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  • I don't understand the negative comments.

    If you can take a passport picture with your smartphone and get a passport mailed to you in weeks, it will enable many more people to travel, and cut down on bureaucracy and wait times.

    It's much better than having papers in archives, will save many errors, and bring government into the 21st century. The information is already in databases, it's just now that it serves the people's convenience.

    by epsteingpt
  • This thing is obviously fully vibe coded... Click the "what's coming next" and under the healthcare section the marketing screenshot contains broken images... Like no one ever looked at this before deploying it?
    by cjonas
  • I asked it "what is love?" It couldn't answer. I said "baby don't hurt me". It said "I'm not here to discuss song lyrics." So you admit it's song lyrics!
    by asveikau
  • Situation: There are 29,000 competing government websites.

    "29,000! Ridiculous! We need to develop one Government website that covers everyone's use cases."

    Soon: Situation: There are 29,001 competing government websites.

    by xd1936
  • I understand that having the fingerprint unlock icon over the text about 'keeping your privacy protected' is supposed to represent protecting 'your privacy', but if you click it, it doesn't even go away, so it just becomes an annoying impediment to trying to read. Am I alone in thinking this or is that entire paragraph just generally poorly designed?

    Edit: Also hope that they don't plan on having anyone using ancient software (specifically IE, which I'm sure there are probably some government agencies somewhere that probably do) having the website work - even if you use an IE user agent, it will use SSE.

    by VoidWhisperer
  • I haven't tried this but in principle I think this sort of finding a needle in a haystack situation (finding the correct path to assistance in a government service) is one of the rare circumstances where a well-crafted chatbot can be genuinely useful rather than just irritating.
    by mellosouls
  • If anyone's wondering how this works, it looks like[1] Gemini + guardrails:

    > Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease

    [1] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...

    by sssilver
  • OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
    by maherbeg

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