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National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility

(www.archives.gov)
299 points LastTrain | 4 comments | 24 Jun 25 21:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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almosthere ◴[24 Jun 25 23:21 UTC] No.44372130[source]▶
It's comical to me that anyone is complaining here because

a) everyone with a business purpose are the only ones going.

b) NO one on hacker news is ever going to go.

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mandevil ◴[24 Jun 25 23:30 UTC] No.44372184[source]▶
Proof by counter example: I've been to NARA II at College Park dozens of times, researching and writing various papers or games I have worked on as side projects. So for example I did a lot of research on WW2 era naval damage control for a video game I was working on that never actually got out of the prototype stage.

Depending on exactly how this is enforced it could be nothing or could be a big deal. It depends entirely on how much you trust the people who will be setting and enforcing the policies, and right now there have been a lot of withdrawals and very few deposits into the organizational trust of the US Government supply.

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1. almosthere ◴[25 Jun 25 00:26 UTC] No.44372507[source]▶
sounds like a business purpose to me, and also, how much do you want to bet if you were to do that today, you'd find all the naval damage control information on chatgpt.
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2. mandevil ◴[25 Jun 25 00:37 UTC] No.44372574[source]▶
So you think that ChatGPT is a substitute for primary source research?
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3. almosthere ◴[25 Jun 25 05:54 UTC] No.44374010[source]▶
no, but you have two avenues - you have a business purpose and for what you were building, a video game, could probably be best approximated through chatgpt.

If you're a historian writing a non-fiction book, then visit the fucking archives.

the point I'm making is that everyone is making this a thing, when it is not.

This is classic TDS. Everyone is attributing everything wrong with anything to Trump, his administration. And it's just insane.

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4. mandevil ◴[25 Jun 25 16:31 UTC] No.44379134{3}[source]▶
The point of the video game was to have a better model for naval damage control than the classic, Star Trek-style "10% damage" that you normally see in naval games. To do that I wanted to model actual WW2 ships, room by room, with the free-surface effect, meta-centric height, etc. respected, and then put you into the role of a DC officer on a ship that was attacked in various scenarios.

That level of detail is impossible to get without these primary sources- and the only people who would be interested in a game like this would be the ones for whom that accuracy is a selling point.

This is just one of my side projects, but it is one that shows the wide variety of projects that NARA II supported, beyond just historians.