oh my God truly we are living in the dumbest, most destructive timeline. There are reasons banks and others are still running on legacy architecture: it's because modernisation of core systems is REALLY FUCKING HARD, and it has to be done slowly and carefully. Not in a couple of months. - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

katebevan.com • 89 days ago

oh my God truly we are living in the dumbest, most destructive timeline. There are reasons banks and others are still running on legacy architecture: it's because modernisation of core systems is REALLY FUCKING HARD, and it has to be done slowly and carefully. Not in a couple of months.

Reposted from makena kelly

SCOOP: DOGE wants to rebuild SSA's codebase in months, risking benefits and system collapse, sources tell me.

The plan is to migrate all systems off COBOL quickly which would likely require the use of generative AI.
www.wired.com/story/doge-r...

Comments

arridgewills.bsky.social•89 days ago

We had an awful lot of very clever people (don't tell them I said that) who knew the systems inside out doing our migration. Still took bloody years.

markouthwaite.bsky.social•89 days ago

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emma-worthington.bsky.social•89 days ago

Even refactoring a legacy codebase is really hard and time-consuming. Let’s hope they keep an unmolested copy of the old code at least.

katebevan.com•89 days ago

yeah, I hope someone prepares for this disaster and shuffles away some backups and documentation

emma-worthington.bsky.social•89 days ago

My god, I’ve been support on major releases that were thoroughly tested and still had to be rolled back because of some glitch. This will be carnage.

katebevan.com•89 days ago

it will cause absolutely untold harm to millions of the most vulnerable Americans.

pauld70.bsky.social•89 days ago

And certainly not by AI. FFS (from an *actual* software engineer)

oliviaquinn.bsky.social•88 days ago

That and the amount of people that will suffer from AI bias and hallucinations will be insane.

sean.doherty.social•89 days ago

60 years worth of complying with legislation, best practice and that guy who know how to do that weird thing who retired 40 years ago. Good luck.

teamnotleafy.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yup.
Move fast, break things. M NotLeafy's been around long enough to see same & their consequences.

ubfriccardo.bsky.social•89 days ago

"Yes but now we have AI to do it..."

katebevan.com•89 days ago

*wail*

alexbb.bsky.social•89 days ago

Oh hell yeah, let them do it, give people what they voted for. Maybe that will make them learn.

highpoh.bsky.social•89 days ago

What could possibly go wrong?! I mean. I know the square root of fuck all about such things, but this does not seem like a good idea.

highpoh.bsky.social•89 days ago

Also *major Horizon sideye*

sncarr.bsky.social•89 days ago

See this for example DOGE idiots: https://www.tsb.co.uk/content/dam/tsb-public/documents/media-centre/Slaughter-and-May-final-report.pdf

thatmartin.bsky.social•88 days ago

When I worked for Lloyds in the 90s - people were reviewing code checking for potential Millennium Bug issues - it was discovered that the core of the standing orders/periodic payments code was still using pounds, shillings, pence with a conversion routine for decimalisation. It wasn't touched.

katebevan.com•88 days ago

very wise 😬😬😬

thatmartin.bsky.social•88 days ago

One assumes they've 'fixed' it by now. Or it is now so buried, that no-one knows as all of the institutional memory has moved on. But most of these heritage systems (preferred to legacy) are layer upon layer of cruft.

katebevan.com•88 days ago

yeah, which is of course one reason they're so hard to unpick. Also, I am nicking "heritage" for all our copy about modernisation.

thatmartin.bsky.social•88 days ago

Of course then you've got clever code...when someone was showing off and no-one knows how it does the thing it was supposed to do...normally surrounded by comments like

'Dangerous - don't change - the last person who tried is dead'

And specification document is missing.

ewanspence.co.uk•89 days ago

(COBOL parsed through generative AI??@?!)

katebevan.com•89 days ago

I mean, this gives you a bit of a clue into what modernising away from mainframes running legacy code entails https://bsky.app/profile/haazah.bsky.social/post/3llh5kduv4c2e

katebevan.com•89 days ago

that sound you can hear is Grace Hopper revolving in her grave.

t1m1964.bsky.social•89 days ago

And what's the data stored on? Really old processing mag tapes sequentially? Probably more recent. COBOL prefers a Codasyl database or indexed files. And good luck with Doge or AI sorting that lot out

berndporr.me.uk•89 days ago

Entirely delusional but predictable when these kids have only skills in creating a social media site but then that's what silicon valley is apart from all the AI hype.

calenhad-social.bsky.social•89 days ago

COBOL is TBF not an "archaic" language. It has been continuously developed at the same time as newer languages have grown up and is amply robust for systems of this kind. Code written back in the day still works fine. You might as well write off Plato for the same reason.

werkoderko.bsky.social•89 days ago

Ah but when you don't really want this to run, DOGE is for you

timsewell.bsky.social•89 days ago

I had to reverse engineer a 4 page phone app done in Angular/Cordova into a React PWA (they had lost the original requirements and no one had managed to compile the app to run it) and that took 3 months. Relatedly, there's a reason the few remaining COBOL devs are much richer than we are.

yesmissmurphy.bsky.social•89 days ago

Sensational

biglazz.bsky.social•89 days ago

Exactly right! These systems have been DECADES in the making.

alialiafro.bsky.social•89 days ago

DOGE will no doubt plan all this with care of a Twitter takeover bid, they'll do a SpaceX style rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Social Security system, while designing and implementing the new system with the speed of a Tesla Full Self Driving rollout. What could go wrong!

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

Of course the banter outcome is that they write a COBOL emulator in a more modern language, containerise and port the original code to that, and then claim that they've modernised everything.

alanbeattie.bsky.social•89 days ago

Has anyone thought of putting it on the blockcha**SHOT RINGS OUT**

katebevan.com•89 days ago

ALAN.

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

You are BigBalls and I claim my five pounds

planetmatt.bsky.social•89 days ago

Just pay social security in NFTs of the Fanta coloured Fash emperor.

katebevan.com•89 days ago

that would be the smart developer's way of keeping dumb shits like Musk off their back

aardgoose.info•89 days ago

Judging by their announcements about obvious fraud, they probably don't understand the data and like Musk will refuse to learn from the experience of others.

Because they are special geniuses.

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

Wondering if you can become so rationalist-data-brained that you convince yourself that all the obvious real-world consequences you can see are just people lying to you because "the data don't lie".

katebevan.com•89 days ago

or you just become so arrogant you can't be bothered with the real-world problems your galaxy-brained nonsense create

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

"Those complaining are only NPCs"

aardgoose.info•89 days ago

They just understand the world in a very simplistic way. They haven't experienced any difficulties in life, so assume anybody who isn't in their position is just lazy or stupid.

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

Petition for a new form of national service which is just having to live for a year in a minimum-wage job.

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

They're going to somehow give all the government computers ebola, aren't they?

planetmatt.bsky.social•89 days ago

What are the chances that somewhere in 50 years of the COBOL code base there's code that uses undocumented hardware features that will fail when emulated on emulators?

rkemb.bsky.social•89 days ago

I remember reading about some incredibly-optimised bit of casino software from the 70s which used an array overflow to re-initialise a loop and thus save several bytes of code, and that kind of thing wouldn't surprise me at all.

planetmatt.bsky.social•89 days ago

Yep, that sort of thing. Musk's incel army and all their cumulative Google-fu and gen AI models are fucked. Well not really, social security recipients are fucked I guess.