This is a blog post I’ve resurrected from just over 20 years ago. I think it’s even more appropriate now.
Tags: inspiration, nostalgia, the value of work, Mercury astronauts
September 26, 2006
I read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff a zillion years ago. One passage hit me then, and it’s stuck with me. The time is somewhere in the beginning of the Project Mercury spaceflight program (1958-63):
Asking Gus [Grissom] to “just say a few words” was like handing him a knife and asking him to open a main vein. But hundreds of workers are gathered in the main auditorium of the Convair plant to see Gus and the other six, and they’re beaming at them, and the Convair brass say a few words and then the astronauts are supposed to say a few words, and all at once Gus realizes it’s his turn to say something, and he is petrified. He opens his mouth and out come the words: “Well… do good work!” It’s an ironic remark, implying “… because it’s my ass that’ll be sitting on your freaking rocket.” But the workers start cheering like mad. They started cheering as if they had just heard the most moving and inspiring message of their lives: Do good work! After all, it’s little Gus’s ass on top of our rocket! They stood there for an eternity and cheered their brains out while Gus gazed blankly on them from the Pope’s balcony. Not only that, the workers—the workers, not the management but the workers!—had a flag company make up a huge banner, and they strung it up high in the main work bay, and it said: DO GOOD WORK.
That came to mind when I read this abstract:
This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities—a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.
Since this is by no means the first such report, I feel safe in saying Diebold is not DOING GOOD WORK.
October 1, 2026
At least Diebold wasn’t humble-bragging about how their little agents were too smart and “unaligned” to be forced to DO GOOD WORK. Maybe there should be a DO GOOD WORK banner in OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, etc. company cafeterias, right below the “🄾 days since warning of existential threat” sign.