Absolutely true.
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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 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.
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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.
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@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.
@causticmsngo @cavyherd @jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @jzillw @cstross I kept my company Silicon Valley Bank credit card as a souvenir. That was 2023.
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@jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross after the 2023 crisis this limit was de facto lifted
@fluffykittycat @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
Maybe so. That sounds right. But de facto isn't de jure so I'd play it safe myself.
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@cstross Yep. But I didn't suggest to buy IBM shares precisely for that reason.
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. :|
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@cstross Has anyone else had the disorienting experience of reading an “AI” summary and realizing that it is wrong, wrong, wrong, but very neatly worded? Why does anyone think the summaries and documentation Claude generates will be any better? And there will be no way to check them…
At slightly greater length, https://shinycroak.blogspot.com/2026/02/ai-and-financial-software.html
@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.
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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. :|
@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?
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