For some reason, Elon hates old people, including Cobol and older adults. He wants to do it quickly, killing two birds with one stone.
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.
Yeah, the ideal process is something like this:
I would budget a couple years. Even a smaller codebase would take more than a couple months.
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.
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%?
The black market for social security data is gonna have a field day.
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?
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.
Someone at work was saying people should download their work records from the ssa web portal before they mess it up/lose it.
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
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.
I just tried to check that out and got "online service not available"
I’m sure they have their remaining engineer on the job and it will be back soon o_-
Imagine the overload on the systems as everyone rushes to do just that...
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?
You know what? I’m slightly more confident about the AIs chances compared to his team of 20 year old lead by Big Ballz.
even ChatGPT agrees this is stupid:
even his own Grok is against the idea:
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"
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
They’re gonna break it, then when people need to reapply, they won’t be able to because they cut funding to phone lines and ssa offices
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.
They're just going to feed it to some LLM and then rely on the slop it outputs.
I need to stock up on popcorn for this
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.
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.
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
it is only obsolete if you have a better currently working solution
anything else is a fucking pipe dream
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.
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.
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.
This is the plan.
Divide and conquer
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.
In their AI-centered, techno-feudal utopia, the elderly are just a drain.
As will we all be soon. We are their cattle.
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.
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.
Isn’t a benefit to these systems still being COBOL is that they’re hard to hack?
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
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.
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.
Not really, no.
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.
"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"
Excuse me, they said they want to have this done in months? Did I read that article correctly?
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.
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.
vibe coding?
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.
I hate how accurate this probably is.
He’ll kill a lot more than just two birds.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Right... That's covered in the "making people suffer needlessly" part.
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".
Busy few months coming up for Grok
Whatever language is chosen will be regarded forever as worse than COBOL, regardless of its actual merits.
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.
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.
Except he has chainsaw mentality, not do it right mentality.
it's a sick world where matthew perry isn't with us but elon still is.
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.
Im gonna side with Elon here,
A broken clock is still right twice a day
he’s only right if he has a working alternative
you don’t remove anything until you do
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.
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?
HTML of course :)
Why would it matter unless he was planning to harvest the data?
Why would Elon hate his mother? She kept him from being beaten up by that facebook guy.
I want to thank @Loduz_247@plemmy.world 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.