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  3. DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

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  • corkyskog@sh.itjust.worksC [email protected]

    What's "vibe programming"?

    A This user is from outside of this forum
    A This user is from outside of this forum
    [email protected]
    wrote on last edited by
    #110

    It's understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.

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    • K [email protected]

      There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:

      1. It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
      2. It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
      E This user is from outside of this forum
      E This user is from outside of this forum
      [email protected]
      wrote on last edited by
      #111

      But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.

      Dude it's not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?

      R 1 Reply Last reply
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      • A [email protected]

        Is that true everywhere or just in the US? I know that, at least a few years ago, a bunch of banking software in the US was still in COBOL but parts of Western Europe were modernizing their banking industry. I'm probably going back to school for computer science in the fall and had been considering trying to learn COBOL in my free time, or learning more Fortran (I have actually taken a programming class with Fortran, but because it was aimed at beginners it didn't really go in depth, but I bet it'd look good on certain resumes). It's looking like my future is in Europe somewhere, so I'm keeping that in the back of my mind while making decisions.

        B This user is from outside of this forum
        B This user is from outside of this forum
        [email protected]
        wrote on last edited by
        #112

        I'm not enough into that industry to actually give a good estimate, here, but the amount of COBOL systems still up and running is certainly not even close to non-zero, and it's going to stay that way for a while. From what I gather for companies moving away from COBOL is more of a "programmers are hard to find" situation, not "these systems absolutely must be replaced" one. It's well-supported and scaled with their business, as in, in places they're running the same 60 year old code on new mainframes because if there's one thing that IBM mainframes are then it's excessively backwards-compatible.

        As far as the language is concerned: It's not hard, it's just weird, dating back from an age where people thought randomly calling things "divisions" would make businesspeople capable coders. The reason I'm not in that space isn't because of the language but because of the type of software you write there, it's all bookkeeping and representing business procedures, as said: Bureaucracy.

        Also I'm not sure what "modernising" actually meant, there: SEPA instant payment was introduced, meaning that mainframes won't batch up the day's transactions and then talk to each other every night so cross-bank transfers took a day to process, now they're doing it in ten seconds. Most banks already supported instant transfers within their own systems so they should only have had to rewrite the external interface as the rest was already up to the task.

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        • S [email protected]

          This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.

          J This user is from outside of this forum
          J This user is from outside of this forum
          [email protected]
          wrote on last edited by
          #113

          Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.

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          • S [email protected]

            This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.

            T This user is from outside of this forum
            T This user is from outside of this forum
            [email protected]
            wrote on last edited by
            #114

            I did such a thing, but I had a big advantage: the codebase had been done by people who had never really learned to code, and I was a seasoned programmer with 20 years of experience.

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            • ? Guest

              Also : it's very complex and it happens to work fine for decades.

              If one day i write a code project and manage to make it work without any major issues for several decades, there is no way i attemptto rewrite it.

              J This user is from outside of this forum
              J This user is from outside of this forum
              [email protected]
              wrote on last edited by
              #115

              Yeah, there's almost 100 years of law, case law and agency regulations built into how this software works. And they fired all the people that knew anything about it.

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              • thepowerofgeek@lemmy.worldT [email protected]

                Ah yes, a classic tale...

                "We're going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we'll do it in a few months!"

                So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There's are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.

                I bet they'll do it in Waterfall too.

                It's interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It's just fucking traffic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to do many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.

                J This user is from outside of this forum
                J This user is from outside of this forum
                [email protected]
                wrote on last edited by
                #116

                They're not going to use Java, it's going to be typescript.

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                • S [email protected]

                  This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.

                  O This user is from outside of this forum
                  O This user is from outside of this forum
                  [email protected]
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #117

                  I'm sure the doge boys are expert grock vibe coders, it will be fine, they've got big ballz on the team, what could possibly go wrong? /s

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                  • D [email protected]

                    If it fails spectaculairly who will take the blame? Will there be any repercussions at all?

                    Or will Musk and Trump shrug their shoulders? Halfheartedly blame Biden for badly programming the original database then go play some golf/videogaminges?

                    J This user is from outside of this forum
                    J This user is from outside of this forum
                    [email protected]
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #118

                    If Trump is smart, he'll let Musk do all the unpopular project 2025 stuff, then throw him in prison at the end and escape the blame personally. This way he gets to keep popularity with his base while telling his donors they got everything they asked for. It's what all dictators do, really.

                    F 1 Reply Last reply
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                    • S [email protected]

                      This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.

                      R This user is from outside of this forum
                      R This user is from outside of this forum
                      [email protected]
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #119

                      That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system's evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.

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                      • E [email protected]

                        But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.

                        Dude it's not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?

                        R This user is from outside of this forum
                        R This user is from outside of this forum
                        [email protected]
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #120

                        I don't think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.

                        But yep, that's the kind of people.

                        About dinosaur things - I've started learning Tcl/Tk and it's just wonderful.

                        F E 2 Replies Last reply
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                        • G [email protected]

                          This is how you know Musk is a fraud. This far into his career and he’s leading teams into rookie mistakes.

                          Or, he knows this will break it and that’s the goal. I’m just not sure how he avoids the blame.

                          ? Offline
                          ? Offline
                          Guest
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #121

                          DARVO is all you need to avoid blame. Deny. Reverse Victim and Offender. Incredibly effective either way everyone except the genuinely principled.

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                          • O [email protected]
                            This post did not contain any content.
                            panarab@lemm.eeP This user is from outside of this forum
                            panarab@lemm.eeP This user is from outside of this forum
                            [email protected]
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #122

                            COBOL is perfectly suitable for financial purposes for which it was designed. The SSA code has gone through decades worth of changes and improvements that cannot be replicated even in 10 years.

                            F T 2 Replies Last reply
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                            • O [email protected]
                              This post did not contain any content.
                              E This user is from outside of this forum
                              E This user is from outside of this forum
                              [email protected]
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #123

                              Russia just wants musks boy toys to cripple the only checks and balances putin thinks he has.

                              gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deG deathray5@lemmynsfw.comD 2 Replies Last reply
                              0
                              • O [email protected]
                                This post did not contain any content.
                                B This user is from outside of this forum
                                B This user is from outside of this forum
                                [email protected]
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #124

                                The MuskRat should get Big Ballz and the boys to program a video game, so he can have a new revenue stream to replace Tesla when it goes bankrupt, which sure looks like the future of that company.

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                                • O [email protected]
                                  This post did not contain any content.
                                  L This user is from outside of this forum
                                  L This user is from outside of this forum
                                  [email protected]
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #125

                                  Rewrite it in Rust has gone too far 😆

                                  1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • S [email protected]

                                    This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.

                                    N This user is from outside of this forum
                                    N This user is from outside of this forum
                                    [email protected]
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #126

                                    It's not a case of "seeing the code isn't perfect" but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.

                                    I'm reminded of this shitshow:

                                    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation

                                    Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.

                                    I'm an accountant by trade, there's a classic "techbro does accounting" style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn't spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude "it's just a database with some rules".

                                    D M S 3 Replies Last reply
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                                    • O [email protected]
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                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #127

                                      step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code
                                      step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has contract elon musk for code maintenance forever
                                      step 3. profit

                                      N 1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • N [email protected]

                                        It's not a case of "seeing the code isn't perfect" but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.

                                        I'm reminded of this shitshow:

                                        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation

                                        Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.

                                        I'm an accountant by trade, there's a classic "techbro does accounting" style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn't spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude "it's just a database with some rules".

                                        D This user is from outside of this forum
                                        D This user is from outside of this forum
                                        [email protected]
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #128

                                        Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

                                        T 1 Reply Last reply
                                        0
                                        • ? Guest

                                          step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code
                                          step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has contract elon musk for code maintenance forever
                                          step 3. profit

                                          N This user is from outside of this forum
                                          N This user is from outside of this forum
                                          [email protected]
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #129

                                          So the way things already were?

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