Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The USA plans to migrate SSAās code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
SSNās pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:
What could possibly go wrong? Iām sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:
Bonus ā Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i
Bwahahaha, as I said on bsky: let them do it, canāt wait to use it as a cautionary tale of why full rewrites are a terrible idea during freshman programming lectures
seems bad
There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.
Anecdote: I gave up on COBOL as a career after beginning to learn it. The breaking point was learning that not only does most legacy COBOL code use go-to statements but that there is a dedicated verb which rewrites go-to statements at runtime and is still supported on e.g. the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS platform that SSA is likely using: ALTER.
When I last looked into this a decade ago, there was a small personal website last updated in the 1990s that had advice about how to rewrite COBOL to remove GOTO and ALTER verbs; if anybody has a link, Iād appreciate it, as I can no longer find it. It turns out that the best ways of removing these spaghetti constructions involve multiple rounds of incremental changes which are each unlikely to alter the codeās behavior. Translations to a new language are doomed to failure; even Java is far too structured to directly encode COBOL control flow, and the time would be better spent on abstract specification of the system so that it can be rebuilt from that specification instead. This is also why IBM makes bank selling COBOL emulators.
Yeah Iām sure DOGE doesnāt appreciate that structured programming hasnāt always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their codeās structure to avoid calling it.
The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:
While Iāve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. Iāve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).
Did my spider sense just tingle? Think the US might be in a bit of danger. Esp with the bit of āburn the boatsā tendency this all seems to have.
To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of itās own lately) and Iāve never worked in government.
But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If thereās anyone who isnāt convinced after reading all the headlines then thereās no convincing them.
details
Some news stories are still saying ācould we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?ā, but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender peopleās visas as āfraudā, and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.
I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:
I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, donāt think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didnāt think Iād have to be in a hurry to update it, and now Iām worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.
My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria
My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.
My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.
* Since Iām taking the work visa route Iāll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.
As someone living in Switzerland for over 6 years, the labor laws arenāt exactly like in the rest of Europe and people are sometimes a bit too much on the freedumb side of things. Also weird german or (possibly less weird, I donāt speak it) french and high cost of living.
Then again, itās not anywhere as bad as whatās happening in the us
Donāt worry I know (approximately) what Iām getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things donāt work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so wonāt start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but Iām at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.
When my German teacher told me she canāt understand Swiss German I thought āhaha Iām in dangerā.
Now I wonder, is this a) the most extreme case of āyoung developer hybrisā ever seen, or b) they donāt actually plan to implement the existing functionality anyway because they want to drastically cut who gets money, or c) lol whatever, Elon said so.
Labrador retrievers ;_; Youāre getting too good at thisā¦
Thereās inarguably an organizational culture that is fundamentally disinterested in the things that the organization is supposed to actually do. Even if they arenāt explicitly planning to end social security as a concept by wrecking the technical infrastructure it relies on, theyāre almost comedically apathetic about whether or not the project succeeds. At the top this makes sense because politicians can spin a bad project into everyone elseās fault, but the fact that theyāre able to find programmers to work under those conditions makes me weep for the future of the industry. Even simple mercenaries should be able to smell that this project is going to fail and look awful on your resume, but I guess these yahoos are expecting to pivot into politics or whatever administration position they can bargain with whoever succeeds Trump.