234
Is This Why Musk Keeps Using the Same Dozen Tech Micro-Bros for Each Takeover?
(talkingpointsmemo.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
234 points (99.2% liked)
politics
20365 readers
3291 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A lot of them don't even seem to have any IT/software muscle. I keep reading that they basically have zero experience with a lot of the languages (COBOL), databases, or software that is used in the government. So these people get into the servers and start digging around in code and data that they don't even have a fundamental understanding of and are essentially making shit up about their findings.
And the use of COBOL in government systems is not some big dirty secret. A quick search finds news articles, from mainstream to industry sources, talking about its continued use a few times every year. So going in expecting something modern is ridiculous. Just goes to show how stupid the people planning and executing this moronic plan really are.
Also like duh. Its the us government. If you're hiring coders to get into every aspect of it and don't have cobol and Unix capacity you clearly didn't think or prepare
I would have been surprised if they weren't using COBOL especially when it comes to the Treasury.
If I know anything about financial systems, I expect that some super critical process in Treasury is coded in like assembly via punch cards in some yellow aged plastic box using an Intel 4004 with like 640 bits of RAM supported by like a single centenarian on an as needed support contract because that's literally the last person on earth who knows how it works and why.
Cobol is heavily used in the financial industry for a reason. It's actually excellent for processing financial data at scale and it's well supported. Many of these institutions attempt to swap out parts of these systems with modern languages or runtimes; these projects often fail because they're simply too slow or the new systems crash too often.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do so, just that it's not worth it.
Yeah, no shit -- most of them are basically college-student-aged. CS undergrads are pretty much fucking useless at accomplishing anything on any real-world production systems (as opposed to making barely-working toy implementations to turn in for an assignment and never touch again).
Pretty much
Exactly what I was thinking of. Their misunderstanding of something like the different data types and epocs for time values is crazy.
Any time I get a weird date/time value the first thing I check is what the epoc and smallest unit of time is as it's far more likely I've done some bad math than something that old actually being valid.
Edit: spelling