Absolutely true.
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@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.
@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.
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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 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...)
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@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.
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@cstross
'Cheerful ineptitude' is a glorious term which I will use without restraint from now on.@johnrohde @cstross I'm tempted to add it to my annual review goals! :)
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@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).
@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
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@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. 🫣
@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross Funnily enough my cousin worked building VBA front-ends for banking systems.
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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.
@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"
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@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
@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 -
@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. 🫣
Fintech's "Mars Climate Orbiter" moment?
No, probably not ; they had hundreds of prior warnings, all dismissed.
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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 @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.
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@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.
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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 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
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@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. 🫣
@selzero @Uilebheist @cstross I guess he shorted himself?
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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>
<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...
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@cstross On the other hand, my brother chose a career as a programmer for banks around the year 2003. Every single job he had back then just added to his personal list of banks where he wasn't going to keep his money. He had seen their backends and was afraid. I distinctly remember one particular job where his boss was the CEO's wife who knew nothing about software engineering and wasn't above e.g. testing in production.
i.e. sometimes banks manage financial risk by allowing it.
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<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...
[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]...
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@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
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@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 after the 2023 crisis this limit was de facto lifted
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@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).
@causticmsngo @peachfront @ldmay65 @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross cops are just gangsters
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Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Come diceva quarcuno, come se fa a non diventà padroni de un paese de servitori? ✋ 🦅
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Ma noi pensavamo che su le emissioni bastava nun fà gniente e a la scandenza rinvià la legge! 😲
Che nun se pò scancellà tutto? Co le concessioni balneari funziona a la grandissima!
Ar massimo cé da pagà na multa europea. Esticazzi!
https://www.open.online/2026/02/26/ets-urso-proposta-sospensione-eutopia/
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Sta tassa sui pacchi da la Cina ce la evadono facile
Che famo, la raddoppiamo? La pagheranno solo i fessi, ma già funziona così l'IRPEF e nessuno se lamenta 🤔
https://www.ilpost.it/2026/02/26/governo-tassa-pacchi-2-euro-milleproroghe/
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Certo che ce stanno le preferenze naa nuova legge elettorale
Sò le *mie* preferenze ✋ 🦅
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Gennaro Carotenuto (@gennarocarotenuto.bsky.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/gennarocarotenuto.bsky.social/post/3mfruurpgfu2s
> “Curiosa sta cosa che se uno in divisa uccide una persona o taccheggia la Coin è una mela marcia, ma se 4 coglioni su 10.000 si staccano da un corteo per assaltare la polizia, tutti e 10.000 sono terroristi”. NB Non è mia, ma sono d’accordo al 100%.
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Silicon Graphics built some stunning computers.
[ via https://www.newbyproduct.com/dark-dancer ]
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@vicash @SmartmanApps wrong again, this is actual math 8-)
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La metamorfosi di Giorgia Meloni: tutte le promesse smentite, dalle accise alla legge elettorale
https://giuliocavalli.substack.com/p/la-metamorfosi-di-giorgia-meloni
> Dalle accise al finto blocco navale, fino al ritorno delle liste bloccate: tutte le promesse tradite dalla premier Giorgia Meloni.
