The White House Open Sources President Obama's Facebook Messenger Bot To 'Bring the Gov't To You' (whitehouse.gov) 37
The White House has open sourced the code for President Obama's Facebook Messenger bot in a hope that this will help other governments and developers build similar services. These services will ideally foster similar connections with their citizens with significantly less upfront investment. From the official post: It's also an important part of furthering our mission to "meet the public where they are." Millions of people contact their friends and family using Facebook Messenger. Why shouldn't they be able to contact the White House, too? And President Obama really reads these messages. Since 2009, he's made it part of his daily routine to read 10 letters sent to him by citizens -- something he refers to as the best part of his day. [...] To be specific, we are open-sourcing a Drupal module, complete with easy steps and boiler plate code. This will enable Drupal 8 developers to quickly launch a Facebook Messenger bot. We also left a few lines in the repository describing our hopes for the future of the code and encouraging members of the developer community to get involved.
Who benefits and How (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm waiting for them to open-source his teleprompter, then I can be president too!
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Who benefits from the perception that government is "there for you"? Government insiders and politicians. If this idea is believed, it helps them continue controlling money someone else earned and power that rightfully belongs to individual citizens in the country.
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The government of course. This supports their desire to create and maintain an ignorant and thus compliant citizenry. By only providing information that they want you to have under the illusion that they are being open with you.
It kind of reminds me of of the movie "Animal House" where Kevin Bacon is trying to quell a stampede at the parade ALL IS WELL [youtube.com]
the source (Score:2, Funny)
say(rnd() % 1 ? "hope" : "change)
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I was going to go with:
Thanks, Obama!!
Here's the update (Score:2)
This is what he's trying to do:
CORE::say(int rand(2) ? "hope" : "change");
From the command line:
perl -e "CORE::say(int rand(2) ? "hope" : "change");"
You need the "CORE::" prefix on the "say" function because "say" is available only in the newer versions of perl (it'll eventually be default available).
Re: (Score:2)
CORE::
You mispronounced CORPSE::
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A real perl hacker would use cowsay.
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say(rnd() % 1 ? "hope" : "change)
This is very educational! The whole time I thought they were doing web searches about the most popular or dangerous topics of the day, ranking them, having humans sift through them and pick duplicates, use the duplicates to verify that they are not biased, and using AI to learn from previous interactions what the key words are after content is delivered; this allowed them to find what words to respond to with "hope" and/or "change" prefixed, suffixed, or inserted before and or after "to" and "and". This c
And President Obama really reads these messages. (Score:2)
Yea sure he does.
Confirmed! (Score:2)
Finally, absolute proof that so-called "open source" is really just a Marxist Kenyan plot to take away our liberties!
LOCK HIM UP!
I found the pseudocode (Score:1)
I found the pseudocode for it:
if (messageIn = praise)
then takeCreditForIt
else if (messageIn = problem)
then blameTheRepublicans
else if (messageIn = requestFromForeignGovernment)
then sendUserToClintonFoundationDonationForm
else if (messageIn = ransomDemandFromIran)
then setupUnmarkedBillExchange
else if (messageIn = threatFromSyria)
then drawMeaninglessLineInSand
else if (messageIn = threatFromRussia)
then makeEmptyThreatsThenCowerInCorner
else if (messageIn = questionAboutVotingLocations)
{
if (user =
'Bring the Gov't to You' (Score:2)