Post AsYJVVhTQmiSXPEfp2 by nerdeiro@fosstodon.org
(DIR) More posts by nerdeiro@fosstodon.org
(DIR) Post #AsYJVVhTQmiSXPEfp2 by nerdeiro@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T15:47:21Z
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#Fellon #Ellon wants to re-write all the Social Security software in Java, in just a few months.Thing is, those systems track the US's social security legislation and court decisons very closely. It's spaghetti code mandated by law.It would be a miracle if the system could be re-written in 6 YEARS. Six months are just delusions of a deranged mind.#ellonmusk #Fascist #socialsecurity #Trump #deposeelon #FuckTrump
(DIR) Post #AsYJVWvgrPgMLmtXcW by mike805@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T16:03:07Z
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@nerdeiro And why in Java? Wasn't that the hot and fast language of 20 years ago? It has major memory allocation issues, for one thing.SS has a large human staff to handle the exception cases, such as people who worked part of their career outside the USA, or who worked here undocumented and then later got status (yes that counts!)They will still need those people.I assume they are going unleash AI on the existing code base and try to "vibe code" the new version.If Elon can pull this...
(DIR) Post #AsYJVXvNA51RR5knlQ by ThatWouldBeTelling@shitposter.world
2025-03-29T16:34:31.104441Z
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@mike805 @nerdeiro Do remember that Elon timelines can be more aspirational than perfectly realistic. You might translate this into "in months, not years" and most especially "we're not going to pay for years of little or no progress" that pre-DOGE has keep too much of government software contracting in tall cotton."And why in Java? Wasn't that the hot and fast language of 20 years ago? It has major memory allocation issues, for one thing.""major memory allocation issues" as in it's a GCed memory safe language, or more properly ecosystem? Because the latter including libraries is now the most attractive thing about it, and I'm not sure if anything would be better for these sorts of jobs. Is after all derided as the new COBOL.And do we even care about this when Level 3 shared on a whole chip cache table stakes are tens or hundreds of megabytes?? "Cash is the new DRAM, DRAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape...."
(DIR) Post #AsYKE1yan4LxNkTJgm by autolycus@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T16:37:18Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @mike805 @nerdeiro "Do remember that Elon timelines can be more aspirational than perfectly realistic."That's a nice way to say that he's a liar.
(DIR) Post #AsYLU4nEBZVmhnN4IS by ThatWouldBeTelling@shitposter.world
2025-03-29T16:57:08.970686Z
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@autolycus @mike805 @nerdeiro Afraid if you have no experience in doing projects, management or grunt sides, you won't be able to understand this.But being a liar simply doesn't work in STEM where hard reality rules aside from the previously mentioned sort of software hijinks that are serving difference purposes. Musk's accomplishments in the very hard field of literal "rocket science" speak for themselves, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YyV-otP3pI although the first Falcon Heavy side booster landings were more impressive in being tenths of a second apart.Tesla, SpaceX, Xwitter, now DOGE, too many technical successes to casually dismiss as you do.
(DIR) Post #AsYMkoY7vqEPChqwYC by mike805@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T17:09:17Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @autolycus @nerdeiro Yes I've been following SpaceX, and have just tried out a Starlink Mini. SpaceX has done some impressive stuff that was sci-fi for a long time until they got it done. Tesla also "got it done" with practical electric cars. SpaceX has had some blow-ups but so has everyone else.In both cases they walked into an industry where vested interests had decided not to do those things. They had no vested interest so they did it.
(DIR) Post #AsYNdpFz0HTTKCb7Kq by jdslyd@poa.st
2025-03-29T17:20:55.219313Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@ThatWouldBeTelling @autolycus @mike805 @nerdeiro I agree, 6 months for the project is not unreasonable, depending on the capabilities and aspects included in the final project one could probably overnight a baseline. It seems the main thing is data retrieval and ability to interface, so as long as the data table is in good form the core minus GUI should be a simple fix. The GUI might take longer than 6 months because government and intentional stymie.
(DIR) Post #AsYNy2f8s36sh50P0i by mike805@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T17:06:54Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @nerdeiro What I do know is every Java-based system I've sysadmined has memory allocation issues, and periodically restarts or has to be restarted due to out of memory. You can say that is code quality, but how good is the code going to be if it is done in haste?
(DIR) Post #AsYNy3yfyuKUlx9W64 by ThatWouldBeTelling@shitposter.world
2025-03-29T17:24:58.448602Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@mike805 @nerdeiro I'm not aware of any software ecosystem immune to leaking memory and requiring restarts in production. The JVM Hotspot ecosystem is supposed to have good tooling to find this sort of thing, so one question about those systems you had to fight with is, why wasn't some money dedicated to finding and fixing the leaks?Of course, we all know it's generally cheaper to put the load on sysadmins (I'm primarily a programmer, but have done a lot of system administration in my career).Does haste have much of a correlation with these sorts of problems? For example, how long in development were the systems you wrestled with? My experience is too much haste is of course bad, but general bad project management is where these sorts of thing come from.Hmmm, with hardware getting so much cheaper and more capable, there's also potential for using more powerful approaches, like continuous integration. Not all the way to production in Social Security of course!, but in the "get a skeleton running end to end" ASAP and then quickly finding and fixing these sorts of basic bugs.Even then, if "Elon SS V1.0" has to be rebooted every night but is correct it would be a win. For that matter, do any of us have any insight into Social Security's current systems administration practices??
(DIR) Post #AsYO0fvPrfyn2ksCVU by mike805@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T17:10:56Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @autolycus @nerdeiro In terms of Social Security though, I doubt they can rewrite the whole code base in a few months. It took a few tries to get those rockets to land; there is even a highlight reel of the failures. You cannot afford to have SS just be down for a month or two while they sort it out.If they are smart they keep the old system running, use it to handle exceptions, get the easy 90% running on the new system, and gradually fix the rest.
(DIR) Post #AsYQMEVagAooI9CVjk by ThatWouldBeTelling@shitposter.world
2025-03-29T17:51:45.887869Z
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@mike805 @autolycus @nerdeiro "In both cases [of SpaceX and Tesla] they walked into an industry where vested interests had decided not to do those things."Indeed, although I'm much less familiar with EV history.After this string of postings I read xAI, which I did not know was not part of X, bought the latter in a stock swap (this is important in removing Tesla shares as collateral backing the Twitter purchase).I'm not sure xAI is doing anything really technically unique, but I hear about good execution, Nvidia specifically praising how quickly they got their first datacenter up and running (and this with half? Supermicro racks! Dell's the other vendor). And see plenty of people using it productively.But I think they have one unique selling proposition compared to the current vested interests, "the least pozzed AI cloud service." X of course first putting a target on Musk's back by breaking free from extreme wokeness including state censorship (for the latter, thank goodness the US Deep State has factions including ones who care very much about SpaceX and Starlink).
(DIR) Post #AsYQhGOEsZkgCxn3Jo by mike805@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T17:54:04Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @autolycus @nerdeiro > EV historyGM had a proto-Tesla in the early 1990s. The second generation EV1 had a NiMH battery, over 100 miles range, a three-phase AC motor, and could outrun most gas cars from a stop. They were only leased. People who had them loved them. GM made a business decision not to do that. Tesla just picked up what was left on the floor, and put a lithium battery in it.
(DIR) Post #AsYeD1j4EZqVOo0bVA by nerdeiro@fosstodon.org
2025-03-29T19:58:23Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @autolycus @mike805 The earliear success of Tesla and SpaceX were in spite of Musk. As soon as he started forcing his will on them, we got the shit show that is the SSybertruck and starship.
(DIR) Post #AsYeD2omAq0Smngg2S by ThatWouldBeTelling@shitposter.world
2025-03-29T20:26:57.291197Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@nerdeiro @autolycus @mike805 What do you have against stainless steel??To the man who doesn't realize one of the reasons Trump won last year was the first Superheavy-tan "chopsticks" catch, now replicated for a third time.And who thinks everything successful which Musk in charge of is despite him. If so, I invoke Napoleon's reply to a recommendation of an officer, "But is he lucky?"
(DIR) Post #AsaUZCHn2gJ3IP6R0q by autolycus@fosstodon.org
2025-03-30T16:12:18Z
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@ThatWouldBeTelling @mike805 @nerdeiro If a person consistently promises unbelievable timelines when they need to raise capital or their company's stock needs a boost, and then it becomes clear years later that they had no conceivable reason for making such a projection, they are obviously just lying.I'm not sure what the rest of your drooling over Musk has to do with my assertion that if he's publicly promising an achievement in an unrealistic timeframe he's just lying.
(DIR) Post #AsaUZDLN6qlWZnmoEa by mike805@fosstodon.org
2025-03-30T17:20:16Z
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@autolycus @ThatWouldBeTelling @nerdeiro He definitely subscribes to the fake it til you make it philosophy, used successfully by Bill Gates and not so successfully by Elizabeth Holmes.He succeeded with reusable rockets. So far he did not succeed with robo taxis, but suffered no serious consequences.Whether he will ever suffer Holmes type consequences remains to be seen. I would not be surprised to see Trump hand him a blanket pardon on the way out the door, if that alliance holds.
(DIR) Post #AsaUZETCvCcy4OSa5Q by ThatWouldBeTelling@shitposter.world
2025-03-30T17:48:18.117911Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
@mike805 @nerdeiro Strikes me as an incorrect thesis.Gates and Musk have serious technical chops and did or are trying to do things that are conceivably possible, in the case of robo taxis with essentially the type of visual inputs humans use, eschewing LIDAR.Elizabeth Holmes didn't, and thus didn't listen to the people who pointed out the nature of human tissue made many tests require a draw from a blood vessel, so for example lipids in tissue from a finger stick wouldn't be confused for what's in the blood.And she did real, blatant fraud of many sorts as her impossible concept indeed didn't work part because in addition to not being able to get "smart money" as in from the biotech financial ecosystem, couldn't get or retain smart people. Pretty sure Gates and Musk got or get plenty of smart money....In the instant case, we're mostly arguing about time frames to rewrite it in Rust Java, not that in theory it isn't possible for a motivated team.If we've been in the industry long enough, and/or follow its history, we know complete rewrites are dangerous to attempt, but you've noted the domain allows using the old system for the special cases not yet in the new system. As in, each system gets disjoint sets of Social Security Numbers. Taking it further, I can see the new system having business logic where it spits out SSNs that newly satisfy the criteria for the current system.We could also note the current overall sets of systems have no problems with tolerating all sorts of absurdities in its data, the first imperative for Social Security is to not wantonly deny people who deserve their monthly payments (still for example does ~500 YOU'RE DEAD!!! denials per month, though).Satisfy that and you can incrementally tighten up, like the ubiquitous and consequential use of identity theft by illegal aliens.
(DIR) Post #AsaVRCqdAXUyfz9X8a by JoeBravo77@poa.st
2025-03-30T17:58:06.918859Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@ThatWouldBeTelling @mike805 @nerdeiro That's good bread.