I keep hearing that gen Z is actually pretty shit with understanding things outside GUIs.
And now I’m watching it actively destroy my country.
Less of a generational problem, more of an educational one. Selfish, badly educated grifters that got pushed into high offices can be of any age. Musk also didn’t recognize SQL when he looked at it, which is arguably even more funny.
The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.
This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.
For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.
How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.
115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier
They’re going to need lots more people going around talking to old people because you don’t want to rely on public records
If that’s what you want they should be staffing up instead of firing.
Absolutely, DOGE is obviously committing crimes doing what they are doing
Jesus fucking christ the interns who have neither seen nor heard of COBOL have also not encountered the concept of a sentinel value used as a fallback/default.
Cant wait till 2038!
Date time types have long since been based on a 64 bit number , at least in Linux. However the old 32 bit date time types are still there so older programs won’t break, and probably on emdpbedded systems.p. So it comes down to the apps: how many old apps or old embedded systems will still be around?
What do you expect? most of the guys in “DOGE” weren’t even alive on 9/11 I’m a bit surprised that they still have something in COBOL, maintenance probably costs o fortune, good luck finding young COBOL devs
Is being a COBOL dev something that can get you jobs?
I’m pretty good at FORTRAN and would love that kind of “you have invaluable skills so we can’t get rid of you for being queer” gig.
I’m ready to learn COBOL. I will take up the torch. If you know good places to start, let me know. Last time I looked into it it seems way more involved than running stuff like Python, Java, and C.
I see, you want that that Lamorghini, well if you really want udemy is always a good start. Personally the difficult part for me when learning a new programing language is not resources, it’s the motivation to keep do it and I usually need a real project to work on. (10 years + dev)
Usually you find on github “awesome-XYZ” repos (ex: awesome python, awesome c, awesome go), but for cobol, most of the projects are dead
https://github.com/loveOSS/awesome-cobol?tab=readme-ov-file#email
These are the same interns that are pushing code in production, right?
Yeah that’s not the defense you think it is.
How much experience do you have in this? Talk is cheap
You guys love the appeal to authority fallacy. You don’t need to be an expert to know you shouldn’t still be using programs written in cobol.
If relying on any knowledge is bad, then why should we believe what you say? That’s an appeal to authority
I didn’t say any knowledge. I’m saying if you reject what someone says only because they don’t have some arbitrary experience that you require. That’s an appeal to authority
Why should anyone listen to what you have to say? Can you give a reason without an appeal to authority?
Could you elaborate on why?
You shouldn’t be using cobol in 2025
Good luck getting musk to pay to update the programs that most of the government uses.
These programs were written in COBOL, and they have had no reason to upgrade things that are still working.
Yeah having incorrect info isn’t a reason to fix it, your right
This is the part everyone is missing. Real life is messy and sloppy and incomplete. Real life has bad data. All the time, especially when you’re trying to match 100 year old records. Not handling bad data s a problem of inexperience, regardless what technology you use. Announcing it as fraud, is just being an ignorant asshole.
That being said, if Musk is willing to put out the billions of dollars it would cost to modernize, that would be great! But it still has to handle bad data. Maybe musk could add hundreds of millions to the budget to hire enough people to manually confirm all the data from before the records were digitized. Good luck with that
You have to be one of Musk’s adolescent DOGE cronies
You know most people support this. Trump has a positive approval rating. You guys are in the minority
How much is Daddy Elon paying you for this sad psyop attempt? Because he should probably be paying you less
They would have to spend on new systems instead of giving tax breaks to corporate welfare queens and the landed gentry.
Money isn’t the issue
Goober, they’re gonna need to spend money on resources migrating away from it.
Elaborate as to what the specific issue is, please.
Yeah, great. Is DOGE going to fix any of that?
Probably
What an incredibly boring troll you are.
Dumb comments get dumb replies
You could at least put some effort into it. Back in the days we would at least get the Marine Copypasta or something.
That’s a delusional answer.
How
The only possible way DOGE would eliminate that code is if the agency doesn’t exist anymore.
Let me get your point straight, because COBOL is an old language, you believe calling out misinformation that shows the people tasked with “finding corruption and financial mismanagement” are completely unqualified for the job isn’t a “valid defense”?
A valid defense of what? The post doesn’t defend COBOL, it makes no claims regarding the best way to track this data at all. It just points out that the dipshits making the claims of corruption are blatantly wrong.
Then you go on to claim that these same dipshits are going to “probably” address legacy systems? Why would you want someone who can’t understand the legacy system to be in charge of replacing it? That’s a recipe for disaster.
Or to put it another way. Saying the government shouldn’t use COBOL “isn’t the defense (of DOGE) you think it is”.
Yes, it is defending cobol. Otherwise it would say this is bad and needs to be fixed
Lol, bruh… You cant be serious.
Defending COBOL would require a statement to the effect of “COBOL should be kept because X”. Do you see any affirmative statement to that effect? No? Wanna take a guess as to why?
I know you won’t be honest about it in your response, but you know exactly why. Because this post has nothing to do with COBOL being good, bad, or in-between for the task at hand. It’s exclusively about calling out bullshit and misinformation spread by unqualified idiots.
Which brings me back around to the fact that your opinion that “COBOL should be replaced” is not a valid defense of idiots, who don’t understand the systems they are tasked with using, making false claims based on misunderstandings caused by their ignorance.
Are you actually Elon Musk trying to gaslight all of us?
No
…not. probably not. That’s what you meant to say. Right? Right!!!
No
Well don’t worry. You’re allowed to change your mind at any point in time once you realize the mistakes you’ve made regarding the trust and belief you’ve put in these people.
There are tons of IT systems in the government that have been running the same programming for 30+ years but if it isn’t broke it doesn’t get touched.
Source: Use mainframe emulators often to perform routine tasks in government HR systems.
Yeah that doesn’t make it ok
The old may be old but the hardware gets updated. I don’t know if they’re using modern tools but the language also gets updated.
It alll comes down to budget: who wants to spend the money to modernize stuff that still works? Iss Musk willing to invest in that?
Just in case you didn’t know, the code is old, but the hardware still gets updates. And when it comes to batch transactions and network speed, mainframes still do the job reliably well. Plus, they are not easy to hack, because few understand them, not to mention the decades of security updates.
Ok great, still didn’t make it ok
Mainframe does what it does very well, and that makes it okay.
so the huge legacy codebase should be ported to…
and who’s gonna do that? You?
The terrifying answer is that script kiddies will end up porting it to JavaScript and Electron and host it on AWS.
I wanted to write JavaScript first but decided against it :D
This hasn’t been done because no one can do it. It’s because the government sucks at this stuff
It hasn’t been done because that’s a great works project that’s on a scale you’re woefully ignorant to (this is an assumption on my part based on what I can grok of you based on your comments here).
I assure you there is a bevy of skilled developers who would love to modernize the systems they work on but the cost and level of effort is beyond what is politically viable.
If you changed your perspective from “it’s awful and bad and always will be” to “it’s awful and bad and we can make it better, how can I help” things will improve for everyone.
Mate, from reading the comments of this no-brains, he or she doesn’t even know how to program in a professional capacity, much less have even the slightest clue of the scope of such a project.
That one is literally a mindless Trump/Elon fan wading into waters way, WAY, WAY beyond his depth.
I didn’t say it wasn’t big
I guarantee you that there are no governments, banks, or businesses older than 15 years that aren’t running some old ass code that’s not getting replaced any time soon.
Again that doesn’t make it ok
Code is not a physical thing that spoils with age.
All that backs that sentence of yours is your uninformed opinion.
They also found that there’s people over 200, so that default date thing doesn’t really explain it all.
It’s because that explanation isn’t correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.
Note that isn’t a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of ‘everyone’ with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don’t do it.
Social Security numbers were first issued in 1937. You would have need someone to be over 110 in 1937 to have an age over 200. I think that it’s a combination of birthdays entered wrong plus no official death date.
Wouldn’t matter anyway the ss admin automatically stops pay and initiates audit for anything over 115.
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Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I’m sure there is a larger answer.
However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn’t even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.
It’s definitely still concerning if the database has a large number of errors. But systematic fraud would be much worse ofc.
the database doesn’t have to necessarily be accurate if there’s other checks - a flag for test data, a system that checks the person is real against another database before dispersing funds etc
A minor grammar point: in this context, the word is actually “disbursing,” from the same root as “bursar,” a job title you may have encountered in school administrations. “Disbursing” means “paying out from a fund.” “Dispersing” means “scattering” or “causing to dissipate.” So the old system was disbursing funds. The new system will be dispersing funds.
It’s really funny to me that everyone thinks every database is always 100% correct. What a magical world it would be!
That’s true. Would be better if it was though.
Fixing an archival dataset that doesn’t even pertain to people actively receiving benefits is so far down the list of priorities as to be a criminal misuse if resources.
Someone with the skills and knowledge to clean up 150-year old typographical errors in one particular table in the Social Security database system would probably provide more benefit to the taxpayers covering their salary by doing some other task.
It might be better to move to a new database at this point rather than trying to fix the existing one. It won’t give immediate benefits but could be helpful down the line.
Or it could cost a fortune and fuck a lot of other processes up.
I am hoping California ditches SSN and other identifiers from the US Treasury. That information is no longer safe, so we need a fresh database that is secure from DOGE fuckery, among many other hostile actors.
Lol why bring drugs into this? Specifically ketamine?
tbf it’s only embarrassing if you’re capable of embarrassment.
I can’t wait for them to discover a bunch of people who are 9999 years old next.
Or supposedly received 9.223.372.036.854.775.807 dollars (64-bit max int).
In the legacy world we just call it the HIGH_DATE constant.
In my experience in the legacy world we have the isHighDate function which not only checks the constant, but also 5 other edge cases where the value isn’t HIGH_DATE but should be treated as if it is.
In before Musk says “You think the government uses COBOL?!”
Not only do many important government systems ultimately rely on or make heavy use of COBOL…
So do many older private companies.
Like banks. Account balances, transactions.
Its actually quite a serious problem that basically nobody who needs to take seriously actually does.
Basically no one is taught COBOL anymore, but a huge amount of code that undergirds much of what we consider ‘modernity’ is written in COBOL, and all the older folks that actually know COBOL are retiring.
We’re gonna hit a point where the COBOL parts of a system to be altered or maintained, and … there just isn’t anyone who actually knows how to do it.
My understanding is that even if you learn COBOL, you’d struggle to understand legacy systems since they have their quirks from a bygone era
That is absolutely true as well… though this may be just a personal anecdote, it seems to me that the few COBOL coders I once knew would be amongst the most likely to keep a solid documentation of their own systems.
The problem with that though, is that their bosses are almost always too stupid to ask them for such documentation before they leave/retire, or to bother to preserve it when the exiting COBOL programmer gives it to them, because coding is magic to them, and you’re either a good magician that can do the thing, or you’re not.
Upper management / C Suite seems to never understand why the term software engineer was/is used.
He would dismiss COBOL and try to prove that he is a super cool geek with a deep knowledge of DnD and gaming culture. So more like:
“COBOL? Such a language doesn’t even exist unless you think Kobolds are real! Hahaha”
I don’t think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.
It doesn’t matter what I think or know, the government uses COBOL.
LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL
They’d probably just delete the Cobol code since “nobody would use that old stuff anyway”.
2016-2020 was the age of too stupid to break everything. Now we’re staring down the barrel of “The files are in the computer?” But the entire US government is the computer.
I dont even program and i could’ve told them it was probably a placeholder or default value lol “durrrrrr lot of people in this database were born at the exact same time on the same day in the same year that predates electronic databases, gotta be fraud!!1!1!11”
Also predates social security. It’s the long con for sure.
More likely they nuke it due to that lack of understanding.
As someone who is working on a project of recreating an enterprise application in a modern tech stack, the legacy code is hard to understand too.
We have something similar in that a ClaimClosedDate is defaulted to 01/01/1900 and if it has that date it means it’s not closed whereas now that would be a nullable field.
The response is wrong. I remember reading an article that disproved it and explained the actual reason. However I forgot the actual reason.
Jay Kuo is wirth worth following. I know people dislike substack, but a lot decent people publish there. Jay Kuo is good at breaking down the legal aspects of the mess we are seeing now
I’ll wait until it get reposted on a platform that isn’t doing revenue sharing with Nazis. You know, like myLemmy instance.
I share this sentiment, and I admit I am not entirly aware of the Substack situation tbh. The issue is that these people, often very good journalists need a platform that generates revenue for them. I am not American, but find that people like Kuo, Jennifer Rubin, Robert Reich and Joyce Vance give valuable insights on American politics, and “sound bites” that can be share. But they need lir financial support to do this.
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Eejit…
No one ever fucking lived to that age for fuck’s sake!
Methuselah would like a word
In that case I think “year” means “lunar cycle”. This makes a more natural age (80-something IIRC)
