John Skiles Skinner

A Farewell to Ask.com | 30 Years of Curiosity

‘We Don’t Want an AI Demo, We Want Answers’: Federal Workers Grill Trump Appointee During All-Hands

Leaked chats obtained by WIRED detail plans for the General Services Administration—and the staff’s angry response.

Bluesky Social

John Skiles Skinner (@skiles.blue)

Let’s begin with Stephen Ehikian, Musk’s pick to head the GSA, speaking at GSA HQ on March 20th. He has a plan to centralize government data and point AI at it: "As you think about the future of AI, in order to think about using any of these tools at scale, we gotta get our data in one place"

Trump’s acting cyber chief uploaded sensitive files into a public version of ChatGPT

The interim director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency triggered an internal cybersecurity warning with the uploads — and a DHS-level damage assessment.

Palantir Is Helping DOGE With a Massive IRS Data Project

For the past three days, DOGE and a handful of Palantir representatives, along with dozens of career IRS engineers, have been collaborating to build a “mega API,” WIRED has learned.

Repression as a service

On the leaked manual for ELITE, the immigrant-targeting computer, and how far we have come down a dangerous road.

Bluesky Social

John Skiles Skinner (@skiles.blue)

These powerful men dream of a crystal ball; the fantasy from which they've taken the name "Palantir." Whispering to it, they will magically see whatever they command, destroy whatever they command. They will not need human minions who might remind them of their own stupidity. This is their fiction

On GSAi

I helped build a government AI system. DOGE fired me, rolled the AI out to the whole agency, and implied the AI can do my job and the jobs of the others they've fired.