Absolutely true.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@ThePolishDispatch Western European banks got computers around the same time as American banks. However, they're structured differently: eg. the UK has no state banks (unless you count Scotland and Northern Ireland, and their banks *issue banknotes*) but half a dozen *very large* high street banks who deal with the public, and a larger number of smaller investment banks, plus building societies (shareholder owned lenders for real estate mortgages). And Visa/MC are franchises run by the banks!

[junklight@mastodon.art]

@bobthomson70 @cstross

I worked on adding an "E-frontend" to a COBOL pensions system in the 90s

We were like "well can't we rewrite it all' [in Java at the time :-) )]

It turned out the system had been worked for 20odd years with a whole floor full of people doing change requests. There was NO spec or description. What the mainframe did _was_ the spec . Absolutely no way to replace it

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@ThePolishDispatch I think a chunk of what's wrong with US banking is that there are far too many tiny regional institutions and inter-bank commerce is ridiculously high friction.

[peachfront@toot.community]

@DukeDuke

so... where do you keep your savings & how often are you robbed or caught up in a natural disaster? i've found that sopping wet rolls of dead presidents don't spend that easy

banks were created for a reason, if the answer is "don't use banks & make it impossible for those vulnerable to robbery, floods, or fires to save for their future" -- i don't think that's a good answer

[benno@bsd.network]

@cstross
<3 Svejk reference

[photo55@mastodon.social]

Much of modern computing is layers of hardware and software each lying to the layer above and below.
Somewhere it meets a person, who probably lies to it, and about what it produced.

Seems to work ;)

[mortonrobd@mas.to]

@ParadeGrotesque @bobthomson70 @cstross I also wonder (left bank 10 years ago) how many of the people who really knew the code are left and how much institutional knowledge has been lost. My last few years there I wrote java tools for Ops but still got asked a lot about how to do obscure stuff in z/OS.

[jsl@hachyderm.io]

@fn0rd @cstross It's not optimism and it may be dependent on your country of residence, but your AI firm would have to bribe a large number of low ranking government officials. These people are not easily accessible to lobbying efforts as it's hard these days to get entertainment approved if it exceeds EUR 50. And nobody risks their job for a cheap pen and some dry sandwiches in a Novotel. /2

[peachfront@toot.community]

@ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross

a person who stashes cash under the mattress / in the freezer in the US is subject to losing the money to police forfeiture, a real fear, not a "might happen in the future"

I worked in a legal cash biz in the 90s/early 00s so i've known many people it happened to ... you do not have to be arrested for much less convicted of any crime because property (cash) does not have civil rights so it can be seized (forfeited) merely on suspicion

[selzero@syzito.xyz]

@Uilebheist @cstross it's not just interns.

When I started in banking almost all front end systems were excel sheets created by traders that had completed a weekend course in VBA.

I made a living for a decade replacing that stuff.

One guy tried to get me fired because my replacement metal trading system flipped his bottom line to a massive negative.

He called a high profile meeting to shit on my maths. Turned out he had been confusing US and Imperial Tons his whole career. 🫣

[bobthomson70@mastodon.social]

@MortonRobD @ParadeGrotesque @cstross the business logic part is a whole other issue too yeah - best train all those folk who know it into 'prompt engineering' then eh 🙄

[bobthomson70@mastodon.social]

@ParadeGrotesque @MortonRobD @cstross probably they are busy trying to figure out how to get that off of Oracle now eh :)

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross

*Actual very loud guffaw of laughter*

I worked in the City of London in a stockbroker early in my career. (Before VBA existed.)

Absolutely 100% believable.

[alisonw@fedimon.uk]

@cstross
Major UK banks were still using £sd on the backend into the 90s because they didn't want to take the £p conversion hit.

[daniel_gonzalez@neopaquita.es]

@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross I've been in similar situation, moving code from Excel to Java as Excel didn't pass newer compliance certification.

[inkomtech@infosec.exchange]

@jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross good point. I’ve done sec (GRC, TPRM) work at many, and saw so many hodgepodges due to mergers AND repeatedly being squeezed both on IT and Infosec resources. bad stale tech, understaffed, underpaid. Irony: incidents => merger/acquistions.

[ragingcelt@corteximplant.com]

@cstross As-400 just wont die. It was running at a couple of others jobs i worked

[causticmsngo@mastodon.social]

@peachfront @ldmay65 @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross This absolutely happens (example: https://nj1015.com/nj-cops-confiscate-property-of-the-innocent-these-towns-grabbed-the-most/) & there's a lot of corruption involved. Don't read too much about how "law enforcement” works in the USA unless you want to be depressed (for example, see Serial podcast season 3 & “No Special Duty” from Radiolab).

[frankendrullat@mastodon.social]

@cstross @charette Got paid 800 Irish ££ after taxes for two nights doing absolutely nothing over Y2K together with maybe 20 others at Compaq in Dublin. Over the two nights we had a grand total of 4 calls, if I remember correctly. 2 HDD RMAs, one dead PSU and an old lady who dialled the wrong number. 🤷‍♂️

The mostly non-event cost companies a shit ton of money.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@FrankEndrullat @charette Yet it was only a non-event *because the remediation work got done properly ahead of time*. It's led to an infuriating denialism: like anti-vaxxers, they're ignoring the huge amount of hard work that went into making sure nothing happened, and assume it means nothing *can* happen.

Next time we won't be so lucky.