What is "Walt Street,...does Walter have a street named after him?
He does "have a whole lot of money."
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
- Thread starter Poor Richard Saunders
- Start date
He does "have a whole lot of money."
ThatOwlWoman
Leftist Vermin
Rather than fucking with and up SSA's systems, why aren't they focusing on the IRS's? After all, *they* have been defrauded out of billions via bogus income tax returns that sent refunds to scammers.
Answer: They want to mess up social security so it can be privatized.
ThatOwlWoman
Leftist Vermin
Your obsession with Walt and Jarod is both touching and amusing. Is this what you imagine doing with them? lol
Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
That's it Earl? A typo? Care to respond to the context of the post, or are you too much of an intellectual coward to deal with reality?
Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
And remember, the GOP is essentially eliminating the federal watch dogs that catch rich folk cheating on their taxes and such.
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
Yet, you trust a teetering, antiquated set of programs running on COBOL, or some other first generation programming language, that is unsupported outside the government because the rest of the world has moved on. I can't say what Musk's approach to a new set of programs is, but the ones in use were designed by committee and like every government specific piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of using is, the SSA's programming has to be anal and pedantic in design and cumbersome in use.
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.www.wired.com
What could possibly go wrong?
Other then benefits not going out to 65 million seniors because DOGE didn't properly vet their code.
Musk can't even get X to stay online because they are making silly mistakes with coding.
ThatOwlWoman
Leftist Vermin
Exactly. They are also creating a hostile work environment across all govt. departments as well. Say the wrong thing and find yourself suddenly expendable. Who's going to have the guts to report a crooked manager, a suspicion of embezzlement or other fraud, or ppl being paid who don't do their assigned tasks?
ThatOwlWoman
Leftist Vermin
Many systems in private industry still run COBOL.
Why do you think they are teetering? The COBOL programs are well tested and working almost flawlessly.
As to not being used outside the government, you seem to be ill informed as to that as well.
SSA's programs have to follow the law which has a lot of anal and pedantic rules.
COBOL is used in all major banks -
Then this is from 2000 and explains why the attempt to rewrite the SSA code in a new language will fail if they attempt to do it in a 6 month time frame. There is a reason why SS spent 3 years to start to rewrite and weren't able to complete it before priorities changed and they dropped it.
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
www.joelonsoftware.com
There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
[snip]
The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive.
..
[A simple piece of code] but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.
Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters.
When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
DOGE doesn't have a clue as to what the many COBOL programs are supposed to do and what legal requirements it must meet for security and access and how benefits are to be calculated and distributed. They won't be able to figure out all that from the existing code and AI will be even worse at it.
Google's Ai seems unusually inaccurate. Haven't looked at Elon's but it would be hard for it to be worse.
It’s going to be a shitshow, just like everything DOGE does.DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
What could possibly go wrong?
Other then benefits not going out to 65 million seniors because DOGE didn't properly vet their code.
Musk can't even get X to stay online because they are making silly mistakes with coding.
ThatOwlWoman
Leftist Vermin
Why do you think they are teetering? The COBOL programs are well tested and working almost flawlessly.
As to not being used outside the government, you seem to be ill informed as to that as well.
SSA's programs have to follow the law which has a lot of anal and pedantic rules.
COBOL is used in all major banks -
Then this is from 2000 and explains why the attempt to rewrite the SSA code in a new language will fail if they attempt to do it in a 6 month time frame. There is a reason why SS spent 3 years to start to rewrite and weren't able to complete it before priorities changed and they dropped it.
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
[snip]
The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive.
..
[A simple piece of code] but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.
Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters.
When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
DOGE doesn't have a clue as to what the many COBOL programs are supposed to do and what legal requirements it must meet for security and access and how benefits are to be calculated and distributed. They won't be able to figure out all that from the existing code and AI will be even worse at it.
I can't wrap my mind around the concept that spending billions (yes, BILLIONS) to "modernize" an existing, well-functioning system, is a good way to "cut waste and fraud" and "create efficiency." Can you?
In reading the SSA reports, one thing they wanted to do was update the database to a modern standardized database structure. Nothing wrong with that because it would allow for new front end programs to be written in more modern languages. But to do this would probably require 6-12 months of testing to make sure the new code and data is giving the same results as the old code and data.
If I am remembering the numbers correctly, Congress had allocated $500 million in 2017 to start the process but it wasn't complete by 2020.
Homan is coming for you old man. Enjoy your all expense paid vacation to El Salvador.
The SSA was actually a very well run system... But not anymore.
I don't understand why people who hate the government can be trusted to 'fix' the government.
Have you ever hired a plumber who hated plumbing, or gone to a dentist who hated dentistry?
It still is. It is run on under 1 percent of revenue and has never missed a payment. There is nothing holy about updating. It would be expensive and likely crash systems. Updating has been gone through many times, but rejected by level heads.
Considering the Social Security Administration probably has to pay benefits to around 50 million people, their error rate must be extremely low. I don't know of anyone not getting their SS or disability payment exactly when scheduled.
Exactly, the SSA appears to be extremely tight. I am not seeing much overhead that can be cut. Certainly not 30% of the budget in overhead of less than 0.5%.