all-costs approach to AI also threatens to upend the energy transition plans of entire nations and the clean energy goals of trillion-dollar tech companies. In some countries, including Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Malaysia, the energy required to run all the data centers they plan to build at full capacity exceeds the available supply of renewable energy, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the latest available data. By one official estimate, Sweden could see power demand from data centers roughly double over the course of this decade — and then double again by 2040. In the UK, AI is expected to suck up 500% more energy over the next decade. And in the US, data centers are projected to use 8% of total power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022, according to Goldman Sachs, which described it as “the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation.”

21 June 2024

[nnctales]

Can I Use ChatGPT as a Construction Assistant?

The construction industry, like many others, has started to embrace the tremendous potential of artificial intelligence (AI). As part of this shift, industry professionals are increasingly asking: “Can I use AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a construction assistant?” The answer is not only a resounding ‘yes’ but also that this technology can offer significant benefits. First, let’s understand what…

[lostconsultants]

Revolutionising Estimations with AI: Smarter, Faster, and More Reliable Predictions

Revolutionising estimations with AI transforms project planning by enhancing accuracy and reducing uncertainty. Unlike traditional methods prone to bias, AI-driven estimations leverage historical data and predictive analytics for more reliable forecasts.

Revolutionising estimations with AI is transforming how teams predict timelines, allocate resources, and improve project planning. Traditional estimation methods often rely on human intuition, which can introduce biases and inconsistencies. AI offers a data-driven approach that enhances accuracy, reduces uncertainty, and allows teams to focus on delivering value. If you’re interested in…

[canmom]

how much power does tech really use, compared to other shit?

my dash has been full of arguing about AI power consumption recently. so I decided to investigate a bit.

it's true, as the Ars Technica article argues, that AI is still only one fairly small part of the overall tech sector power consumption, potentially comparable to things like PC gaming. what's notable is how quickly it's grown in just a few years, and this is likely to be a limit to how much more it can scale.

I think it is reasonable to say that adding generative AI at large scale to systems that did not previously have generative AI (phones, Windows operating system etc.) will increase the energy cost. it's hard to estimate by how much. however, the bulk of AI energy use is in training, not querying. in some cases 'AI' might lead to less energy use, e.g. using an AI denoiser will reduce the energy needed to render an animated film.

the real problem being exposed is that most of us don't really have any intuition for how much energy is used for what. you can draw comparisons all sorts of ways. compare it to the total energy consumption of humanity and it may sound fairly niche; compare it to the energy used by a small country (I've seen Ireland as one example, which used about 170TWh in 2022) and it can sound huge.

but if we want to reduce the overall energy demand of our species (to slow our CO2 emissions in the short term, and accomodate the limitations of renewables in a hypothetical future), we should look at the full stack. how does AI, crypto and tech compare to other uses of energy?

here's how physicist David McKay broke down energy use per person in the UK way back in 2008 in Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, and his estimate of a viable renewable mix for the UK.

('Stuff' represents the embedded energy of manufactured goods not covered by the other boxes. 'Gadgets' represents the energy used by electronic devices including passive consumption by devices left on standby, and datacentres supporting them - I believe the embodied energy cost of building them falls under 'stuff' instead.)

today those numbers would probably look different - populations change, tech evolves, etc. etc., and this notably predates the massive rise in network infrastructure and computing tech that the Ars article describes. I'm sure someone's come up with a more up-to-date SEWTHA-style estimate of how energy consumption breaks down since then, but I don't have it to hand.

that said, the relative sizes of the blocks won't have changed that much. we still eat, heat our homes and fly about as much as ever; electric cars have become more popular but the fleet is still mostly petrol-powered. nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of the efficiency of most of this stuff. depending where you live, things might look a bit different - less energy on heating/cooling or more on cars for example.

how big a block would AI and crypto make on a chart like this?

per the IEA, crypto used 100-150TWh of electricity worldwide in 2022. in McKay's preferred unit of kWh/day/person, that would come to a worldwide average of just 0.04kWh/day/person. that is of course imagining that all eight billion of us use crypto, which is not true. if you looked at the total crypto-owning population, estimated to be 560 million in 2024, that comes to about 0.6kWh/day/crypto-owning person for cryptocurrency mining [2022/2024 data]. I'm sure that applies to a lot of people who just used crypto once to buy drugs or something, so the footprint of 'heavier' crypto users would be higher.

I'm actually a little surpised by this - I thought crypto was way worse. it's still orders of magnitude more demanding than other transaction systems but I'm rather relieved to see we haven't spent that much energy on the red queen race of cryptomining.

the projected energy use of AI is a bit more vague - depending on your estimate it could be higher or lower - but it would be a similar order of magnitude (around 100TWh).

SEWTHA calculated that in 2007, data centres in the USA added up to 0.4kWh/day/person. the ars article shows worldwide total data centre energy use increasing by a factor of about 7 since then; the world population has increased from just under 7 billion to nearly 8 billion. so the amount per person is probably about a sixfold increase to around 2.4kWh/day/person for data centres in the USA [extrapolated estimate based on 2007 data] - for Americans, anyway.

however, this is complicated because the proportion of people using network infrastructure worldwide has probably grown a lot since 2007, so a lot of that data centre expansion might be taking place outside the States.

as an alternative calculation, the IEA reports that in 2022, data centres accounted for 240-340 TWh, and transmitting data across the network, 260-360 TWh; in total 500-700TWh. averaged across the whole world, that comes to just 0.2 kWh/day/person for data centres and network infrastructure worldwide [2022 data] - though it probably breaks down very unequally across countries, which might account for the huge discrepancy in our estimates here! e.g. if you live in a country with fast, reliable internet where you can easily stream 4k video, you will probably account for much higher internet traffic than someone in a country where most people connect to the internet using phones over data.

overall, however we calculate it, it's still pretty small compared to the rest of the stack. AI is growing fast but worldwide energy use is around 180,000 TWh. humans use a lot of fucking energy. of course, reducing this is a multi-front battle, so we can still definitely stand to gain in tech. it's just not the main front here.

instead, the four biggest blocks by far are transportation, heating/cooling and manufacturing. if we want to make a real dent we'd need to collectively travel by car and plane a lot less, insulate our houses better, and reduce the turnover of material objects.

[solar-winds-ttrpg]

Looking for illustrators for my space fantasy TTRPG

Hello! I am looking for artists, especially local artists in or from the Nordics, to work with in creating images and illustrations for my Tabletop Role-Playing Game, Solar Winds. Any artwork provided will be for commercial use, fully credited and payed appropriately. Rates, stylisation wishes, and further details are listed below. If you are not interested, but know someone who might be, please share this with them!

Solar Winds is a space fantasy TTRPG that draws inspiration from various Nordic myths and folklore, with an especial focus on Finnish and Sámi folklore, as well as other stories such as Star Wars. It focuses on roleplay-driven storytelling while providing an elegant structure to combat, and allowing players to traverse both stars and a multitude of climates and environments. Think heroic or epic fantasy, with the addition of being set in space and containing starships.

Artists chosen for the project will be paid 50% up front, 50% after completion. I have a total budget of about 15 000kr (NOK) (~1 300€). The project is funded by TVIBITstigen (https://tvibit.net/stigen). The budget is split between the artpieces like this:

2x Landscapes / full scenes, 3000kr each

6x Characters, 1000kr each

2x Vehicle designs, 1000kr each

Smaller sketches or concepts for weapons, armour, etc., about 500kr each (These are my estimations for how much I'm going to pay for the different kinds of artwork, though final price will be agreed upon with each artist.)

If you are interested, you should take contact! To do so, you send your portfolio, or a link to your portfolio, to my e-mail:TheRightDragonEye@gmail.com. (You should make sure your link does not require users to have an account to see your work.) Please also mention what kinds of artpieces you would be interested in / best suited to create, as this is big project with a variety of scenes.

I'm most interested in semi-realistic artstyles, semi-stylised artstyles, and paintings (digital or otherwise). While the artworks would need to be delivered digitally, I accept both digital and traditional artstyles for this project. You will also have an advantage if your portfolio includes some of the following subjects:

Process images or timelapses (to root out AI)

Science fiction

Diverse landscapes

Various insectoid humanoids (bug people) (this one is a massive plus)

Mechanical humanoids (droids, exos, robots, etc.)

Vehicles (starships, hoverbikes, walkers, cars, etc.) (especially if self-designed)

City streets, megacities

Action, combat, war

Post-apocalypse

Armour and weapon designs (especially if self-designed)

A mixture of fantasy and technology

Cryptids, folkloric entities

Northern lights

In addition, while anyone can apply here, I am especially looking for artists in or from the Nordic region, especially Sámi or Finnish artists, as this project takes a lot of inspiration from Sámi and Finnish folklore in particular. If you have another indigenous background, that is also an advantage!

I will accept NO AI-generated or assisted "art".

If you have any questions or comments, please ask away <3

[kynndr3dd-synn3]

0BAMA ‘CRIME FAMILY’ : What's The TRUE ORIGIN Of Their Wealth⁉️

Barack and Michelle Obama’s net worth is estimated between $70M and $135M - a sharp rise from just $1.5M in 2008. How did they amass such wealth?

���� Between 2005 and 2016, the couple earned $20.5M in salaries and book royalties, per Forbes.

🔴 By his 2009 inauguration, Obama held $1.1M-$5.1M in US Treasury bills.

🔴 In 2017, they secured a $65M joint book deal.

🔴 Barack made $1.2M from just three Wall Street speaking engagements, with estimates of $400K per event - equal to his presidential salary.

🔴 Michelle reportedly charges $225K per speech, with 2018 book tour tickets ranging from $307 to $4,070 (Business Insider).

🔴 In 2018, they founded Higher Ground Productions and signed a $50M Netflix deal.

🔴 In 2019, they inked an exclusive podcast deal with Spotify, followed by a first-look deal with Audible in 2022.

POLITICAL DYNASTY GRIFTERS...

While mainstream outlets insist there’s nothing unusual about their fortune, a Kogod School of Business projection suggests the couple could earn $242.5M by the 2030s.

However, US conservatives on X are urging Elon Musk's DOGE community to INVESTIGATE the true extent of the Obamas' wealth, citing their lavish lifestyle and luxury properties.

Wall Street analyst and charity fraud expert Charles Ortel suspects the Obamas’ philanthropic ventures mimic the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud:

“The IRS… has never disciplined the Obamas for corporate mining naked partisan and personal enrichment schemes inside a ‘public charity,’ which is strictly and clearly illegal,” he believes.

Ortel notes the Obama-era FBI & DOJ failed to complete investigations into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged pay-to-play schemes. He believes the Clintons and Obamas pushed Russiagate and post-2020 lawfare against Trump to prevent him from using presidential powers to thoroughly investigate them.

The image is generated by AI

👍 @geopolitics_live

[inbabylontheywept]

So, just some Fermi numbers for AI: I'm going to invent a unit right now, 1 Global Flop-Second. It's the total amount of computation available in the world, for one second. That's 10^21 flops if you're actually kind of curious. GPT-3 required about 100 Global Flop-Seconds, or nearly 2 minutes. GPT-4 required around 10,000 Global Flop-Seconds, or about 3 hours, and at the time, consumed something like 1/2000th the worlds total computational capacity for a couple of years. If we assume that every iteration just goes up by something like 100x as many flop seconds, GPT-5 is going to take 1,000,000 Global Flop-Seconds, or 12 days of capacity. They've been working on it for a year and a half, which implies that they've been using something like 1% of the world's total computational capacity in that time.

So just drawing straights lines in the guesses (this is a Fermi estimation), GPT-6 would need 20x as much computing fraction as GPT-5, which needed 20x as much as GPT-4, so it would take something like a quarter of all the world's computational capacity to make if they tried for a year and a half. If they cut themselves some slack and went for five years, they'd still need 5-6%.

And GPT-7 would need 20x as much as that.

OpenAI's CEO has said that their optimistic estimates for getting to GPT-7 would require seven-trillion dollars of investment. That's about as much as Microsoft, Apple, and Google combined. So, for limiting factors involved are... GPT-6: Limited by money. GPT-6 doesn't happen unless GPT-5 can make an absolute shitload. Decreasing gains kill this project, and all the ones after that. We don't actually know how far deep learning can be pushed before it stops working, but it probably doesnt' scale forever. GPT-7: Limited by money, and by total supply of hardware. Would need to make a massive return on six, and find a way to actually improve hardware output for the world. GPT-8: Limited by money, and by hardware, and by global energy supplies. Would require breakthroughs in at least two of those three. A world where GPT-8 can be designed is almost impossible to imagine. A world where GPT-8 exists is like summoning an elder god. GPT-9, just for giggles, is like a Kardeshev 1 level project. Maybe level 2.

[meret118]

Elon Musk Is an Evil Piece of Garbage—and an A-Level Fraud Too

He is stupid. He is incompetent. He is cruel. He is sinister. And people will die because of what he’s done.

He vowed to slash $2 trillion in “wasteful” federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it’ll be more like $150 billion.

However, his “cuts” will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money.

But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.”

. . .

The cuts are leaving thousands of good people unemployed. And they will literally kill people. Coal miners will die prematurely. Children all over the world will die from malaria and other diseases because of the demise of USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization.” In fact, this is already happening

. . .

Musk and his Muskrats are doing nothing less than compiling a vast database on every one of us: “assembling a sprawling surveillance system,” she writes, “the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/194769/elon-musk-evil-garbage-fraud

Trump Is Destroying the Data that Keeps the Country Running

While air traffic controller shortages have understandably been at the center of the story about Trump 2.0–era airline chaos, FAA cuts are gutting more behind-the-scenes positions too.

Back in March, TheAtlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker reported that as many as 12 percent of the FAA’s aeronautical-information specialists—those tasked with updating charts, maps, and flight procedures—had been fired or were exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program spearheaded by DOGE. These kinds of cuts to critical information-gathering services are happening across agencies, eroding the government’s ability to collect and interpret data on everything from maternal mortality to flight paths, hurricanes, and electricity. The results could prove far more devastating than a few hundred canceled and delayed flights.

. . .

Experts have raised alarm bells in recent weeks about White House attempts to make it easier to fire federal officials. If economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics could be fired at will, without the usual lengthy appeals process, they could be pressured by political appointees into manipulating BLS data on politically sensitive subjects like inflation, unemployment, productivity, and growth.

newrepublic.com/article/194930/trump-destroying-data-keeps-country-running

DOGE Was Bad. Schedule F Will Be Worse.

An executive order will convert 50,000 government employees into de facto political appointees who serve only at the president’s pleasure.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-civil-service-schedule-f/682609/

A DOGE Recruiter Is Staffing a Project to Deploy AI Agents Across the US Government

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-recruiter-ai-agents-palantir-clown-emoji/

Elon Musk's time machine DOGE is taking America back to the 1800s, one agency closure at a time

DOGE has been very good at reducing the number of people who work for the government — as many as 216,000 federal employees and contractors are already out, with more dismissals in the works. Musk has gutted or eliminated agencies that prevent disease, protect us from pandemics, provide aid to our allies, ensure the safety of our food and medicines, and safeguard Americans against toxic chemicals. Every one of those efforts is a proven multiplier of our tax money — every dollar we spend on them redounds to the US economy.

Which means that even if Musk succeeds at slashing government spending, he'll actually be adding to the federal deficit: DOGE cuts to the Internal Revenue Service alone are estimated to cost America some $500 billion in lost tax revenue every year.

. . .

Here are four possible explanations for what DOGE is actually up to. Maybe none of them are right. Or perhaps they're all accurate, to varying degrees. But one thing is certain: Each of them provides a more plausible insight into what DOGE is doing than the official explanation of saving taxpayers money.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doge-cuts-federal-worker-firings-government-plan-2025-4