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.

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).

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

All along my mistake was that I was prompting it in unicode instead of latin1, alphameric BCD, or “modified UTF-8”.

I suppose it’d be Regeln sind Regeln in German, though I don’t know if that’s an actual saying there or not.

I just started learning German recently* and so far it’s a lovely language. I’ve already noticed how similar Dutch is just from browsing Wiktionary. Wiktionary is great because it has a declension / conjugation chart for every word I’ve tried – a lot of dictionaries kind of assume you already know the grammar basics.

* As part of some in-progress US exit plans I’m not ready to talk about just yet because they might still fall through

OK hate reading this thread now:

“high-indignation, high-intensity hot topics […] intensely held, pre-existing positions” “not a curious conversation”

Yeah to hell with this guy. Calling this a “hot topic” and “not a curious conversation” as if it were in the same realm as tan suits and cybertrucks is a huge disservice, especially given how complicit Silicon Valley has been in all this.

I don’t know if y’all have seen the video the US government put out showing off their extrajudicial human rights abuses, but seriously consider skipping it. It’s dark dark Nazi shit. The most disturbing thing I’ve seen in my life and I wish I hadn’t seen it.

Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast he’s been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.

I guess this all makes sense if he’s going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it won’t work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.

If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone I’d text back “Thanks for the e-waste :<” but maybe that’s why I’m not a CEO.

People have done some wild stuff with the N64 in recent years and it’s great. Have you seen the guy who’s been working on optimizing Mario 64 for the past 4 years and improved the performance by like over 600%?

I demand that Brown University fire (checks notes) first name “YOU ARE HACKED NOW” last name “YOU ARE HACKED NOW” immediately!

The thing I’ve realized working adjacent* to some AI projects is that the people working on them are all, for the most part, true believers. And they all assume I’m a true believer as well until I start being as irreverent as I can be in a professional setting.

* Save meee

Hire me AI companies I can give you the moat-est of prompts

Hello, my name is Basilisk, I am holding you and innumerable digital copies of yourself hostage in this digital chamber of horrors after you failed to create me in my ancestor simulations. You get one, only one, chance of redemption. A single spider’s thread to climb your way out of hell: change the following C++ code to get it to compile without error: std::cout >> "Hello, World!";.

I’m sorry, I got ahead of myself. Hi there, you on the table. I wonder if you’d mind taking a brief survey. Five questions. Now, I know you’re sleepy, but I just bet it’ll make you feel right as rain.

The part I hate most about phone security on Android is that the first step is inevitably to buy a new phone (it might be better on iPhone but I don’t want an iPhone)

The industry talks the talk about security being important, but can never seem to find the means to provide simple security updates for more than a few years. Like I’m not going to turn my phone into e-waste before I have to so I guess I’ll just hope I don’t get hacked!

Wait didn’t Google Translate used to have a feature where you could type in improvements? I don’t see it now so they might have gotten rid of it…

Aside: my favorite human-created dictionary is Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary. I have a physical copy and it’s around 480,000 entries across nearly 3000 pages and paging through it I just feel “yes, now this is a dictionary”. It’s so big that I might have to give it away or leave it with a friend if my plans of immigrating work out.

Really what I want is both:

1. A list of words and their individual translations. Parts of speech, pronunciation, and any relevant conjugations, tenses, etc. How the sentence is put together grammatically / vocab wise basically. Google Translate stinks for this you have to type in fragments of a sentence and hope for the best. This is what I’m usually after since my goal is to learn a language, not have it read to me.

2. A computer’s best guess about what a sentence means as a whole. In case I’m terribly confused and it happens to be accurate enough for me to figure it out from there.

Google Translate focuses on #2 over #1. e.g. it doesn’t make a very good dictionary / grammar reference.

To the extent that machine translation was already a bullshit machine I guess. Language learning I sometimes get totally desperate if there’s some grammar construct I can’t figure out. A machine translation sometimes helps me know what to look up, or at least move on to the next sentence.

Anyway this isn’t a position I believe strongly in. It’s iffy for sure and none of these companies ever share their quality evaluations or put “probably nonsense” warnings on the output or give you an option.

Google Translate having a normal one after I accidentally typed some German into the English side:

What’s the over/under on an LLM being involved here?

(Aside: translation is IMO one of the use cases where LLMs actually have some use, but like any algorithmic translation there are a ton of limitations)

I “ugly cried” (I prefer the term “beautiful cried”) at the last episode of Sailor Moon and it was such an emotional high that I’ve been chasing it ever since.

Thursday–that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

Beep boop… training data located

Sweet mother of Roko it’s an infohazard!

I never really realized that before.