this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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[–] orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 73 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 24 points 6 days 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.

[–] orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 9 points 6 days 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.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

well years are made of months

[–] leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 41 points 6 days 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.

[–] Dultas@lemmy.world 29 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] el_bhm@lemm.ee 27 points 6 days 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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[–] SSNs4evr@leminal.space 20 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 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.

[–] Pirata@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Yep, this is the explanation. People are still trying to rationalize "why do this in months, its all gonna collapse!" not understanding that collapse is the actual point.

[–] PiJiNWiNg@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Its so disheartening how well its working

[–] SSNs4evr@leminal.space 4 points 5 days ago

IMO, only 3 things hold social order together....Laws, Consequences, and Prosperity. The loss of any one of those things will result in some pretty nasty stuff. We're not going to go the way of Germany - at least not as fast....there are simply too many guns in this nation, too much communications capacity, too much ability for quick travel, etc.

Through trump 45, all the lawsuits, hearings, censures, lawsuits, protests, and impeachments were simply seen as "liberal tears." When thenorange voters are directly, and negatively impacted by what they voted for, those liberal tears will a protest of government that will mean something. We're still in the shocked-look, "I thought the other people were the problem" phase of things.

Orange voters are starting to lose their jobs. Orange farmers are starting to have distressed farms, or fields with rotting product waiting for harvest. Stress fractures are beginning to appear with Medicare/Medicaid and SS. Wait until the Farmbill is canceled.

Republican town hall meetings will reach a point where they'll be canceled entirely. They're starting to crack down on the ever-growing population of homeless and people living in their cars. They're starting to crack down on social media negativity towards government. Just wait until conservatives come after the guns.

Our allies are doing their best to help us out by economic means, but they can only do so much, as the threat to our nation is coming from within our nation. Canada is rocking it with their tariffs, being focused squarely on red states.

Things will likely get uglier, but that might just be the way it has to be, before things can improve, and it'll be scary for everyone. The US has been on a downward/rightward spiral since the early 1970s, and we've let it slowly happen to ourselves. Setting things right Will be difficult, and will certainly take more than a few 4-8 year presidential cycles, and people need to understand that.

This is the plan.

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[–] drascus@sh.itjust.works 35 points 6 days 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?

[–] undefinedValue@programming.dev 24 points 6 days 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.

[–] chrislowles@lemm.ee 18 points 6 days 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.

[–] freeman@sh.itjust.works 9 points 6 days 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.

[–] Quexotic@sh.itjust.works 20 points 6 days ago (1 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.

[–] trogon@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

In their AI-centered, techno-feudal utopia, the elderly are just a drain.

[–] Quexotic@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago

As will we all be soon. We are their cattle.

[–] MuskyMelon@lemmy.world 23 points 6 days ago (2 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.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 11 points 6 days 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.

[–] Kevo@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

Surprise surprise, that's a similar time frame the last attempt at this gave. Apparently the they never got too far off thr ground because they had to divert resources to help against covid

[–] baines@lemmy.cafe 6 points 6 days ago (4 children)

it is only obsolete if you have a better currently working solution

anything else is a fucking pipe dream

[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 6 days ago

Just toss it all into an Access database. What could go wrong?

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[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 25 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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"

[–] FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafe 27 points 6 days 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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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 5 days 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.

[–] Lucky_777@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days 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.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 days ago

Right... That's covered in the "making people suffer needlessly" part.

[–] mkhopper@lemmy.world 25 points 6 days 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.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 19 points 6 days 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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[–] vala@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days 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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[–] demizerone@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days 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.

[–] MashedTech@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days 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".

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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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[–] ChillPenguin@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago

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

[–] JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 6 days 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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[–] slowcakes@programming.dev 11 points 6 days 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.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 6 days ago

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

[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago

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

[–] Blurghalurg@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days 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.

[–] athairmor@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago

Some of them are teenagers and the rest have the mental and emotional maturity of a teenager.

They have no clue what it takes for such a large project. Even Elon “self-driving by the end of 2014” Musk hasn’t a clue.

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[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 4 points 5 days ago

A sad fact about programming projects is that you can and have to lie about how long it'll take or cost because nobody will ever accept the truth about those things.

it's a sick world where matthew perry isn't with us but elon still is.

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