Spyke

Avoiding Gell-Mann amnesia! Unfortunately, to even get to this question you have to be expert enough in one area to see through the BS... Not a luxury everyone is afforded.

11
orcas.enjoying.yachts

I’ve been a programmer for around 20 years now and I can tell you with 100% confidence that this is going to be an absolute fucking disaster. I’ve built project features—not even full projects—that took months. Hell, we launch one on Monday. This would realistically take years, and after seeing how garbage the DOGE site was built, I have zero confidence in the incel team Elon scraped off his Steam friends list.

73
sh.itjust.works

Yeah, the ideal process is something like this:

  1. Write a bunch of automated tests
  2. Rewrite a chunk that's well tested
  3. Go to 1 until the project is done

I would budget a couple years. Even a smaller codebase would take more than a couple months.

24

Yeah, this. They need this to be completely test-driven. Build a foundation and build out/finalize in pieces. If they had an actual dev team that knew what they were doing, someone would set them straight. They also need a ton of time to gain an understanding of what every part of the existing codebase is doing.

9

I vaguely remember the same story when he bought twitter and got called out by a senior dev for not understanding shit. History repeating itself speedrun any%?

44
lemm.ee

The black market for social security data is gonna have a field day.

41

It will kill the black market for that kind of data. What good is a black market if the data is trivially available to everyone?

9
lemmy.blahaj.zone

If they are genuinely stating months as a realistic timeframe then they either know nothing or are fully aware and this is a deliberate killshot.

41
Dultasreply
lemmy.world

This is the typical Elon "Fully self driving soon" of 2016.

29
el_bhmreply
lemm.ee

No. It is a killshot.

He stated his resentment of social security MULTIPLE times.

Sabotage is the purpose.

27

You might be right. Cutting expenses and saving money, but not in the way that any normal person would want.

2
slrpnk.net

Someone at work was saying people should download their work records from the ssa web portal before they mess it up/lose it.

40
valkyre09reply
lemmy.world

Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll make a full backup before they do something as drastic as try to re-write the system. /s

23

I fully expect them to celebrate launch day by taking a sledgehammer to the old machine like that scene from Office Space. All I can say is that I really hope the SSA has been virtualizing their old COBOL applications and not running them on an ancient mainframe.

19
lemm.ee

I just tried to check that out and got "online service not available"

7
sh.itjust.works

How much you want to bet they are going to feed the code base into ai and ask it to re-write it in a different language?

35

You know what? I’m slightly more confident about the AIs chances compared to his team of 20 year old lead by Big Ballz.

24
pivot_rootreply
lemmy.world

Between this and the other instances of Elon's AI correctly calling a duck a duck (or rather, a Nazi a Nazi and a disinformation spreader a disinformation spreader), Elon might be able to replace himself with Grok as the head of DOGE and see significant improvements almost overnight.

15
lemm.ee

Tbh, replacing our unhinged leadership with LLMs would probably make things a lot better in the near term, though not the mid or long term, as IME they tend to be way too cautious about things they shouldn't be and way too confident about things they shouldn't be.

2

In general, I agree with your conclusion. In this specific case with DOGE, I would argue otherwise.

Elon is overconfident about things he shouldn't be (which is everything) and not cautious about anything. With a LLM being dumb as hell and confidently wrong, that's actually not any worse than what we have now. If it somehow manages to be cautious about anything at all, it's an honest to goodness improvement.

1
lemmy.world

As if "accidentally" breaking it during this process would be a bug, not a feature.

"Oh no, we completely broke the SSA, it's all gone. Soorrrrrryyyyyy"

25
literature.cafe

Fr. They’re gonna “accidentally lose” all the records of who was receiving social security and how much they were getting, and they’re gonna make people reapply for it in person, but they have to bring their birth certificate, social security cart, passport, driver’s license with real id, 5 years of tax returns, and probably some new special certificate they start issuing to prove you’re maga a real citizen

26
lemmy.world

Oh fuck this.... I can't even look at my own code from a year or two ago and understand what the hell I was doing.

I learned some very basic COBOL back in high school (using punch cards), and that shit was confusing as hell.
There is no possible way that this ancient codebase could be migrated by a bunch of 20 year olds in such a short amount of time.

25
aussie.zone

They're just going to feed it to some LLM and then rely on the slop it outputs.

20
lemmy.world

As someone who's actually been part of a team that did this exact migration, it's gonna be shitshow with tons of bugs when the mainframes are decommissioned and the new system goes live.

It's not the wrong move cause the tech is increasingly obsolete but the level of effort will be underestimated.

23
lemmy.today

I think this type of project would take at least five years. A minimum of three to develop, 1 to do internal QA, and at least a fifth as a slow roll out from the smallest states while progressing to the larger. If bugs are revealed during that fifth year, slow the roll while getting them patched up.

It is the sort of thing that requires long term vision, effective governance, and patience. Things that Trump and friends do not possess.

12

Surprise surprise, that's a similar time frame the last attempt at this gave. Apparently the they never got too far off thr ground because they had to divert resources to help against covid

5
bainesreply
lemmy.cafe

it is only obsolete if you have a better currently working solution

anything else is a fucking pipe dream

6
MuskyMelonreply
lemmy.world

Nope it's also obsolete if the cost of maintaining an old system is far higher than a buggy new system. That's what accountants tell me anyway.

2

people say this at a manager level, then go over budget by 3x in time, 2x in cost and only mostly get the same result as the original

ask me how I know

accountants, business majors and leadership with 0 experience doing the actual job need to fuck right off

fucking wanker muppet elmo

2

I'm convinced this is a genuine attempt at geriatricide and to weed out the weak. If I'm not mistaken, this is something that he and his friends are fond of.

20
trogonreply
lemmy.world

In their AI-centered, techno-feudal utopia, the elderly are just a drain.

6
leminal.space

First you break government. Once broken, privatize everything on the justification of government not working.

Use propaganda to make people hateful and violent towards election workers. Use to loss of election workers to either have the incumbent administration run elections with "impartiality" or cancel elections altogether.

Cut government funding and make everything unpredictable, causing farmers and business owners to go bankrupt. Have oligarchs buy up everything at rock-bottom pricing, and turn the citizens back into serfs, who will be poor enough to shut up and do as they're told.

20

IMO, only 3 things hold social order together....Laws, Consequences, and Prosperity. The loss of any one of those things will result in some pretty nasty stuff. We're not going to go the way of Germany - at least not as fast....there are simply too many guns in this nation, too much communications capacity, too much ability for quick travel, etc.

Through trump 45, all the lawsuits, hearings, censures, lawsuits, protests, and impeachments were simply seen as "liberal tears." When thenorange voters are directly, and negatively impacted by what they voted for, those liberal tears will a protest of government that will mean something. We're still in the shocked-look, "I thought the other people were the problem" phase of things.

Orange voters are starting to lose their jobs. Orange farmers are starting to have distressed farms, or fields with rotting product waiting for harvest. Stress fractures are beginning to appear with Medicare/Medicaid and SS. Wait until the Farmbill is canceled.

Republican town hall meetings will reach a point where they'll be canceled entirely. They're starting to crack down on the ever-growing population of homeless and people living in their cars. They're starting to crack down on social media negativity towards government. Just wait until conservatives come after the guns.

Our allies are doing their best to help us out by economic means, but they can only do so much, as the threat to our nation is coming from within our nation. Canada is rocking it with their tariffs, being focused squarely on red states.

Things will likely get uglier, but that might just be the way it has to be, before things can improve, and it'll be scary for everyone. The US has been on a downward/rightward spiral since the early 1970s, and we've let it slowly happen to ourselves. Setting things right Will be difficult, and will certainly take more than a few 4-8 year presidential cycles, and people need to understand that.

4

Yep, this is the explanation. People are still trying to rationalize "why do this in months, its all gonna collapse!" not understanding that collapse is the actual point.

5
lemm.ee

It took the GIMP team 7 years to harden and release 3.0 and it's a fucking image editing program, this guy is actually insane.

18

On one hand the GIMP project took so long because they have very little resources. They would certainly do it faster with more people.

On the other hand you will probably get a team of inexperienced developers picked for their loyalty to a cokehead. The overall organization has a history of confusing millions for billions and problems working with much more common stuff than COBOL.

9
lemmy.world

Isn’t a benefit to these systems still being COBOL is that they’re hard to hack?

17

Obscurity is not security. We've learned a lot about security in the post 20 years, let alone the last 40

No, cobol is not more secure because it's a dead language. Obscurity is a hurdle, security is a wall - security is mathematical and good practices, obscurity is just being weird. It takes a bit longer to get past the weird, getting past a solid wall is a matter of luck or brilliance

23
Jackreply
slrpnk.net

The programming language itself rarely opens hacking opportunities in my experience. It is more the design of the system and potential bugs introduced by the dev can be exploited as well.

21

Luckily DOGE has already breached dozens of hardened systems and created a single point of failure to collapse US government wide systems, and when it happens, they'll be sure to blame Biden.

7
Ledericasreply
lemm.ee

That's probably why. It was the premise for the reimanged series of bsg, Galactica was so old that the cylons could not hack the computers like did with the 12 colonies whom they disabled with a virus.

5

"Grok, do you know anything about coding in Cobol?"

Absolutely, Elon. You programmed me with all the knowledge of every coding language you know.

"Excellent! Rewrite the SSA software!"

R****dead f**got pedo-guy loser. You don't know shit, I'm a really good dad who's really good at computer games!

"Perfect. Push it to prod"

15

Excuse me, they said they want to have this done in months? Did I read that article correctly?

14

They are using this as cover to say, oops we don't know how much you paid into the plan, so therefore we will give all money to Elon and Wallstreet instead of paying benefits. I hope this is what finally get people to throw this clown out of government.

14
lemmy.world

I'm 100% sure the plan is to let an LLM write the code and not a single human will attempt to understand how it works.

13

His gremlins can't chatgpt their way through the code so he wants it migrated so he can fuck with it or steal money, probably both.

11

There are actually companies (very few) that work with migrating large cobol code bases to java, in a automated manner. And it costs a lot, hundreds of millions and it takes a couple of years. They ensure that the cobol and java execution is doing the same thing. So it works, but it's shit. Many do this because it's hard to find cobol developers and the cost of IBM mainframes.

Anyways the code turns into cobol style in Java, horrible and hard work with, would never like to maintain it.

11

I feel like there are a good six very large companies that could give firsthand accounts on why letting Elon Musk touch an important piece of software is a terrible idea.

11

There's probably a few rich people who can tell you why Elon Musk and his team of 20 year olds led by Big Ballz touching government software is a great idea, especially Social Security!

1
lemmy.blahaj.zone

What the fuck is the rush!? They should do this, but there is zero reason to rush it unless you want people to suffer needlessly.

10
Lucky_777reply
lemmy.world

It's easy. Rush to "fix" things, but break them in the process. Then tell the American people... look we tried and it's not working! Let's privatize! Moving all of our SS money into hedge funds and wall street scum. Welcome to Trump's America.

12

That's how you know they have nobody with experience there that has their opinion being considered. No one with actual experience in the industry wouldn't do this out of the blue and in a few months "for sure, no delays".

10

Whatever language is chosen will be regarded forever as worse than COBOL, regardless of its actual merits.

10
lemmy.world

My only thought here is that they have no idea how to scope things properly. Anyone who has done rewrites or large ETLs of systems knows that initial scoping is always usually wrong. -- my bet is they drag this out for the rest of the presidency where "done in months" is actually "we're still working on it". And maybe even after so Musk can suckle another government test.

9

Some of them are teenagers and the rest have the mental and emotional maturity of a teenager.

They have no clue what it takes for such a large project. Even Elon “self-driving by the end of 2014” Musk hasn’t a clue.

8
lemmy.world

Im gonna side with Elon here, in the fact COBOL is absolutely outdated and should be phased out. However, considering what they said in the post and how it went with his takeover of Twitter, I have doubts that he will be capable of executing it correctly. Move fast and break things simply shouldn't apply in the government sphere.

5

he’s only right if he has a working alternative

you don’t remove anything until you do

4

A sad fact about programming projects is that you can and have to lie about how long it'll take or cost because nobody will ever accept the truth about those things.

4

Craziness aside, what would be a good language to redo a critical system like this in?

Lots of hype around rust lately, but not sure if that's appropriate?

3

Why would it matter unless he was planning to harvest the data?

1

Why would Elon hate his mother? She kept him from being beaten up by that facebook guy.

1

I want to thank @[email protected] for finding the one BlueSky post that isn't schadenfreude the dark realities that Nazis did when they genocided the disabled.

It was so grotesque, I almost broke protocol.

Whatever you do, DO NOT READ QUOTE REPLIES & REPLIES TO THIS ON BLUESKY.

What you can do, is warn people on social security what will repeat historically, and defend the vulnerable. I will continue communications happening until I too get abducted.

-2
lemmy.dbzer0.com

Buddy, keep fighting the good fight, but there has got to be a better way to post about this shit where you don't come across as insane to those not already in the know. This reads like something from insanfacebookposts.

That first sentence is a run on that takes multiple reads to parse. It's definitely missing a word, and it's worded somewhat odd.

I almost broke protocol

I highly doubt anyone but you has any idea what you mean by that. We aren't all from 50501 or whereever.

The hashtag makes the next line unreasonably large, at least on lemmy. You can just bold things. That really, really damages the overall look of your post. Also, don't be coy. There's negative reason to be vague. Why shouldn't anyone read the replies? Explicit nazi propaganda? Stupid Elon simps?

What you can do, is warn people on social security what will repeat historically, and defend the vulnerable.

What you can do is: warn people on social security about the atrocities from history about to repeat, and you can defend the vulnerable.

I will continue communications happening until I too get abducted.

There are numerous college students and academics being abducted right now. I will continue posting things like this until I am as well. Abduction tracker here.


Look. I know there's a huge thing about "don't tear down or nitpick allies' messaging, that's just helping the enemy" but poor enough messaging can be self defeating. Not saying yours is, just that it can be. Lord knows they have masterful propagandists on their side, "influencers", editing teams, maybe even "audience" reaction and sentiment analytics shit going on.

You can at least take two extra minutes to proofread your shit.

11

Buddy, keep fighting the good fight, but there has got to be a better way to post about this shit where you don't come across as insane to those not already in the know. This reads like something from insanfacebookposts.

There's always someone who posts like they're a homeless person in a park telling you that god is a sock.

Wherever I see this rambling I just move on to another topic. You know you've reached the bottom of the barrel when it appears. This, or those images macros of Ralph picking his nose saying "other team stupid" or whatever.

2

No responsible adult should "hope for the best" when putting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk.

Americans who have paid taxes for most of their lives.

Gamble your own life, not others'.

6
Lennnyreply
lemmy.world

Grimes? Why's Elon so far up your ass he's talking for you?

3
Lvdwsnreply
lemmy.world

Could you explain, in your own words, what authority Elon Musk has to make decisions on what constitutes overspending, fraud, and waste? Or what decisions he’s made that have inarguably reduced overspending, fraud, and waste?

I can say one thing but that doesn’t make subsequent actions fulfill it. I can say something good like “women deserve orgasms” but that doesn’t justify an unwarranted/unsolicited attempt to make that happen.

It feels disingenuous to give an unelected billionaire with clear conflicts of interest the benefit of a doubt that they’re just trying to make the only thing that could theoretically thwart them (the government) more “efficient” when it’s much more likely that they’re trying to remove the fangs that could pop their world domination bubble.

3

you know what's wasteful spending? 44 billion dollars to buy a shitty site so you can force people to see your dumbass memes

2