strange æons takes on hpmor :o
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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all of the subculture YouTubers I watch are colliding with the weirdo cult I know way too much about and I hate it
oh no :(
poor strange she didn't deserve that :(
The USA plans to migrate SSA's code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”
SSN's pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:
SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.
What could possibly go wrong? I'm 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:
You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.
Bonus -- Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i
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, I'd 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 code's 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 I'm sure DOGE doesn't appreciate that structured programming hasn't 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 code's structure to avoid calling it.
The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:
It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt – the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required
While I've never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. I've 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).
60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler
Now I wonder, is this a) the most extreme case of "young developer hybris" ever seen, or b) they don't actually plan to implement the existing functionality anyway because they want to drastically cut who gets money, or c) lol whatever, Elon said so.
But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this: [...]
Labrador retrievers ;_; You're getting too good at this...
In other news, the Open Source Intiative's publicly bristled against the EU's attempt to regulate AI, to the point of weakening said attempts.
Tante, unsurprisingly, is not particularly impressed:
Thank you OSI. To protect the purity of your license – which I do not consider to be open source – you are working towards making it harder for regulators to enforce certain standards within the usage of so-called “AI” systems. Quick question: Who are you actually working for? (I know, it is corporations)
The whole Open Source/Free Software movement has run its course and has been very successful for business. But it feels like somewhere along the line we as normal human beings have been left behind.
You want my opinion, this is a major own-goal for the FOSS movement - sure, the OSI may have been technically correct where the EU's demands conflicted with the Open Source Definition, but neutering EU regs like this means any harms caused by open-source AI will be done in FOSS's name.
Considering FOSS's complete failure to fight corporate encirclement of their shit, this isn't particularly surprising.
Discovered an animation sneering at the tech oligarchs on Newgrounds - I recommend checking it out. Its sister animation is a solid sneer, too, even if it is pretty soul crushing.
Nice touch that the sister animation person is the backup emergency generator in the first one.
Would you believe this prescient vibe coding manual came out in 2015! https://mowillemsworkshop.com/catalog/books/item/i-really-like-slop
Craniometrix is hiring! (lol)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/craniometrix/jobs/ugwcSrU-chief-of-staff
Hey, there's a new government program to provide care for dementia patients. I should found a company to make myself a middleman for all those sweet Medicare bucks. All I need is a nice, friendly but smart sounding name. Oh, that's it! I'll call it Frenology!
That’ll look good in my portfolio next to my biotech startup with a personal touch YouGenics
Very fine people at YouGenics. They sponsor our karting team, the Race Scientists.
Nothing like attending a rally at Kurt’s Krazy Karts!
hmm, interesting. I hadn't heard of these guys. their original step 1 seems to have been building a mobile game that would diagnose you with Alzheimer's in 10 minutes, but I guess at some point someone told them that was stupid:
So far, the team has raised $6 million in seed funding for a HIPAA-compliant app that, according to Patel, can help identify Alzheimer’s disease — even years before symptoms appear — after just 10 minutes of gameplay on a cellphone. It’s not purely a tech offering. Patel says the results are given to an “actual physician” affiliated with Craniometrix who “reviews, verifies, and signs that diagnostic” and returns it to a patient.
small thread about these guys:
https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3llepnsvtpk2g
tldr only new thing I saw is that as a teenager the founder annoyed "over 100" academics until one of them, a computer scientist, endorsed his research about a mobile game that diagnoses you with Alzheimer's in five minutes
I missed the AI bit, but I wasn't surprised.
Do YC, A16z and their ilk ever fund anything good, even by accident?
Annoying nerd annoyed annoying nerd website doesn't like his annoying posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489058
(translation: John Gruber is mad HN doesn't upvote his carefully worded Apple tonguebaths)
JWZ: take the win, man
"vc-chan"
Thats just chefskiss
>sam altman is greentexting in 2025
>and his profile is an AI-generated Ghibli picture, because Miyazaki is such an AI booster
it doesn't look anything like him? not that he looks much like anything himself but come on
He's an AI bro, having even a basic understanding of art is beyond him
sam altman is greentexting in 2025
Ugh. Now I wonder, does he have an actual background as an insufferable imageboard edgelord or is he just trying to appear as one because he thinks that's cool?
can we get some Fs in the chat for our boy sammy a 🙏🙏
e: he thinks that he's only been hated for the last 2.5 years lol
I hated Sam Altman before it was cool apparently.
you don't understand, sam cured cancer or whatever
This is not funny. My best friend died of whatever. If y'all didn't hate saltman so much maybe he'd still be here with us.
"It's not lupus. It's never lupus. It's whatever."
Oh, is that what the orb was doing? I thought that was just a scam.
holy shitting fuck, just got the tip of the year in my email
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it's called kerplunk.com, a domain named after the sound of your balls disappearing forever
the market is gullible recruiters
founder is Jonathan Gallegos, his linkedin is pretty amazing
other three top execs don't use their surnames on Kerplunk's about page, one (Kyle Schutt) links to a linkedin that doesn't exist
for those who know how Dallas TX works, this is an extremely typical Dallas business BS enterprise, it's just this one is about AI not oil or Texas Instruments for once
It's also the sound it makes when I drop-kick their goddamned GPU clusters into the fuckin ocean. Thankfully I haven't run into one of these yet, but given how much of the domestic job market appears to be devoted towards not hiring people while still listing an opening it feels like I'm going to.
On a related note, if anyone in the Seattle area is aware of an opening for a network engineer or sysadmin please PM me.
This jerk had better have a second site with an AI that sits for job interviews in place of a human job seeker.
best guess i've heard so far is they're trying to sell this shitass useless company before the bubble finally deflates and they're hoping the AI interviews of suckers are sufficient personal data for that
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