There's really no words to express the absolute absurdity of a lone person trying to rewrite a bunch of old mainframe code like my brain rebels that anyone could possibly be doing this and how badly it's going to fail - ThreadSky

skamille.themanagerswrath.com • 19 days ago

There's really no words to express the absolute absurdity of a lone person trying to rewrite a bunch of old mainframe code like my brain rebels that anyone could possibly be doing this and how badly it's going to fail

Reposted from Josh Marshall

2/ privileges in this system but has indeed begun rewriting the code base of this critical system, significantly rewriting the software for this critical system. For more on this it was this situation I was referring to in a series of tweets from last night in which, as I said, I substituted the …

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crocwearer.bsky.social•19 days ago

reliving the feeling of the executives watching every minor update about my project and knowing the project is therefore fucked, but instead it’s every newspaper and like 50 million people watching

doriantaylor.com•19 days ago

but camille he's using ai

coty.bsky.social•19 days ago

If there are topics that I’m sure are well represented in modern AI training sets, they would definitely include:

* COBOL
* Mainframe operations
* Internal runbooks
* Etc.

doriantaylor.com•19 days ago

so it can stochastically get that wrong too, lol

coty.bsky.social•19 days ago

Stochastic terrorism takes on a double meaning.

skamille.themanagerswrath.com•19 days ago

Please kill me

aac.social•19 days ago

Consider how much of that code is probably really being written by GPT

coty.bsky.social•19 days ago

s/GPT/Grok/

dandantransient.bsky.social•19 days ago

This seems like a bad place for them to just wing it

moishel.bsky.social•19 days ago

Beyond this being doomed to failure for any code, I’m thinking about how complex and full of weird little quirks and complexities the payment code is at $prevstartup, and that code had only been around a few years and only served a few thousand customers.

skamille.themanagerswrath.com•19 days ago

Exactly, nightmare

indukhosla.bsky.social•19 days ago

I hope there is pushback on this instead of it being dismissed as an “IT issue”. This seems way more dangerous than a single agency shutting down

dbsmasher.com•19 days ago

I feel like we’re about to witness the wildest restore from backup outage in history.

lookitup.baby•19 days ago

Bold of you to assume they aren’t destroying the backups

hazelweakly.me•19 days ago

Bold of anyone to assume a mainframe can even be restored from a backup. Like do some people know that some systems literally run on inertia so hard that restore becomes impossible as a concept?

It’s… wild. While I hope that’s not the case here, I, uhh, am not discounting it

dbsmasher.com•19 days ago

I’m just. My brain. It hurts.

jkachmar.com•19 days ago

the consequences of modern software development being a near-zero marginal cost and modern software infrastructure being absurdly abstracted from underlying physical systems..?

even at my most cynical I wouldn’t have guessed at this outcome tbqh.

arreffbee.bsky.social•19 days ago

This is not going to save money

This is going to cost so much money to fix

skamille.themanagerswrath.com•19 days ago

It's not that young people never surprise me with what they can accomplish because they don't know what the limits are, it's that I've seen _so many young people_ fail doing almost exactly this over and over and over I've basically made a career of fixing it

coty.bsky.social•19 days ago

I might have even been one of those young people in the past (on both the good and bad sides of not knowing limits). The problem here is that the person who should be old enough to provide some wisdom somehow acts with the impetuousness of a teenager.

grimalkina.bsky.social•19 days ago

I think it is very inaccurate and exculpating to frame this like it's "young people just coding around!" in this startup coding kind of narrative instead of calling out what it is, a deeply systematic profoundly power based move seizing ownership.

grimalkina.bsky.social•19 days ago

Tech culture does not give us the right language for this moment. Because tech culture made itself the perfect target to be used for this.

skamille.themanagerswrath.com•19 days ago

Oh sure, it's much worse than that. I'm only commenting on one element of it, not the whole fucked up shebang; plenty of people have said interesting things about the systemic power grab and I don't have much to add to that.

thejeffbyrnes.com•19 days ago

Shockingly, complex complicated things are complex & complicated.

Who knew?! 🙃

cliff.leaninto.it•19 days ago

And to be blunt: i wouldnt bet on the success of a gaggle of iPad babies who've melted their brains reading dark enlightenment blogs. If they pull this off it will be because Larry Ellison brings in an army of consultants

codahale.com•19 days ago

There’s also a persistent motte-and-bailey thing where if you disagree with “you just need a small team of brilliant kids with ChatGPT accounts” the conversation immediately shifts to defending the brilliance of the kids.

therasteri.bsky.social•19 days ago

The point is to make it fail

centralfloridainternet.com•19 days ago

They have the advantage of AI to write any codes they want.
When everything seems lost.... history shows that's when the fight begins!

good.software•19 days ago

Security teams everywhere adding "What if a fascist breaks into your datacenter and replaced your programs AI-generated COBOL" to their threat models.

outerleftfield.net•19 days ago

The shortest answer I can think of is it doesn't matter if this kid 'succeeds', failing to do this correctly is also a victory in the eyes of those letting them do this.

pstabs.bsky.social•19 days ago

I dont think Trump even realizes that Musk has more power than he does now. Taking over the Treasury means he can literally do anything he wants. No law will stop him.

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