Just tried to log into My Social Security, the website and made it through the second ID level with the phone code, then it said it couldn't log me in and to call....called and the Phone Tree App said the wait times were too long and to try again latter in the month...fuck......
Years ago United Airlines showed how you replace an old but critical COBOL application.
They created a new company, 'Ted' airlines, and built a new ticketing system for just that new company, so any pain from the unavoidable issues that the new system would face were impacting just a few customers... and United made sure those customers were already getting a discount on their product, so the screw-ups would be easier to swallow. Then they eventually rolled the new company back up into the full 'United' system and migrated over to the now fully functional system created to replace the old COBOL code...
The SSI could do the same. Carve out a small section of people (maybe only 'new' enrollees') and have the new system specifically handle their records for the first two years. Then when it has proven itself stable, expand the people using it until eventually everyone is off the old COBOL system
To rewrite the code in the SSA system would be like trying to swap out engine parts from an airplane as it's flying at 10,000 feet.
Stable COBOL code is a spaghetti mess and no one should be touching it except for deeply talented Site Reliability Engineers, like the proud few who rescued healthcare.gov when it was broken. The people that fixed healthcare.gov gave a few (confidential) talks to Google employees back in the day, and let me tell you that government computers systems are fragile as f**k and have multiple companies' software held together with baling wire and spit. If the Muskrats touch the SSA code, Social Security dies, unless they do a full restore backup immediately after things start to crash, and that may not fix it.
Right? I don't know a lot about code, but I do remember a website I used to play at and when they wanted to update the code, the ran the new side by side with the old and migrated a bit at a time, so no data was lost.
Seems that Social security, considering how important it is, could have treated the data a bit better
This is alien territory. Very, very alien territory.
I mean, could anyone have foreseen THIS particular level of absurdity and fuckery? That Social Security would be endangered or even ended, not by a legitimate vote or action of Congress, or even by the start of a second civil war, but by the whims of an unelected, ketamine-addled, illegal alien Blue-White Sack of Whale Intestines, and his posse of over-entitled frat-boy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds with newly-minted "respect mah authoritah" boners busting down the doors and rampaging through the agency with metaphorical chainsaws.
It boggles the head one tries to wrap around it.
Waaaaay back in the Before Trump Times, if James Patterson or Tom Clancy had made this the plot of one of their political thrillers, well...if the publishers didn't laugh them out of the office, the critics would had a field day wondering what they had been smoking, and the reading public would have rolled their eyes at the implausibility.
No, I don't think even Patterson or Clancy could have pulled that one off as believable, even as a work of fiction. But now, here we are for real.
so when the Right realise that it was their money they screwed with and they can no longer *checks notes* buy food then what? the dems will come fix it? ffs
Have any of these callow idiots ever wondered why spreadsheets include so much quasi-datsbase functionality? BECAUSE IT'S NEEDED. Real database software is incredibly difficult, detail-oriented and error-prone programming that has to tolerate the most boneheaded user inputs imaginable.
Strike that. It's not even possible to imagine all the kinds of ridiculous things users will try to do. It's one of the reasons it takes so long to test and prove these systems.
Yeah, how do I know this? I was once asked to port an inventory tracking system from a spreadsheet to a database, and I was young and arrogant enough to think I could figure it out. For a while. Not long enough to actually try to use it, though, thank God. I don't care what kind of genius programmer you think you are, databases are specialist work.
The biggest problem with database software is that high-level data structure design is almost never something companies are willing to pay for. They give that task to coders who are really only qualified to write SQL. Then they 'fix' that design problem by writing code that is tightly-coupled to the badly designed database. It can get the data you're looking for out of the system, but it takes a huge number of lines of code and more complexity than should be necessary. And once this is done, there is no system more difficult to replace once it has been in use than a tightly-coupled, badly designed three-tier web application. Usually all anyone ever does once these are built is update the U/I....
Let’s imagine that some AI system could transform 66m lines of code to a modern language( it can’t but we will make an assumption). Now, how are you going to transform the databases to modern tools, how are you going to test it( this is far and away the most critical), and how are you going to maintain it?
Given Tesla’s track record meeting deadlines confirms my assumptions that it is impossible.
We had a legacy proprietary system for calculating payrolls. It was in COBOL. When we eventually upgraded it and converted to a newly written system, we tested them parallel for six months to a year. 1.)System-mapping (matching functions from old to new, and how they are performed) took another 6-10 months, and we didn't get everything, because some types of scenarios had custom programming that was only rarely needed..
Designing management reports, internal reports, exception reports, and security reports took some serious time to map, identify, categorize, upgrade and test. This does not even address the screens needed for all the tasks and levels associated with internal monitoring, processing, error resolution and research needs. I have no idea how many lines of code there were, but I would wager it was less than a tenth of what the SSA has. I could go on in much more detail, and this was over 20 years ago.
Took us a number of years because we actually cared about getting people's paychecks correct for our customers. Any one in a service business would say the same. Any one who cared would do the same thing. And we had back up for if a process failed.
Attempting to "use AI" is nonsense when you take into consideration that AI has to be trained/educated as far as how to interpret the code it is attempting to emulate. Once you toss away all the people who understand what all the processes do, it can't be taught.
These guys' grasp of COBOL may not be quite as tenuous as Trump's understanding of "Signal." But the point is: they believe they don't NEED to grasp COBOL in order to trash it for "concepts of a plan."
And the real question should be, where will all that money YOU paid into SS go? I have my own suspicions...I'm sure you do too.
I wish I could get back all the money I paid into that system over the years. Money that was taken out of MY PAYCHECK for 35 years, and continues to be taken out today, and probably will continue to be taken out. And I won't ever see one red cent. But I am certainly seeing red now.
Recently a client of mine passed away. His widow got a letter from SSA within about 45 days explaining that his death had missed the cut-off day for his last check by one day. Consequently, she was ordered to refund to social security the full amount of the last check within 30
days or be subjected to fines and penalties, far in excess of the amount of the last monthly benefit. They are not wealthy people and refunding the money was a bit of a hardship. SSA is on top of this shit and always have been.
Anyone who believes the ridiculous claim that huge numbers of social security benefits are being sent out to dead people has obiously never been involved in the passing of a family member and arranging funeral services. if you have, you know that a Certificate of Death is issued by the State. Licensed morticians are required by law to forward a copy of the Death Cerificate to SSA. The death is duly recorded, and the Funeral Director collects the $256 burial stipend provided. Failing to do so could result in revocation of the Morticians's license and fairly steep fines. SO, It ain't happening!!
Seems to me it's an advantage to have that old system as long as it works and it has. Better to be more walled off from hacker world and out of step with it, though AI will probably blow through all that. We should get on top of banking and the financial sectors now. The big opportunity was after 9/11 but what Republican is going to call for an end to anonymous banking, which would have been a move against terrorism and criminality generally. Much more fun to blow stuff up and make money while at it.
Neither my Mom and Dad received their annual statement of benefits from the SSA, which they needed to file their taxes. So that was definitely a clusterfuck. But then I was able to download my Mom’s from the website last week, after a bit of faff, so that part of the system worked. So…no fucking clue what’s going on, other than that people without access to or experience using tech are probably fucked.
I didn't get mine either. I, too, had to download and print it from the website. Fortunately, I do have just enough knowledge to do little things like that. I'm not a programmer or any kind of expert, but my job required me to keep up with at least a minimum amount of computer stuff. I used to have to electronically file bankruptcy petitions, motions, etc. in federal court, so I had to learn how to upload, download and file stuff.
You should have opened an online account years ago. You will find your documents there instead of having them get lost in the mail. It's not a good idea to do your taxes or pay your bills using the mail.
Just tried to log into My Social Security, the website and made it through the second ID level with the phone code, then it said it couldn't log me in and to call....called and the Phone Tree App said the wait times were too long and to try again latter in the month...fuck......
Years ago United Airlines showed how you replace an old but critical COBOL application.
They created a new company, 'Ted' airlines, and built a new ticketing system for just that new company, so any pain from the unavoidable issues that the new system would face were impacting just a few customers... and United made sure those customers were already getting a discount on their product, so the screw-ups would be easier to swallow. Then they eventually rolled the new company back up into the full 'United' system and migrated over to the now fully functional system created to replace the old COBOL code...
The SSI could do the same. Carve out a small section of people (maybe only 'new' enrollees') and have the new system specifically handle their records for the first two years. Then when it has proven itself stable, expand the people using it until eventually everyone is off the old COBOL system
Not getting my upgrade to business class is exactly the same as not getting my monthly income. But hey. Why not?
Fuck Ted Cruz.
Website fucking right before the deadline for people to prove their existence?
Coincidence. I am sure.
To rewrite the code in the SSA system would be like trying to swap out engine parts from an airplane as it's flying at 10,000 feet.
Stable COBOL code is a spaghetti mess and no one should be touching it except for deeply talented Site Reliability Engineers, like the proud few who rescued healthcare.gov when it was broken. The people that fixed healthcare.gov gave a few (confidential) talks to Google employees back in the day, and let me tell you that government computers systems are fragile as f**k and have multiple companies' software held together with baling wire and spit. If the Muskrats touch the SSA code, Social Security dies, unless they do a full restore backup immediately after things start to crash, and that may not fix it.
Right? I don't know a lot about code, but I do remember a website I used to play at and when they wanted to update the code, the ran the new side by side with the old and migrated a bit at a time, so no data was lost.
Seems that Social security, considering how important it is, could have treated the data a bit better
This is alien territory. Very, very alien territory.
I mean, could anyone have foreseen THIS particular level of absurdity and fuckery? That Social Security would be endangered or even ended, not by a legitimate vote or action of Congress, or even by the start of a second civil war, but by the whims of an unelected, ketamine-addled, illegal alien Blue-White Sack of Whale Intestines, and his posse of over-entitled frat-boy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds with newly-minted "respect mah authoritah" boners busting down the doors and rampaging through the agency with metaphorical chainsaws.
It boggles the head one tries to wrap around it.
Waaaaay back in the Before Trump Times, if James Patterson or Tom Clancy had made this the plot of one of their political thrillers, well...if the publishers didn't laugh them out of the office, the critics would had a field day wondering what they had been smoking, and the reading public would have rolled their eyes at the implausibility.
No, I don't think even Patterson or Clancy could have pulled that one off as believable, even as a work of fiction. But now, here we are for real.
so when the Right realise that it was their money they screwed with and they can no longer *checks notes* buy food then what? the dems will come fix it? ffs
They'll BLAME the Dems.
Already on it. It was our fault for being too Democrat, or not Democrat enough, so they just hadda vote for Trump
Yep. They play that blame chorus on a continuous loop.
Have any of these callow idiots ever wondered why spreadsheets include so much quasi-datsbase functionality? BECAUSE IT'S NEEDED. Real database software is incredibly difficult, detail-oriented and error-prone programming that has to tolerate the most boneheaded user inputs imaginable.
Strike that. It's not even possible to imagine all the kinds of ridiculous things users will try to do. It's one of the reasons it takes so long to test and prove these systems.
Yeah, how do I know this? I was once asked to port an inventory tracking system from a spreadsheet to a database, and I was young and arrogant enough to think I could figure it out. For a while. Not long enough to actually try to use it, though, thank God. I don't care what kind of genius programmer you think you are, databases are specialist work.
The biggest problem with database software is that high-level data structure design is almost never something companies are willing to pay for. They give that task to coders who are really only qualified to write SQL. Then they 'fix' that design problem by writing code that is tightly-coupled to the badly designed database. It can get the data you're looking for out of the system, but it takes a huge number of lines of code and more complexity than should be necessary. And once this is done, there is no system more difficult to replace once it has been in use than a tightly-coupled, badly designed three-tier web application. Usually all anyone ever does once these are built is update the U/I....
Let’s imagine that some AI system could transform 66m lines of code to a modern language( it can’t but we will make an assumption). Now, how are you going to transform the databases to modern tools, how are you going to test it( this is far and away the most critical), and how are you going to maintain it?
Given Tesla’s track record meeting deadlines confirms my assumptions that it is impossible.
Oh ye of little faith. Look at what Tesla's already done for self-driving cars!! They only crash into pedestrians now and then.
Fuck Ted Cruz.
We had a legacy proprietary system for calculating payrolls. It was in COBOL. When we eventually upgraded it and converted to a newly written system, we tested them parallel for six months to a year. 1.)System-mapping (matching functions from old to new, and how they are performed) took another 6-10 months, and we didn't get everything, because some types of scenarios had custom programming that was only rarely needed..
Designing management reports, internal reports, exception reports, and security reports took some serious time to map, identify, categorize, upgrade and test. This does not even address the screens needed for all the tasks and levels associated with internal monitoring, processing, error resolution and research needs. I have no idea how many lines of code there were, but I would wager it was less than a tenth of what the SSA has. I could go on in much more detail, and this was over 20 years ago.
Took us a number of years because we actually cared about getting people's paychecks correct for our customers. Any one in a service business would say the same. Any one who cared would do the same thing. And we had back up for if a process failed.
Attempting to "use AI" is nonsense when you take into consideration that AI has to be trained/educated as far as how to interpret the code it is attempting to emulate. Once you toss away all the people who understand what all the processes do, it can't be taught.
I had no problem this morning with logging into my SSA account. Even so, that could change at any given moment.
These guys' grasp of COBOL may not be quite as tenuous as Trump's understanding of "Signal." But the point is: they believe they don't NEED to grasp COBOL in order to trash it for "concepts of a plan."
And the real question should be, where will all that money YOU paid into SS go? I have my own suspicions...I'm sure you do too.
I wish I could get back all the money I paid into that system over the years. Money that was taken out of MY PAYCHECK for 35 years, and continues to be taken out today, and probably will continue to be taken out. And I won't ever see one red cent. But I am certainly seeing red now.
Recently a client of mine passed away. His widow got a letter from SSA within about 45 days explaining that his death had missed the cut-off day for his last check by one day. Consequently, she was ordered to refund to social security the full amount of the last check within 30
days or be subjected to fines and penalties, far in excess of the amount of the last monthly benefit. They are not wealthy people and refunding the money was a bit of a hardship. SSA is on top of this shit and always have been.
Anyone who believes the ridiculous claim that huge numbers of social security benefits are being sent out to dead people has obiously never been involved in the passing of a family member and arranging funeral services. if you have, you know that a Certificate of Death is issued by the State. Licensed morticians are required by law to forward a copy of the Death Cerificate to SSA. The death is duly recorded, and the Funeral Director collects the $256 burial stipend provided. Failing to do so could result in revocation of the Morticians's license and fairly steep fines. SO, It ain't happening!!
What happens when grandma dies and I bury her in the backyard? HEEEENNNNGGGHH?????
Checkmate, libs.
Fuck Ted Cruz.
Seems to me it's an advantage to have that old system as long as it works and it has. Better to be more walled off from hacker world and out of step with it, though AI will probably blow through all that. We should get on top of banking and the financial sectors now. The big opportunity was after 9/11 but what Republican is going to call for an end to anonymous banking, which would have been a move against terrorism and criminality generally. Much more fun to blow stuff up and make money while at it.
"...blow stuff up and make money while at it."
The MO of the GOP.
The Classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOgMVw38xkA
The Cliff Notes:
https://substack.com/profile/157420297-margery-traylor-trashe/note/c-104532166
Neither my Mom and Dad received their annual statement of benefits from the SSA, which they needed to file their taxes. So that was definitely a clusterfuck. But then I was able to download my Mom’s from the website last week, after a bit of faff, so that part of the system worked. So…no fucking clue what’s going on, other than that people without access to or experience using tech are probably fucked.
I didn't get mine either. I, too, had to download and print it from the website. Fortunately, I do have just enough knowledge to do little things like that. I'm not a programmer or any kind of expert, but my job required me to keep up with at least a minimum amount of computer stuff. I used to have to electronically file bankruptcy petitions, motions, etc. in federal court, so I had to learn how to upload, download and file stuff.
You should have opened an online account years ago. You will find your documents there instead of having them get lost in the mail. It's not a good idea to do your taxes or pay your bills using the mail.