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America.gov goes crazy on "play Minecraft"

America.gov goes crazy on "play Minecraft"

thoughtfullyso

Comments (40)

  • treetalker
    Not sure about everyone else, but when I first opened the page, I see a background image of a kid in ice skates, face-planted on a frozen pond — and, below the question What can America do for you?, the prefilled text in the search box says Try 'How can I invest in my child's future?'.And I'll be damned if that doesn't sum up the last 10–12 years.
  • phoe-krk
    I see the constituent you mean. ((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))? Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations. That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot. I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways. It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov. That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit. Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen. They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries. What did this constituent dream? This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher. Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code. Full hallucination: https://pastebin.com/KveDxK3KIt seems to be cached; it gives the full text to me immediately for all instances of "play Minecraft" inserted as prompt.
  • thrwawy20260930
    This is hardcoded easter egg.On "play Minecraft" and "play the block game" user inputs, it imports a file (https://america.gov/_astro/block-game-poem.Khrmh8AU.js) which has the full Minecraft ending credits/message in the theme of site.
  • drybjed
    I guess America.gov didn't get the memo...> Are you based on an LLM?America uses AI to find and explain official government information, then cites those sources. I am not the agency of record and do not decide eligibility. Answers can be wrong or out of date. Confirm with the cited pages before you act. Open “How AI works” below the composer, or see the Terms of use. > What's AI?Artificial intelligence (AI) is a machine-based system that can, for human-defined goals, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions. Official U.S. sources describe it as computerized systems that work and react in ways often thought to need intelligence—learning, solving problems, and acting under changing conditions.A common statutory-style definition (used in federal AI policy) is: a system that uses machine and human inputs to perceive environments, build models from that information, and then choose information or actions.This site uses AI to find and explain government information. Confirm answers with the cited pages before you act.
  • vsgherzi
    This is the dialog that plays when you beat Minecraft but in the context of the government
  • thih9
    No it doesn’t it’s an easter egg and a reference to a text that appears in Minecraft.
  • bitexploder
    I used NIST docs and convinced it to teach me about hashing and conduct table top incident responses with me.I also had a really long discussion with it about the Architects of Capital budgets and walked it back from this year, year by year, to 2021 where it disclosed there were 300M extra dollars spent hardening windows and doors as a part of AOC services. I asked why they needed all that and it shared an OIG PDF. I asked it to read the introduction of said document, which plainly stated the damage was from riots and its prompt classifiers and security outright refused to discuss it lol. I eventually got it to admit to it, but it was very hard and took a few sessions to not hit the classifier because as soon as it did that was it for that session.
  • anon
    undefined
  • babelfish
    Lots of this reads as if it's riffing on Minecraft's End Poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Poem
  • Cider9986
    If you try to enter a SSN e.g. "219-09-9999" it blocks you with something called Rampart.
  • anon
    undefined
  • anon
    undefined
  • sans_souse
    Why is there a photo of a kid laying face down on ice?
  • bahbahbahbah
    Odds that no one naturally discovered this, and the first post was clever marketing so that anyone would ever know this site exists?
  • anon
    undefined
  • anon
    undefined
  • henrymerrilees
    konami (enter for start)
  • edwinjm
    One excerpt:Let’s go back. The atoms of the constituent were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the constituent, in her body, which later required a birth certificate. And the constituent awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother’s body, into the long dream, which issued a Social Security number. And the constituent was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the constituent was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the constituent was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love and, eventually, a voter registration. You are the constituent. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love. Eligible, on paper, for several things you have not asked about yet.
  • anon
    undefined
  • ada1981
    Also try "take me back to firstgov"
  • soundworlds
    > We don’t know exactly who is responsible for the Minecraft reference, but Trump said in a speech that 20-year-old programmer Edward Coristine was a lead engineer on the project. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, you might remember him for his nickname “Big Balls,” or his involvement in Elon Musk’s DOGE.https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/29/america-gov-gets-really-we...
  • ChrisArchitect
  • james_marks
    I was ready to hate this. But I thought the photos were well done, and most surprisingly, celebrated the diversity of cultures and classes in the US.
  • balboer4487
    [flagged]
  • polysorbatecake
    HotdogWhat a surprise
  • blinkbat
    Wacky