this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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[–] melsaskca 1 points 6 days ago

Why would Elon hate his mother? She kept him from being beaten up by that facebook guy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 112 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, the ideal process is something like this:

  1. Write a bunch of automated tests
  2. Rewrite a chunk that's well tested
  3. Go to 1 until the project is done

I would budget a couple years. Even a smaller codebase would take more than a couple months.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago

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%?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This is the typical Elon "Fully self driving soon" of 2016.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No. It is a killshot.

He stated his resentment of social security MULTIPLE times.

Sabotage is the purpose.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The black market for social security data is gonna have a field day.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Someone at work was saying people should download their work records from the ssa web portal before they mess it up/lose it.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago

You know what? I’m slightly more confident about the AIs chances compared to his team of 20 year old lead by Big Ballz.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

even ChatGPT agrees this is stupid:

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

even his own Grok is against the idea:

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They're just going to feed it to some LLM and then rely on the slop it outputs.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Isn’t a benefit to these systems still being COBOL is that they’re hard to hack?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

"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"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Excuse me, they said they want to have this done in months? Did I read that article correctly?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

He’ll kill a lot more than just two birds.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Whatever language is chosen will be regarded forever as worse than COBOL, regardless of its actual merits.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

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".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Busy few months coming up for Grok

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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