• nwilz@lemmy.world
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        20 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.

        • m_f@discuss.online
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          20 hours ago

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

          • nwilz@lemmy.world
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            20 hours ago

            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

            • m_f@discuss.online
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              19 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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          17 hours ago

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

        • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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          20 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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              18 hours ago

              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

              • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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                17 hours ago

                If you want actual proof of this, look at your medical records. And I say this as a healthcare worker. All kinds of nonsense ends up in the chart for a myriad of reasons.

              • nwilz@lemmy.world
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                20 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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              20 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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                20 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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                  20 hours ago

                  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.

                  • nwilz@lemmy.world
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                    20 hours ago

                    No it’s not. It’s that they are afraid of all of the waste and corruption being exposed and losing control. They don’t care about misinformation, they spread the most misinformation

          • nwilz@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

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

            • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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              21 hours ago

              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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                19 hours ago

                Mate, from reading the comments of this no-brains, he or she doesn’t 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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              21 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.

        • glitch1985@lemmy.world
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          22 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.

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              18 hours ago

              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@sopuli.xyz
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              20 hours ago

              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.