Absolutely true.

[lazarou@mastodon.social]

@cstross I recall working in banking in the 00s and they were still using programs from the 80s, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" as well as their appropriate attitude to risk (which was starting to lapse in the 00s, but hey...)

[frankendrullat@mastodon.social]

@cstross @charette Completely agree! For months before we made sure that every bloody customer was running the latest and greatest firmware / BIOS / Insight Manager / whatever else to minimize the impact. That must have also been a significant amount of money that got invested there.

[uilebheist@polyglot.city]

@aapis @selzero @cstross I have my opinion on anything "enterprise" and it's not quite complimentary:

https://polyglot.city/@Uilebheist/116101530297706771

[jtonline@mastodon.me.uk]

@johnrohde @cstross I'm tempted to add it to my annual review goals! :)

[peachfront@toot.community]

@causticmsngo @ldmay65 @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross

it's just plain cruel because people who are unbanked & living out of their cars can't save up & rise to help themselves because their cash gets stolen

i played on a blackjack team in the 90s, a legal cash business, we helped a formerly homeless player get back on his feet but once he went back out on his own, i don't think it was 6 months before some traffic cops stole all his cash & put him homeless again

very discouraging

[mathew@universeodon.com]

@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross Funnily enough my cousin worked building VBA front-ends for banking systems.

[interpipes@thx.gg]

@skolima @cstross @davidgerard I think this is less about their risk aversion and the fact that the "could" in "could go to prison" is vaguely equivalent to "99% likely not to because accountability is for the poors"

[jsl@hachyderm.io]

@fn0rd @cstross You will find developers at banks who are genuinely intrigued by the new tools, and that's good. But a lot of the ones who maintain the dinosaur pens of old iron that run the core banking services with uptimes north of 99.99% take pride in what they do, and that includes telling their line and top management where to shove vibe coding.
Sure, this is an independence based on good education, a good salary and strong employment protection, but that's why the middle class, while slowing good things down, also prevents CEOs from shooting themselves into both feet. /end

[wellsitegeo@masto.ai]

@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross

Fintech's "Mars Climate Orbiter" moment?

No, probably not ; they had hundreds of prior warnings, all dismissed.

[joxn@wandering.shop]

@cstross @charette Boeing, in the 90s, could and did spin up the engineering project for the 777 with a clean sheet design in 5 years from start of program to service entrance of the first aircraft. Now, they can’t really build new planes and they can’t modify old designs without the effort being an utter (sometimes fatal) disaster.

The world of professional and technical services looks a lot different now. I’m not sure that banks’ caution around Y2K bugs is necessarily predictive of anything.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@joXn @charette Boeing *today* is run by McDonnell-Douglas management, which is why they can't build another 777. McD-D lost the market war but won by a management reverse takeover. This is how industries die. (Airbus are eating their lunch despite the giant miss-step that was the A380.)

[ravenonthill@mastodon.social]

@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

[llewelly@sauropods.win]

@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross I guess he shorted himself?

[cadbury_moose@wandering.shop]

@jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross

<Sigh> That has brought back all the memories of wrangling remote printing for customers:

1) The office move where the old site was wired with Twinax and used SNA with antediluvian protocol converters [1] for each printer[2], and the new site that was all TCP/IP and 10BaseT.

2) The company that was still using X.25 PSS and some dot-matrix printers with multipart stationery when they physically skipped the X.25 network hardware.[3]

Continued...

[qhstone@mstdn.social]

@jzillw @cstross I once interviewed at a bank for a programming position. The dev who interviewed me got some of his own questions wrong and did not appreciate me correcting him.

I did not get the job (nor did I want it at that point).

[cadbury_moose@wandering.shop]

@jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross

[1] Said protocol converters had to be manually configured by attaching a 3270 terminal to the device and typing lots of values in from the configuration sheet.

[2] A mixture of Lexmark (1620s?) and HP LaserJets, with different default character sets (UK4 and PC-8, I think) this caused even more problems later[4].

[3] They needed multipart stationery for work orders used by the construction gangs, so this led to MPITech BlueBox converters for the printers[5]...

[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…)