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?
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.
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!"
The Reddit thread is reasonably inflamed, but the theory about changing reality downstream by changing the sources that chatbots ingest is a chilling one.
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?
> 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.
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?
23 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 38.3 ms ] threadThe removed bits discuss habeaus corpus, emoluments, and congressional oversight of the military.
(In case you don't want to visit reddit)
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!"
> 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/202508061932...