What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.
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I'm hoping that this is such a complex, daunting problem that BigNuts and company will just stare at it, mumble a bit and start tossing portions into xAI which will denigrate them, call them pussies and tell them to code it themselves. Whereupon they will overdose on chocolate covered coffee beans and ketamine, fry their brains and end up collecting Social Security disability.
The really scary part is when Musk goes to Congress and says 'It's too complex and broken, you need to rewrite the Social Security act to simplify it'. The act then ends up being 'If the person is over 65, can prove they are alive by showing up in one of the few remaining Social Security offices (between 10:00 and 4:00) with three forms of identification including their birth certificate then they get $100 per month'. Until next year.
Musk could possibly code that.
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I'm okay with that, but where would I go? What country is going to accept Americans seeking political asylum that isn't also a target of the US government?
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P,ease don't give them any WORSE ideas than they already have.
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Come here to Australia. Be warned. We are WAY more liberal than the US
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Where would you get that crazy idea? It's not like Trump said exactly those words during his campaign or anything batshit crazy like that...
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No, it's more like LLM been training on more Java code than any other language. If they have any hope of meeting this timeline, it's by juicing the development effort with a model produced by xAI, which will absolutely be awarded with government contracts.
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Right. "How hard can it be?" I could do it with an Excel macro. Sheesh.
My own theory of why Musk wants to do this is for control. He can't stand that the system is a black box that his kiddies can't understand. If he can get it converted to Java, or BASIC, or whatever they can comprehend, he can add his own tweaks like spying on people, syphoning off some of the Trust Fund, punishing people he doesn't like, etc.
I guess the good news is that it will be much harder than he thinks to make his new software function reasonable well so that might slow him down enough to keep it from happening.
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That's hardly an interesting take. Capitalism requires an underclass to function. Marx figured that out in the mid-1800s. Republicans are the party of the capitalist class and have been for over 100 years.
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They are still in the "little incel boys" faking-it until they "make it" phase. These are the same children who didn't understand that COBOL had a different concept of the epoch than the christian calendar, lol.
Every one of them, for 7 generations to come, should be forced to pay for the damage they are causing.
Every one of them, for 7 generations to come, should be forced to pay for the damage they are causing.
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Musk's other team he hired (the FSD one at Tesla) is closing in on a decade late on delivering their promised software. It still doesn't work 9 years later. So yeah, I'm skeptical of Musk's time estimation abilities.
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Putting aside the challenges of actually doing a software rewrite, for such a rewrite to "eliminate fraud" you have to show that the sources of fraud are inside the existing codebase. Anomalies in the data that it doesn't detect and flag, and so forth.
So far, nobody has done that. DOGE/Musk's one attempt just showed that they didn't understand how the existing system stored dates, and that was it.
What little fraud that anyone can prove exists with Social Security comes from outside the system, feeding it incorrect data and the like. A rewrite won't do anything to prevent that.
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Has there been a cost benefit analysis? How long would a rewrite that runs in a current programming language and hardware take to break even, once the old system is decommissioned?
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In my field, industrial automation, we keep going through the same loop with every new CS grad.
"Why are we using ladder logic, it's so ancient. We should be using insert whatever text-based language they learned in school.
"Why can't this run on like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi? They we could use see language mentioned previously.
"I know, I know. Of course we'd have to harden the Pi for things like dust and vibration. And support would have be be over a decade long. "
Me - "Congratulations. You just reinvented the latest Allen Bradley PLC we're already using. We use the visual ladder logic because it's easy for a non-programmer at a glance to see which input is holding up the program. Input on the rung should be green (on) and it's not? Check that sensor."
Most CS grads seem to hate learning anything past graduation.
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Yeah, but the sane rest of the country outnumbers the MAGA die hards by way more than 2:1. All MAGA does by hoarding weapons before a civil war is create ammunition dumps for everybody else. Take out 1 MAGA, and now you and all your friends are suddenly armed. The numbers of people are the important part.
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I found those that make you do the [de]allocation manually at least teach discipline. And pain.
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This sounds like woke nonsense. I’m sure ‘Big Balls’ has got this.
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Yes. Because I know enough COBOL to know it was designed to to exactly this kind of thing. It’s one of the first languages I learned around the turn of the century when Y2K made it marketable.
I also know that modernizing a COBOL codebase is probably a better idea than trying to write it in something else. It’s a hilariously bad idea to do this. These systems were designed to process these kinds of transactions.
Yes. And the other engineers I know who also predicted self driving would be a disaster. And it has been. Musk is a moron whose only accomplishments are being born rich and taking credit for the work of others.
A complete rewrite I would almost say is intentional sabotage. These people don’t intend to fix government. They want to burn it down and loot the place. They have their hands in your pockets and you thank them for it.
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We interrupt your irregular programming to bring you this comedy message...
Most employees at US Institute of Peace mass-fired via late-night email
Thank you.
Most employees at US Institute of Peace mass-fired via late-night email
Thank you.
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I tend to feel they teach arrogance. They give engineers the idea it’s a good idea to rely on themselves for things that they should not rely on humans at all for.
It’s these engineers who, even in C++ rage against best practices like RAII or iterators under the false assumption their code is somehow better or faster for doing everything by hand. And inevitably it leads to disaster. Avoidable disaster.
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Come on people. This is sarcasm. Jesus fucking. Christ. It’s funny! Haha! Funny! Don’t downvote the funny.
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SSI is paid to those who are disabled, solely on the basis of disability, no Earnings Record required-- a Benefit & handout by your definition.
Also SSI is administered by SSA, but is not part of Social Security. It is mandated separately by Congress and paid from the General Fund. Responsibility for managing SSI was given to SSA as they already had systems in place for managing a massive benefits program (Social Security Pension & Social Security Disability, along with the various additional entitlements that are based on an Earnings Record)
SS Pension, SSD, SS Survivor, SS Spousal Pension are the major Social Security expenses paid from the Trust Fund -- By your definition, these are all Entitlements as they all require an Earnings Record of 40 qualifying quarters for the worker the benefits are qualified by.
For further confusion SS payments are termed benefits by Social Security. Similarly SSI payments are also benefits according to SSA with the payments drawn from the US Treasury General Fund, not the SS Trust Fund.
Complicating edge cases are non-citizens who qualify for Social Security payments, but do not reside in US jurisdiction & US citizens who reside outside US jurisdiction.
Non-citizens have their benefits cancelled after 6 months outside US unless they are citizens of a country that has a bilateral Social Security Treaty with US (a unique treaty with country specific terms for each). Residence requirements for noncitizens are treaty based and require them to reside in one of a limited list of countries according to the treaty for their country.
US citizens have their benefits suspended if they do not report to Social Security by January of each year verifying address & continued life. Hard copy delivered by Postal Service required.
My luck so far over 2 years is no mail received from SSA [all notices are sent by postal mail only "to ensure delivery" and one out of 7 forms sent by PhlPost registered and 1 out of 5 sent by US Mail registered actually delivered. Luckily LBC delivery is accepted and they have had a 100% successful delivery rate so far ... faster than postal mail also
There is nothing SSA can do about the Post Office "efficiency" other than accept courier service delivery as that is mandated by the Wisdom of Congress.
I just hope that nothing important is in any of the notices that aren't being delivered by the Post Office as SSA policy is that if the notice was given to the Post Office for delivery, the Beneficiary has read it
Post Office failure to deliver the mail is not an acceptable excuse for failing to read the undelivered notice. Also there is no side channel indication that a notice was sent until the beneficiary is penalised for failing to read the undelivered notice.All this is before the "improvements" implemented by Mr.Trump's hatchet team.
Requiring in person visits for things that could be done by mail, phone, or internet previously along with closure of the office you're supposed to visit will "Biggly enhance efficiency"
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What midsize bank deals with tens of trillions of dollars and has 400 million customers?? lol “midsize bank level software transition”
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The hubris is astonishing. As a 40 year IT veteran involved in multiple migrations of this type I can tell you this simply can't be done no matter who wants it when. I'd be willing to bet we'll have self driving Teslas (any day now) before this project is finished. Writing a non-existant system from scratch is magnitudes easier than migrating from an existing one, you simply don't know what you don't know and many, many landmines are encountered along the way. The midterms are going to be a bloodbath.
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Have Republicans been behaving like they're worried about losing the next election? That's what keeps me up at night.
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Presumably this project will cost money to implement, isn't congress the only entity that can authorize this? Even those GOP clowns must recognize the danger they'd be putting themselves in. On the other hand, they're already frogs in a pot on slow boil. I repeat, the midterms are going to be a bloodbath.
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Lots of people are going to stop getting checks. I can’t imagine a bigger shitshow for the gop, if elections continue to matter to them.
On a lighter note, would this be a good application for rust? (assuming it was done competently and well planned, unlike here). Memory safe and fast seem like nice points in its favor here.
On a lighter note, would this be a good application for rust? (assuming it was done competently and well planned, unlike here). Memory safe and fast seem like nice points in its favor here.
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