Absolutely true.

[fluffykittycat@furry.engineer]

@mherbert @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross the federal pension system gets around this by not using computers. They have a cave where employees hand calculate how much you're owed and you have to wait 6 months for them to figure it out

[fluffykittycat@furry.engineer]

@jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross after the 2023 crisis this limit was de facto lifted

[fluffykittycat@furry.engineer]

@causticmsngo @peachfront @ldmay65 @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross cops are just gangsters

[joxn@wandering.shop]

@cstross @charette Banks today are not the same either, after the giant rounds of M&A driven by the mid-2000s financial crisis. (The Airbus A380 mis-step is evenly matched by the 747-8 debacle, I think, and that was a decade later so they should have known better…)

[toychicken@mastodon.social]

@cstross I worked for a big bank in 2016, and we weren't allowed to run automated tests between 3pm and 6pm, because "the batch process" meant that new account registrations were handled by a manual process. In practice, what that meant was that any new accounts generated via the Web were faxed to a team in India that waited until "the batch process" was done, and completed the registrations manually. They did NOT like it when we generated 10000 new requests just to test our system.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@qhstone @jzillw

Back in 1990 in the middle of a recession and with no job I once WALKED OUT of a job interview when I asked my interviewers about their plans going forward and the answer ended with, "… but we upgrade to COBOL next year".

In 1990.

[qhstone@mstdn.social]

@cstross @jzillw OOF!

[mathew@universeodon.com]

@causticmsngo @cavyherd @jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @jzillw @cstross I kept my company Silicon Valley Bank credit card as a souvenir. That was 2023.

[mathew@universeodon.com]

@cstross @qhstone @jzillw I really want to know what they were using for which COBOL was an upgrade in 1990. 370 assembly language? REXX? JCL? PL/I?

[jawarajabbi@mastodon.online]

@fluffykittycat @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross

Maybe so. That sounds right. But de facto isn't de jure so I'd play it safe myself.

[billysmith@social.coop]

@Uilebheist @cstross

There's going to be the start of a commodities crash at the end of this/beginning of next week.

Look at the futures contracts for Silver.

The Shanghai exchanges have three times the contracts completing compared with the amount of silver in storage to fullfill them.

The amount of silver that is needed does not exist. :|

[ravenonthill@mastodon.social]

@cstross One of the things I realized after a long series of interchanges with an AI-nik is that the guy thinks that Claude is a verification tool, that it actually checks program logic. It's not, and we know from repeated experience that text completion engines are incompetent at logic.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@mathew @qhstone @jzillw All of the above, ISTR!

[holgerpieta@digitalcourage.social]

@BillySmith @Uilebheist @cstross From my limited knowledge of such markets I get the feeling that this is a normal occurrence. The unfulfilled futures will not be called, but just replaced by new futures. Maybe a scheme to drive up prices.
Is there any way of checking that?