Absolutely true.
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@bituur_esztreym @cstross @quinn It also shortens to a nice acronym that sounds way less insulting than it really is ("WoO manager", "he has WoOed all the way through this project", "that's a glorious pile of WoO").
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@causticmsngo @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross
So...are you all saying I need to stash my cash under my mattress or in my freezer?@ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
No. But definitely try not to exceed the FDIC-insured maximum of $250,000 per bank if you can. If you have $500K lying around, keep it in two different banks.
Notwithstanding the incompetence and corruption of the Trump regime, the Federal Reserve and its affiliated systems are still holding up.
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.Vibe coding could cause a disaster there, yes. But AI assisted refactoring might be part of a solution.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.Ex-outsourcing moose here: Mainly "Closed Book Life Insurance" companies with a steadily shrinking workload, so they offload their computing to someone else. Then the companies get bought, sold and merged and we had to migrate the workloads (with incompatible support software (tape management, print archiving, etc.) to a single system. Changing their networks from SNA to TCP/IP was also "interesting"... 3:OP>
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross As someone who has spent the last twelve or so years working with one of these systems, I regret to report that the people at the top are absolutely working on using LLMs to convert the stable COBOL codebase into Java that runs in the cloud. But on the other hand, they've been talking about moving off the mainframe for at least ten of those twelve years, and we're no closer to it now than we were then
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@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross Don't banks also have a history of getting billions in free money from the government when they fuck up hard enough...?
IT won't make that decision, but most AI mandates are coming from the higher level executives...
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@cstross Don't banks also have a history of getting billions in free money from the government when they fuck up hard enough...?
IT won't make that decision, but most AI mandates are coming from the higher level executives...
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@8r3n7 My experience was of '96-2000.
In 2008/09, half the main banks in the UK were nationalized to stop them going bust and taking half the populations' mortgages and savings with them. They ended up back in private hands again a decade later.
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@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.
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Vibe coding could cause a disaster there, yes. But AI assisted refactoring might be part of a solution.
@dummzeuch @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross The important term is "assisted". And boy, assistance we need with that...
I'm not involved in the project in my company, we are doing exactly that refactoring (though not LLM-assisted) - and in parts actually develop new systems to replace the old one. -
@ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
No. But definitely try not to exceed the FDIC-insured maximum of $250,000 per bank if you can. If you have $500K lying around, keep it in two different banks.
Notwithstanding the incompetence and corruption of the Trump regime, the Federal Reserve and its affiliated systems are still holding up.
@jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
And, we presume, have substantial vested interest in not collapsing....
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@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross There is, at a rough estimate, over a Trillion-with-a-T dollars of VC funding behind pushing LLMs. That's the kind of money that can rather easily make governments look the other way at "a few computer glitches". No craters, I'm afraid. The old rules don't apply anymore.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross Yep. They have enough trouble accepting conversions of code that involve formal proofs that the result is identical let alone a pattern recognition engine mostly built on junk github code and stackexchange nonsense.
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@jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
And, we presume, have substantial vested interest in not collapsing....
@cavyherd @jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @jzillw @cstross It’s not like 2008 was that long ago. It’s all the same people in charge & no one went to jail.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
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@8r3n7 My experience was of '96-2000.
In 2008/09, half the main banks in the UK were nationalized to stop them going bust and taking half the populations' mortgages and savings with them. They ended up back in private hands again a decade later.
@cstross And virtually no punishments for any bankers or ratings agencies. Just a few scapegoats. Banks are immune to their own mistakes. Too big to fail. They have carte blanche to do whatever stupid vibe banking they want.