Among the many nasty things about those old languages is that there were often many dialects. And the chances of ChatGPT being trained on manuals from the 1970's are slim, not to mention Stack Overflow doesn't go back 50 years.
Also, I can say from experience that LLMs are incredibly bad at writing code in unsafe languages like COBOL - they seem to have absolutely no clue what to do with pointers
I write 65816 Assembly and it can be days and days of trial and error trying to figure out exactly how to get something to work even with good documents and a not-dead scene of people who use it for SNES emulation. There's not really a super mario world romhack scene for 1992 banking software.
That's a great point that I hadn't even thought of. "Dear Grok: if someone used you to write Cobol, what are some common security mistakes they might make?"
My understanding is that COBOL was ordinarily used for financial stuff which does cover part of these systems. (It was one of the few languages that didn't use floating point for math.)
I'd expect more of the modern scientific database stuff to rely on SQL, though I have no inside knowledge.
doesnt quite hit the same when u replace 'stake your business' with 'stake some breadline dude's welfare check' but definitely appreciate the broader sentiment
Unfortunately it's Stake the Full Faith and Credit of the US government... if payments don't go out the yield people will want will skyrocket and bankrupt the US gov
Not just COBOL, what are the chances they can frgure out CICS, JCL, and the 100 other thing you'd need to know, etc., in a week! Bet they wouldn't even be able to tell if they are working on prod or dev/qa.
Something people NEED to understand about COBOL is that it's not sanskrit, it's a maintained language. The DOGE chucklefucks need people with *domain-specific knowledge* not *technical knowledge*
Hmm, DuckDuckGo-ing the name of the sender, and it appears that Yargo Bonetti is Swiss, as in, actually in Switzerland... I think the "coincidence" option is probably more likely, but still... that's one hell of a coincidence...
It didn't and stop encouraging it. This isn't skynet, it's a fucking Speak-N-Spell they keep trying to get to invent surgeries on human organs that don't exist, but sound convincing. It is a plausible lying machine.
If the US is anything like Canada, you didn’t just need to know COBOL, you needed to be fairly expert, because the code for the older systems was complicated. Old, patched, rewritten and repatched. I imagine a lot has been cleaned up since my time, but still.
Yes, they do still use COBOL at OPM. But: "OPM will embark on a two-year project starting in calendar year 2025 to modernize the underlying back end software." Guy Cavallo retired before Trump was sworn in, so Musk will probably do it.
It’s true government code needs to be updated, but Congress refuses to fund it. It isn’t the kind of thing that can be done in a few days but someone who doesn’t know what the code even does.
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I'd expect more of the modern scientific database stuff to rely on SQL, though I have no inside knowledge.
Full disclosure: I've never used Grok. I just assume anything Musk is connected to is hot garbage.
https://bsky.app/profile/trickycrayon.bsky.social/post/3lgnopij2ss2k
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnucobol/2025-02/msg00000.html
"Please note I'm a total COBOL newbie and only know perhaps 2% of the language. ^-^"
Coincidence, or... do you think perhaps...?
Don't think this is a "smoking gun"
This is just a random dude asking for help.
https://gopher.mills.io/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space
https://www.qrz.com/db/HB9KNS
You have quite the imagination, friend!
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/it-modernization/2024/12/tmf-award-to-help-opm-modernize-cobol-code-via-ai/
lol