• shawn1122@lemm.ee
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      39 seconds ago

      There are many people who were born in developing nations during times of war who do not know their exact age. They usually do have an idea of a range though.

  • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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    4 hours ago

    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.

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 hours ago

      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.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
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    7 hours ago

    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.

    • Microw@lemm.ee
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      5 hours ago

      115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier

      • splinter@lemm.ee
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        12 minutes ago

        There are other verification procedures in place as well. This is something like a failsafe.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        58 minutes ago

        They’re going to need lots more people going around talking to old people because you don’t want to rely on public records

        • Microw@lemm.ee
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          1 hour ago

          Absolutely, DOGE is obviously committing crimes doing what they are doing

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    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.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        55 minutes ago

        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?

        • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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          18 minutes ago

          How many cobol systems are still around in 2025. If it works, don’t fix it. And I have a feeling a lot of things will need fixing in 2038 lol

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      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

      • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        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.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        3 hours ago

        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.

        • sasquatch7704@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          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

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    16 hours ago

    Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn’t. Don’t dis teen coders.

    • geogeogeo@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      The issue isn’t inherently age it’s just time and experience, understanding different coding patterns and paradigms that have changed over the years etc. Even someone who’s been coding every day from ages 14-20 can’t have the same knowledge and experience as someone who’s been working with software since the 90s or earlier. Granted, there will always be brilliant people who even when lacking experience are more talented and skillful than maybe the majority, but that is uncommon. I’m only in my late 20s. And I remember in college there was a huge diversity of skills, from “are you sure this career path is really a good idea for you?” To “holy hell how did you do all of that in one hackathon?” But even for those really smart folks, they aren’t just going to inherently understand all the different ways to organize and structure code, all the conventions that exist, and more importantly why those methods and structures exist and the history that informed them. I’m not saying you need on the ground experience (although, I’d say many people do, as many people can’t really internalize things without direct exposure), but there’s just not enough time, literally, in the handful of years that is childhood and teenage years to absorb all that history.

      Anyway, what I’m getting at is that, yes, I agree that the problem isn’t inherently about being teenagers but I do think it’s a valid criticism that it’s kind of ridiculous to have such young folks leading this kind of project given it’s literally impossible for them to have the same amount of experience as software vets. It’s also valid that young people are capable of seeing things in very new ways, since they aren’t weighed down by al that history. But that’s why diversity is useful especially for such a monumental project as this.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.

      This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven’t actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.

      What’s specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:

      • They’re very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards “cool” stuff, which COBOL hasn’t been for 4 decades.
      • They haven’t been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.
      • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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        13 minutes ago

        I’ve been surprised multiple times by coworkers who don’t know the significance of midnight January 1st 1970… We support an embedded Linux device, among other things…

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      How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?

      I studied COBOL a bit in college and it’s not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason …

      • tempest@lemmy.ca
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        8 hours ago

        Learning to COBOL is not itself that hard.

        Understanding decades of “business” logic is.

        It isn’t WHAT it is doing, it’s WHY it is doing it that makes these systems labyrinthian.

        Also afaik they don’t get paid that well which is part of the problem.

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      14 hours ago

      I don’t know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc…

      There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.

      You wouldn’t say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven’t had the time to get to greybeard level yet

      • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        13 hours ago

        this is why, if they heavily modified the code in such a short time and they couldn’t understand it: it proves there was a previous data breach and they’re just installing the pre-written patches… the smoking gun that i can’t explain to anyone

      • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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        15 hours ago

        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.

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    11 hours ago

    They also found that there’s people over 200, so that default date thing doesn’t really explain it all.

    • ansiz@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      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.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        9 hours ago

        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.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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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.

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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        10 hours ago

        It’s definitely still concerning if the database has a large number of errors. But systematic fraud would be much worse ofc.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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          10 hours ago

          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

          • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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            2 hours ago

            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.

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            3 hours ago

            It’s really funny to me that everyone thinks every database is always 100% correct. What a magical world it would be!

            • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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              6 hours ago

              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.

            • Lyrl@lemm.ee
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              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.

              • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                20 minutes ago

                How would you clean up that data? If they didn’t have the correct data in the first place, where do you expect to find it decades later?

                Sometime real life is just bad data and that’s not necessarily a problem. All of the business logic and agency process around not spending money for those situations is probably one of the difficult areas blocking modernization or shrinkage. Bad data is reality. How you handle it shows how experienced you are

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                8 hours ago

                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.

                • SabinStargem@lemmings.world
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                  6 hours ago

                  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.

  • JoYo 🇺🇸@lemmy.ml
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    17 hours ago

    More specifically, they didn’t find anyone receiving social security who were 150 years old because they didn’t prove that they were receiving anything as that’s not the purpose of that database.

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        3 hours ago

        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.

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          3 hours ago

          If relying on any knowledge is bad, then why should we believe what you say? That’s an appeal to authority

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            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

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              2 hours ago

              Why should anyone listen to what you have to say? Can you give a reason without an appeal to authority?

        • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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          7 minutes ago

          Lolololol tell that to literally every major bank, I’m sure they’ll get right on it just for you.

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          3 hours ago

          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.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              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

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                2 hours ago

                You know most people support this. Trump has a positive approval rating. You guys are in the minority

            • doomcanoe@sh.itjust.works
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              3 hours ago

              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”.

              • nwilz@lemmy.world
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                3 hours ago

                Yes, it is defending cobol. Otherwise it would say this is bad and needs to be fixed

                • doomcanoe@sh.itjust.works
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                  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.

                • ridethisbike@lemmy.world
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                  3 hours ago

                  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.

        • glitch1985@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          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.

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              The code 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?

            • ano_ba_to
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              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.

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            4 hours ago

            This hasn’t been done because no one can do it. It’s because the government sucks at this stuff

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              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.

              • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                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.

            • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com
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              3 hours ago

              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.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      8 hours ago

      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.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        12 minutes ago

        Yeah, I’ve been tempted to try this route, but you’re really pigeonholing yourself. Even if there’s always wrk, I can’t imagine only working with cobol the rest of my career.

        Even worse, the places still using this are very heavy in process, with many undocumented dependencies among many undocumented workflows and business processes. Modernizing COBOL is not a coding problem: it’s a mammoth project management, coordination, and paperwork project that also has a little bit of coding. And its not like you can write clean code, you need to write essentially the same tangled mess of accumulated changes over decades because there’s no way of knowing everything that might break

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        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

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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          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.

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      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”

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    20 hours ago

    LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL

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      17 hours ago

      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.

    • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      19 hours ago

      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”