This week, Silicon Valley came to Washington, DC, in the form of fresh -faced engineers who supposedly run the government. A bomber -wire report said Elon Musk had quietly chosen at least six engineers, the oldest of whom reported that 24, to help him run his government efficiency department (DOGE).
The secret of the group, as well as inexperienced sixth identified, withdrew from the founding of Washington. “The American people will not stand for an unsolved secret group to run rampant through the executive branch,” the Senate Chuck Schumer’s minority leader said Tuesday.
But mostly, it has created six new mysteries. Since engineers reported that everyone is under the age of 25, their digital tracks are limited, and, in true musical fashion, most have avoided any media. Musk even said that the publicly naming of these men was “a crime”, which reached Doxxing. So the country is left to wonder who these young people are and what motivates them.
At the end of 2023, I spent an hour talking to one of these newly crowned authorities: Luke Farritor, a “Major of Estimated Computer Science” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln working in Vesuvius challenges. This is an attempt by he, Nat Friedman’s investor to use him to decipher the ancient rolls. The Farritor, a Thiel friend, was like many young people on Peter Thiel-Verse: polite (he referred to me as “lady”), prone to tangent to past civilizations and committed to technology above all.
Our conversation was mainly about the Vesuvius challenge, so I didn’t ask, to say, what methods would use to dismantle the federal government if it was called to do so in the future. But Farritor stressed that the project showed him the power of coding – how technology enabled him to solve a problem that had prevented experts for decades. “Even if you are just a sharp child from Nebraska, you can work hard and make an impact,” he said.
“We’re here to help”
When the Farritor joined the Spacex in early 2023, as a practitioner working on the Starship start software, he was following in the footsteps of his father. His father, Shane Farritor, is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and co-founder of the Robotics Surgical Company. The Farritor shared his father’s passion for technology, working long hours to help facilitate the start of the star. “I just worked super hard at night and day for all seven months,” Farritor told his practice, describing it as “a ton of entertainment.”
One day on traveling to work, he heard Friedman in Podcast of Dwarkesh Patel, describing the mystery of Vesuvius’s rolls: Papyrus documents buried in 79 AD by MT explosion. Vesuvius. The rolls looked like coal blocks, but Friedman and a small proportion of professors believed that, with 3D modeling and technology, one could read them. He offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who succeeded.
The Farritor had studied Latin and was fascinated by ancient civilizations. “I always read about archeology that grows, and it’s like, wow, now I have to get involved in a project with Richard Janko,” he recalled, referring to the classic scholar who was a judge for the Vesuvius challenge.
After hearing Podcast, the Farritor went home to his apartment in Texas and began working, creating software that could detect patterns in the fuel paper that would be connected to the letters. He went so far as to make his test movements, buying papyrus from Amazon and burning him in the oven of his father’s robotics company.
Friedman announced some of the cash prices recipients at a Livestream-Immediately before a star launch, where the task of the Farritor was to check all 60 computers in the mission control. “I have this very special memory where in my left hand I am holding this Nat Livestream,” he said. “And then, with my right hand, I’m going from computer to computer, turning on everything in mission control.”
Farritor and his friends would eventually take home of $ 700,000, which Farritor told me he would use to pay for his parents’ mortgage, “Buy the new iPhone”, and is likely to put the rest in the “start of a company”.
His plans at the time were far from his current concert, where wireless reports he has a government email and access to the Physical Office in the General Services Administration.
But his time in the Vesuvius challenge included running with the founding of the university. He described the organizers of the Vesuvi challenge by supporting the heads with the university’s bureaucracy as they tried to enter certain high -tech scanners. His appearance as to why the team should take the entrance they wanted: they were trying to help.
“Yes, we are a bunch of Silicon Valley technology, but we are here to help and the kind of building all that good will,” he told university project relations. “It’s a very delicate balance, right? People are very complicated creatures. “
