What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.

A safe and proper rewrite should take years not months.

See full article...

 

[raschumacher]

I mean Europe, South America, and Asia all have a history of voting for fascists, why is the US earning so much of your ire? We're just finally joining you all

They had hoped that we would learn from their example. Oh well.
---
History teaches us that nobody ever learns from history.

 

[nosmadar2016]

No one could even spec a system this complex in only a few months.

Not to mention that there are inevitable issues of Scalability / Performance, Threading and Database Integrity that will arise no matter how supposedly intelligent the AI is that translates the COBOL.

 

[DarthSlack]

And i'm asking why it's so complex.

This is why its so complex.

 

[Barleyman]

I know it is fashionable to diss COBOL, 70 years old, much more than C, 60 years old, but then again, the pioneers of COBOL were women, not men, and trying to design a supportable, readable language

COBOL can, and does do the job, this is wrong on so many levels

Pardon moi, C is 53. It's also evolved a lot, not many people use K&R syntax these days, although I'm sure some weirdos do. Cobol, on the other hand, is 66.

Age in programming languages is pretty meaningless benchmark in isolation, there's a reason why C stuck around just like Cobol.. didn't. Except fossilized into systems held together by baling wire and duct tape as the article points out.

Looking at Cobol wiki page, it's apparently had major revision in Cobol 85 and then transformed in 2002 to OO language, but I rather doubt these legacy systems are using either and what'd be the point of starting a new project using an incompatible version of Cobol?

 

[raschumacher]

Musk has determined that he will never be God-Emperor of Mars, so he's taking the United States as a consolation prize, and is now converting it into a dry and airless waste.

 

[arsisloam]

Elections or not, that's how you get rioting in the streets. I don't think they've solidified power that well yet to be able to quell that.

I think Trump wants riots. I think he wants the whole thing to break, so he can declare martial law and suspend elections.

Killing the weakest and oldest among us is all Elon though. He does it at his companies too, firing the lowest 10% regularly. Except now when he does it, people won't just be out of work. They'll starve, or resort to armed robbery. And the dumbest among us will cheer for it. It's a very frustrating time to be alive.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

I hate hackathons to solve problems: a group of people come in, do all the fun part, then leave with the knowledge of the systems they built which, of course, leaves everybody who needs to support those systems a year, five, or ten from now in the lurch.

This sounds exactly like a hackathon.

Wait, there are real, existing, living breathing human beings, legitimate H . sapiens, who believe that this is how you solve problems?

This is how the vast majority of the problems I've had to solve in the real world were created!

 

[fellow_traveler]

As a retiree dependent on my SS check, I guess it's time to buy a pitchfork.

 

[keltorsori]

Wagers on how much of this work is to be done by Grok? (Let's get some code with an attitude!)

Never even thought it was possible to find a group of people so in love with the smell of their own farts as to entirely forego oxygen for so long.

 

[raschumacher]

This is exactly what happened at my previous employer. A high-level exec came in and brought a bunch of his tech cronies to "migrate to the cloud" and save a TON of money. They got part of the way through it, found out that moving the multi-petabyte DB was too expensive\difficult. They gave up, took credit for the cost savings my team made on our on-prem modernization project and left everyone in the lurch when they quit to do the exact same thing at a medical company that shall remain nameless.

Why leave their next victim/medical company nameless? Some of us might want to avoid doing business with them.

 

[needSomeCoffee]

Tried to access ssa.gov to review some docs last week. I use a "username/pwd" signin. Tried this around 2pm PDT. Got to the point where I was to be sent my 2FA code. It never arrived. Tried several times, but obviously the 2FA server was not working for some reason as no codes ever arrived (likely overloaded). Since the system is available from 4am to 1am EDT (e.g. 4am Mon - 1am Tue), I tried again at about 4:15am EDT (1:15am my time). Finally got in.

I have been accessing ssa.gov for a good number of years. I am quite certain that the problem above has never happened before. (I certainly would have remembered having to login in at 1:15am.) Rumor is DOGE is downscaling current compute/server resources -- part of a bigger gaslight plan methinks re: old system was not working hence our need to rush the changes.

If DOGE tries this, and it does not work... Wow. Just. Wow.

 

[clackerd]

I think Trump wants riots. I think he wants the whole thing to break, so he can declare martial law and suspend elections.

This is what I've been thinking. Break shit to the point it cant be fixed and piss everyone off to the point of mass demonstrations. Boom - declare martial law, enjoy the lifetime monarchy/broligarchy

 

[approximate_pi]

Yeah - it'll all be fine, we just need some vibe coders typing prompts into the cheapest LLM we can use. No need to worry about the decades of institutional knowledge embedded in that crusty old pile of cobol.

/s

Surprised they're going with Java. Why not Go or Rust - that's where the cool kids are hanging out.

pipcorn.gif
leslie nielson nothing to see here.gif
little girl standing in front of burning building.gif

Honestly given the crew in question I’m surprised they arent attempting a rewrite in node

 

[arsisloam]

And i'm asking why it's so complex.

Because there are tons and tons of edge cases about "What if XYZ happens?" Where XYZ is the death of a spouse while outside the USA, so there's no death certificate yet, or any of a hundred weird situations lie that, that somebody spent time and effort to program around.

Or the COBOL system has to interact with some other system, but the COBOL system only reads CSV files, and the other system only reads XML files. Or something. Every complex system has a lot of situations like that, that it just silently deals with, until you try to change something, and then you have to fix the fix.

Literally every single person who has done one of these large projects, particularly with a mainframe, will tell you horror stories about all the ways it can go wrong. DOGE is unfortunately staffed by people who don't have that experience yet, so this will be their first, and therefore worst, fuckup.

 

[el_oscuro]

I am legitimately curious what exactly the breaking point would be for Trump's base to break with him. I see people who are facing the bankruptcy of their farms and businesses as well as people with deported family members who pray to Trump to intercede on their behalf. I see others who say that they're about to be ruined, but always caveat it by saying they believe in Trump.

I am honestly curious how much it would take before they break.

I saw a TikTok video of some farmer flying a large Trump 2024 flag - upside down. So far the FO part has only really affected Federal employees and some farmers. Some will break and others won't. Think about that woman who's child died of measles.

 

[bigsnake499]

Good luck finding forever bugs with those languages when dealing with floating point arithmetic.

Cobol does not use floating point arithmetic. It uses decimal point arithmetic. $10.50 is precisely $10.50 and not $10.490835. It is an accounting language.

 

[Beckler]

Rewrite(All, Cobol, Java);

 

[Barleyman]

"Lines of code" means a lot in FORTRAN or BASIC but not in higher level languages like C, C++, Java, etc. where you split token across readable lines to make them... readable.

COBOL-60 and its deritavites were meant to be read like a human book. So you can accomplish what you want but have to read an entire chapter instead of a page. 60 million lines of Cobol is probably 60,000 lines of real programming.

Really? Okay, I'll bet you money whether you can replicate that 60 million line codebase using 60k lines of "real" programming. And no trying to be clever and pretending your libraries don't count.

 

[password123]

I hate hackathons to solve problems: a group of people come in, do all the fun part, then leave with the knowledge of the systems they built which, of course, leaves everybody who needs to support those systems a year, five, or ten from now in the lurch.

This sounds exactly like a hackathon.

A hackathon with ketamine!

 

[squawkingVFR]

I will enjoy watching this from afar. Y’all voted for it. Chilling here in a land of good food and free healthcare, overdosing on schadenfreude.

Any chance you can sponsor some of us that didn't vote for this?

 

[Waluigi]

gets 10 year supply of popcorn

 

[A Man A Plan A Canal Panama]

... and left everyone in the lurch when they quit to do the exact same thing at a medical company that shall remain nameless.

Oh please do name them, as a public service, so we can try to avoid doing business with that company. The lives you save will be grateful m

 

[nafhan]

A pretty common tactic in this space is just to lie about the time and money involved in doing something (reference: most of what Boeing does). That's probably what's going on here.

Another real possibility is that they are completely unconcerned about the outcome. For instance, the article mentions testing. Chuck all the testing and verification out the window, and you can get stuff done a lot quicker.

From any perspective that involves a good faith estimation of doing it well, this timeline is nonsense, but we're clearly already working outside those parameters.

 

[A Man A Plan A Canal Panama]

And i'm asking why it's so complex.

Because the laws are complex.

Invented by humans, congresspersons, and others with unaligned incentives...

 

[Jordan83]

They won't 'rise up' and march to Washington. They will vote. And presuming the Dems don't Really Screw It Up Again the Senate and the House will go Democratic and then they actually can push Trump away. I really don't think the Repubs can prevent the next midterms and they probably can't shut down the next Presidential elections.

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I refuse to believe many of them are budging for anything. We’ll see in a couple years, at least.

My bigger hope is that maybe, somehow, Democrats can recapture some of the youth and middle class votes that they lost. I find that far more likely than seniors and aging population switching sides.

But, we’ll see.

 

[TechnicaGratiaArs]

The worst part of these radical Republican bulldozing projects is that when Democrats have the Federal power they are overwhelmed by cleaning up the last Republican mess that got Democrats elected, so they don't remake the government in sustainable, equitable, functional ways. Bush/Cheney got to remake the entire US defense system as "Homeland Security" because they failed to protect the USA from the well known #1 terrorist threat about which they were amply warned, then used as lies to start and lose Iraq War Jr.

 

[Jordan83]

A large amount of seniors rely 100% on social security. I think once they're homeless they may wake up.

Like I said, I’ll believe it when I see it. Yes, I am that cynical about it.

 

[raschumacher]

Note that if you want to login at SSA to print your account history etc. you must lift any credit freeze you might have at Experian. A credit check is part of SSA's current verification process.

 

[dollyllama]

As far as the Trump administration (and especially Musk) is concerned, if people don't get paid, that is a good thing, because it saves money.

Of course, if they make a mess of it, will old people who stop receiving their checks ever vote Republican again?

Not only is money saved, more power is amassed by the oligarchs. If it goes according to plan, no one's vote will matter: Trump and his crime gang will win.

 

[RobL]

Condolences for all of the edge-case recipients.

 

[ColdWetDog]

COBOL is ridiculously verbose for a coding language. It's not too far off writing instructions in plain English that anybody can read.

One problem is that the plain English of the actual law isn't exactly coherent.

 

[el_oscuro]

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I refuse to believe many of them are budging for anything. We’ll see in a couple years, at least.

My bigger hope is that maybe, somehow, Democrats can recapture some of the youth and middle class votes that they lost. I find that far more likely than seniors and aging population switching sides.

But, we’ll see.

We will also see next Tuesday. If you haven't donated to the FL and WI campaigns, I would suggest doing so. Just make sure you use an email relay/alias so ActBlue doesn't spam your real email.

 

[dollyllama]

A large amount of seniors rely 100% on social security. I think once they're homeless they may wake up.

Many will die before they're evicted, due to being unable to afford prescription drugs.
And don't forget the SSA recipients who aren't seniors but are disabled.

 

[strawman49]

You assume there will be elections in four years.

Or in 2026.

I wrote my republican US Senator about Musk's rewrite plans. I wasn't very polite to him this time so my message will get ignored. I can't bother being nice to him while he says nothing and just follows the Trump line.

 

[Demosthenes642]

Hopefully some admin at SSA will start squirrelling away some backups of the code base in placed DOGE can't find.

 

[dollyllama]

Should I trust a brilliant tech entrepreneur with a diverse record of extreme success or unnamed "experts" who say the goal cant be accomplished (and failed to previously perform) ....hmmm

Musk is a dork. A rich, power-mad dork, but nevertheless a dork. He did not found Tesla--he bought it. He has almost zero patents to his name. His business success is attributable to smart, hard-working people that for some reason (i.e., because of his ginormous ego) the general public doesn't know who they are.

 

[darwinosx]

Anyone with a any sense knows this is impossible. They know it too. The only logical conclusion is they want to break it.

 

[ColdWetDog]

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I refuse to believe many of them are budging for anything. We’ll see in a couple years, at least.

My bigger hope is that maybe, somehow, Democrats can recapture some of the youth and middle class votes that they lost. I find that far more likely than seniors and aging population switching sides.

But, we’ll see.

Remember, very few Repubs won by a 'landslide'. So if you can get some seniors, some youngins and the idiot Progressives that had their panties in a twist because Biden didn't give the Palestinians the time of day (he should have) to vote Democrat (even if it hurts a bit) the entire world would look rather different. Hell, had folks that voted for Obama but not voted for Harris actually voted the result would be different. So as long as Trump doesn't actually disassemble the next elections (a possibility for sure) we could see a real switch.

Much damage would have been done and the best time to fix that would have been a couple decades ago, the second best time would be now.

I keep telling myself this in order to keep my spirits up.....