People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
Im gonna side with Elon here, in the fact COBOL is absolutely outdated and should be phased out.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
Why would Elon hate his mother? She kept him from being beaten up by that facebook guy.
Someone need to back up this codebase ASAP so it can be restored when thing surely go to shit because of Elon and some random LLM.
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?
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%?
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.
Imagine the overload on the systems as everyone rushes to do just that...
even ChatGPT agrees this is stupid:
even his own Grok is against the idea:
Between this and the other instances of Elon's AI correctly calling a duck a duck (or rather, a Nazi a Nazi and a disinformation spreader a disinformation spreader), Elon might be able to replace himself with Grok as the head of DOGE and see significant improvements almost overnight.
Tbh, replacing our unhinged leadership with LLMs would probably make things a lot better in the near term, though not the mid or long term, as IME they tend to be way too cautious about things they shouldn't be and way too confident about things they shouldn't be.
In general, I agree with your conclusion. In this specific case with DOGE, I would argue otherwise.
Elon is overconfident about things he shouldn't be (which is everything) and not cautious about anything. With a LLM being dumb as hell and confidently wrong, that's actually not any worse than what we have now. If it somehow manages to be cautious about anything at all, it's an honest to goodness improvement.
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.
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"
Busy few months coming up for Grok
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.
