Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Anecdote: I gave up on COBOL as a career after beginning to learn it. The breaking point was learning that not only does most legacy COBOL code use go-to statements but that there is a dedicated verb which rewrites go-to statements at runtime and is still supported on e.g. the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS platform that SSA is likely using: ALTER.
When I last looked into this a decade ago, there was a small personal website last updated in the 1990s that had advice about how to rewrite COBOL to remove GOTO and ALTER verbs; if anybody has a link, I’d appreciate it, as I can no longer find it. It turns out that the best ways of removing these spaghetti constructions involve multiple rounds of incremental changes which are each unlikely to alter the code’s behavior. Translations to a new language are doomed to failure; even Java is far too structured to directly encode COBOL control flow, and the time would be better spent on abstract specification of the system so that it can be rebuilt from that specification instead. This is also why IBM makes bank selling COBOL emulators.
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:
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).
Did my spider sense just tingle? Think the US might be in a bit of danger. Esp with the bit of “burn the boats” tendency this all seems to have.
To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of it’s own lately) and I’ve never worked in government.
But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If there’s anyone who isn’t convinced after reading all the headlines then there’s no convincing them.
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Some news stories are still saying “could we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?”, but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender people’s visas as “fraud”, and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.
I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:
I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, don’t think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didn’t think I’d have to be in a hurry to update it, and now I’m worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.
My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria
My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.
My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.
* Since I’m taking the work visa route I’ll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.
As someone living in Switzerland for over 6 years, the labor laws aren’t exactly like in the rest of Europe and people are sometimes a bit too much on the freedumb side of things. Also weird german or (possibly less weird, I don’t speak it) french and high cost of living.
Then again, it’s not anywhere as bad as what’s happening in the us
Don’t worry I know (approximately) what I’m getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things don’t work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so won’t start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but I’m at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.
When my German teacher told me she can’t understand Swiss German I thought “haha I’m in danger”.