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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course, one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED.

The Social Security Administration did not immediately reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper's accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

It’s unclear when exactly the code migration would start. A recent document circulated amongst SSA staff laying out the agency’s priorities through May does not mention it, instead naming other priorities like terminating “non-essential contracts” and adopting artificial intelligence to “augment” administrative and technical writing.

Earlier this month, WIRED reported that at least 10 DOGE operatives were currently working within SSA, including a number of young and inexperienced engineers like Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran. At the time, sources told WIRED that the DOGE operatives would focus on how people identify themselves to access their benefits online.

Sources within SSA expect the project to begin in earnest once DOGE identifies and marks remaining beneficiaries as deceased and connecting disparate agency databases. In a Thursday morning court filing, an affidavit from SSA acting administrator Leland Dudek said that at least two DOGE operatives are currently working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project,” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries. The agency is currently battling for sweeping access to SSA’s systems in court to finish this work. (Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.)

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months, then their way is the right way, and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

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yesornopolls · 3 months ago

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Grace Hopper (1906-1992)

In 1934, Hopper earned her Ph.D. in mathematics, becoming one of the very few women to hold such a degree. She went on to help "develop a compiler that was a precursor to the widely used COBOL language" for computers, and she became a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy

#not a poll #women's history

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talenlee · 1 month ago

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Game Pile: Civilisation 1 (Video)

Watch this video on YouTube

Script and thumbnail below the fold!

In 1991, Sid Meier released Civilisation, starting off a habit that didn’t really get kicked at any point after that. It’s kind of hard to underestimate the legacy of Civilisation as a game, as a genre.

It isn’t that no game of its ilk happened before, that’s not how history works. We rarely are given hard ‘starts’ for some thing, since, you know, there were all sorts of games being made by developers and never ‘released’ to a greater market, so instead we have to kind of point to places where specific, defined, observed events based, annoyingly, on markets and capitalism.

There were probably videogames about running countries before 1991, possibly games with even more elaborate structures and systems and different ideological perspectives, and they probably had wholly text prompts and were run on some truly abysmal software system like COBOL, Decay mention for the bingo card. The thing is, most of them didn’t succeed to the degree that Civilisation did as a commercial product, and the upshot of that is, generally speaking, it’s a common way to see Civilization 1 as the ‘start’ of the genre.

That’s kind of the nature of the game, too. There’s a lot of stuff that just starts in it, around the same time. If you’re not familiar with the genre –

HOW?

but in this game you play an immortal leader overseeing a cultural identity that expands across territory, builds cities, claims land, trades, researches, all that stuff, and eventually retires at a ripe old age of 6,100 years old. The game lets you play a civilization from a small selection of appropriate civilisations, which have their own personalities and biases. Anyone not covered by these options – Romans, Russians, Babylonians, Zulus, Germans, French, Egyptians, Aztecs, Americans, Chinese, Greeks, the English, Indians, and the Mongols – is just… barbarian tribes.

This makes it a game where you can build Jerusalem, Mecca, or Brisbane, but not be any of the cultures that actually founded those cities, it’s an interesting unintentional statement. Still I’m not here to retread the old conversations about how Civilisation views the question of ‘who gets to be a civilisation’ or even ‘what does it mean to be civilised.’ That’s something other people have done, often better than me, and with a broader context of other Civilisation games.

I haven’t really played any of the other ones after the first. I’ve installed them, I’ve run a few of them, and even played through the tutorial on one of the more recent ones – five, I think? but they all bore me and I just find myself wanting to come back to this one, with its systems.

Part of it is just mental headspace. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to care too much about the specifics of each new game, the way things are almost but not quite the same. It’s just too much and I don’t really feel the absence of those things in the game I like to play. And I do not really understand what’s in this game at all – my knowledge of Civilisation 1 is pretty patchy for a game that I’ve played this much.

What is remarkable about Civilisation 1 is how it scales. When you start playing Civilisation you’ll be introduced to its wide variety of systems without a lot of clear explanation.

You start with some starting technology, some starting units, and a starting location that may or may not feature free resources, units or good terrain and you’ve got to make the life out of it. For example, I literally just before reading this learned how the corruption mechanic works, and that the enemy units were doing things I thought impossible wasn’t because I didn’t understand how to do them, but because the game just cheats.

One thing I remember from my childhood years was that developing technology seemed the best way to ‘succeed,’ because that’s what gave you military units you could use to fight and protect. I had this weird sort of hypermilitaristic state where all my cities would endlessly produce just defensive units, until most cities had sometimes six or eight military units guarding a population of 2-3. Which you might be wondering ‘what’s the point’ or, more likely, ‘what do you mean?’ because you aren’t familiar with a thirty-five year old videogame’s intricate systems.

Cities can be built, they can be defended, they can grow, and they have populations, and all of those terms bring with them a new subset of mechanical information that can be expanded on further, and which brings with it a new layer in the very specific way Civilisation, the videogame, thinks of being.

I came back to it as an adult, as a sort of idle game I can appreciate in a small window while I’m doing other things.

And y’know what?

Civilisation turns out to be a startlingly easy game to break. Not even with cheats or exploits – the game gives every single city square a certain ‘base’ advancement, meaning that making a new city will typically yield more results than letting a neighbouring city develop that square themselves. You need some limit on it because you don’t want to go haywire but the general idea is that if you control an area, you can probably get a really good output of all the stuff you want by ensuring that about a quarter of that area is covered in cities, rather than giving those cities the much larger non-competitive territory they can hypothetically control.

The upshot of this is that you can leap up the tech tree at a speed that makes even the most optimistic monkey wonder why they ever bothered throwing the bone if you’re going to mock the teleology of technological progress like that. In one such game, I had access to superconductors before we even hit the Anno Dominis, just because the game doesn’t do anything to slow you down. And why should it?

It’s just trying to let you play with emergent systems. Anything else would be ridiculous.

There’s no inherent reason any given slick of land should have another civilisation on it, meaning to meet with other cultures and engage in the hypothetically important civilisational struggle, you have to develop both transport boats and the units you want to send, and have a civilisation that appreciates that kind of military adventurism.

Even if you just want to go say hi and discover other nations and see how they’re doing, you have to construct something that can fight to do it. Even a humble settler!

And each city can only support so much in the way of units and their presence in the world, meaning that you basically have to dedicate a city or two to supporting the task of ‘finding someone else’ when all you can gain out of it is an opportunity to smush some loser underfoot. Why bother? You can wind up in the later stages of a successful civilisation, with heavily developed technology and nobody to talk to.

Then at some point, a trireme shows up to your civilisation which is developing the cure for cancer and they wonder if you’d like to learn how to do pottery. This is in cities that are doing nothing but making caravans to contribute to wonders, or building barracks that you sell, because buildings need upkeep and only change your stats in that city, and if you’re happy with only making enough and not making everything, then you suddenly don’t care about giving yourself 50% extra happiness off your temples or whatever.

Suddenly you’re left with no real reason to want to build most of anything in a city. People don’t need a coliseum to be happy, they need more people in the city doing the important job of making entertainment and doing cool art.

The solution to every problem in a city, more or less, can be developed by just growing more, and that rewards growth more than anything else, and the systems that let you grow the most are the ones that discourage you from doing anything military, but that’s okay because going and finding people to fight is a pain in the bum.

But and this is where things get really interface-weird, you can’t just sit back, develop tech, and goof around until the space race kicks in, because the way you build things in this game is to tell your cities to build them, and you do that through a menu. This menu cannot handle a game state where you have access to every piece of technology to build with, or even most of it. It splits into two menus when the menus get too busy, but if there are too many wonders and nobody’s built them… it just stops. You open up the build menu to make something – like one of those wonders – and you get a blank menu of nothing. You have been locked out of all production for the rest of the game, or until someone else develops your technology level, makes some wonders, and shrinks what appears on that menu.

But the AI opponents aren’t likely to do this because wonder building is really slow and annoying and a lot of the benefits are transitory, especially if you’re the tech powerhouse of the world learning the hell out of everything. The game rolls dice on whether it makes a wonder, and it seems to avoid making wonders that aren’t useful any more – It’s fine to have a Great Wall of Newark but if I’ve already developed gunpowder, the game’s not going to bother taking it off my plate.

The game doesn’t actually play by its own rules. It feigns playing fair in a moment to moment, looking-at-the-enemy way, but the enemy civs just behave in really banana ways that replicate the appearance of following the rules, but really don’t. They build faster, earn more, and in some cases teleport to ensure they can oppose you. That’s not even accounting for the way the game can have technologically outmatched units win in combat against seemingly much more powerful things. Ever seen a phalanx with spears destroy a stealth bomber? The math says it can happen so the game lets it happen. There, the game is willinng to ‘play fair’ with its math.

That’s the funny thing about this game, to me. All these years later, as I play it, knowing the game now, the priorities of how to play have shifted. I could make it harder by avoiding this strategy, but I like playing this way. I like how silly it makes history. I like going to space with a civilisation that doesn’t know what a king, a pot, or a horse are. I like the distorted way it works and the mid-game challenge of making wonders quickly enough to not break the end game menu.

Basically, Civilisation wasn’t a game made that ever expected you to be good at it. In fact, Civilisation was a game with a lot of expectations and assumptions about what made the world work in the ways it did, and those historical assumptions are… a thing.

Look, this is not a new observation. Back in 2002, Matthew Kapell wrote in Popular Culture Review the article ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: American Monomythic Structure as historical Simulacrum.’ It’s a short article, not really a paper proper, but it’s a good analytical examination of the game and assumptions that are evident in the text, particularly as they relate to how you tell the story of history and whose history you’re telling.

Kapell talks about the idea of CIvilisation telling a fundamentally American style of history, and not just history but mythic history. In Civilisation 1, know where the game talks about slaves across all the cultures it represents? ‘Cos I don’t, and I’ve played the game a lot.

What Kappell describes in Civilisation that many have observed since is that the vision of games Meier poplated around this time was fundamentally a treatment of the world as a frontier. There is free land and resources waiting for the person to take best advantage of it, and you do so only in competition with other equal parties trying to do the same thing. It is a place for capitalism, free enterprise, and a spread of progress.

This vision of the world as frontier, and the civilisation as a simple relationship to resources and one another does a great job of feeling like it’s about history while skirting around all the murder and genocide. That’s why monomythic: This is the story of America that America tells itself. All history becomes part of this, all of the story is not about representing the world as a place for America to be but rather a world that looks the way America needs it to for it to be correct in how it views itself. The leader of America in Civilisation 1 is Abe Lincoln, not George Washington.

I don’t even necessarily want to talk about civilisations and identity in this though. The thing that stands out to me about this game is the fascinating ideology underpinning how it thinks governments are run and the weird moments of cynical realism it expresses in that.

In this game, you can run your country under a specific system – despotism, monarchy, republic, democracy, or, supposedly, communism. These all have special rules that change the way you relate to resources in your cities.

To unlock Communism, you need to research Communism, which you get to after Democracy and Philosophy. Communism then gives you the government system of Communism, which works identically to Monarchy, but with a special, unique perk: Your people can be oppressed with military presence in the city, and, corruption is omnipresent and equal in all cities.

This is a vision of communism that is not about Communism – the description even takes time out to explain that it hasn’t improved lives for workers – but is really talking about specifically, Stalinism – and like, Stalinism of maybe the 1950s, which had a shelf life of Not Long because Stalin himself didn’t exactly rack up a high score in getting through that decade.

Oh and once you have Communism, you can unlock Labor Unions. Labor Unions let you build a tank.

That’s it.

That’s all labor unions are for, in the idea of Civilisation 1.

But let’s roll back and look at that world that breaks the game.

I’m building as many places as I can for people to live in. When populations grow, I make a new place, and immediately connect it via infrastructure. I don’t build military units at all – unless a place is being attacked, military units are bad, and I don’t want them. If I do have them, I can’t use them to go on military adventurism, sending them out to go beat people up, because that makes the people who are supporting them unhappy: my people don’t support a military exploratory force.

I don’t make money. My tax rate is zero, because I want to work on science instead. Cities grow close together so when the population gets too big, they can’t process more of the land around them, and instead are limited to only about 4-5 squares around them and everyone else in the city takes on jobs of being entertainers, artists, or scientists. And I’m not building the buildings that demand more resources to maintain; people are left with their own goods, so they can use them in their own community. If people are mad about the government for more than one turn, that government collapses.

It’s very hard to argue that the ‘democracy’ outlined here is anything like the democracy the game was sold under. Can you imagine if being mad for a year resulted in an overhaul of everything? Can you imagine being able to impact the military operations in your country and indeed, discourage them? Can you imagine a society that only turns to expressions of force when someone else comes in and takes over a city, turning it into a temple-building military outpost? Can you imagine a place without police where people vote and throw parades and have a nice time? Can you imagine a community that doesn’t know what kings are?

The irony is that the optimal strategy of this frontier strategy is a peaceful anarchism that both does no harm and takes no shit.

No, it wasn’t intentional. But that doesn’t stop it from being funny.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Game Pile #Games

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willowwindss · 2 months ago

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100 Inventions by Women

LIFE-SAVING/MEDICAL/GLOBAL IMPACT:

Artificial Heart Valve – Nina Starr Braunwald

Stem Cell Isolation from Bone Marrow – Ann Tsukamoto

Chemotherapy Drug Research – Gertrude Elion

Antifungal Antibiotic (Nystatin) – Rachel Fuller Brown & Elizabeth Lee Hazen

Apgar Score (Newborn Health Assessment) – Virginia Apgar

Vaccination Distribution Logistics – Sara Josephine Baker

Hand-Held Laser Device for Cataracts – Patricia Bath

Portable Life-Saving Heart Monitor – Dr. Helen Brooke Taussig

Medical Mask Design – Ellen Ochoa

Dental Filling Techniques – Lucy Hobbs Taylor

Radiation Treatment Research – Cécile Vogt

Ultrasound Advancements – Denise Grey

Biodegradable Sanitary Pads – Arunachalam Muruganantham (with women-led testing teams)

First Computer Algorithm – Ada Lovelace

COBOL Programming Language – Grace Hopper

Computer Compiler – Grace Hopper

FORTRAN/FORUMAC Language Development – Jean E. Sammet

Caller ID and Call Waiting – Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – Marian Croak

Wireless Transmission Technology – Hedy Lamarr

Polaroid Camera Chemistry / Digital Projection Optics – Edith Clarke

Jet Propulsion Systems Work – Yvonne Brill

Infrared Astronomy Tech – Nancy Roman

Astronomical Data Archiving – Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Nuclear Physics Research Tools – Chien-Shiung Wu

Protein Folding Software – Eleanor Dodson

Global Network for Earthquake Detection – Inge Lehmann

Earthquake Resistant Structures – Edith Clarke

Water Distillation Device – Maria Telkes

Portable Water Filtration Devices – Theresa Dankovich

Solar Thermal Storage System – Maria Telkes

Solar-Powered House – Mária Telkes

Solar Cooker Advancements – Barbara Kerr

Microbiome Research – Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello

Marine Navigation System – Ida Hyde

Anti-Malarial Drug Work – Tu Youyou

Digital Payment Security Algorithms – Radia Perlman

Wireless Transmitters for Aviation – Harriet Quimby

Contributions to Touchscreen Tech – Dr. Annette V. Simmonds

Robotic Surgery Systems – Paula Hammond

Battery-Powered Baby Stroller – Ann Moore

Smart Textile Sensor Fabric – Leah Buechley

Voice-Activated Devices – Kimberly Bryant

Artificial Limb Enhancements – Aimee Mullins

Crash Test Dummies for Women – Astrid Linder

Shark Repellent – Julia Child

3D Illusionary Display Tech – Valerie Thomas

Biodegradable Plastics – Julia F. Carney

Ink Chemistry for Inkjet Printers – Margaret Wu

Computerised Telephone Switching – Erna Hoover

Word Processor Innovations – Evelyn Berezin

Braille Printer Software – Carol Shaw

⸻

HOUSEHOLD & SAFETY INNOVATIONS:

Home Security System – Marie Van Brittan Brown

Fire Escape – Anna Connelly

Life Raft – Maria Beasley

Windshield Wiper – Mary Anderson

Car Heater – Margaret Wilcox

Toilet Paper Holder – Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner

Foot-Pedal Trash Can – Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Retractable Dog Leash – Mary A. Delaney

Disposable Diaper Cover – Marion Donovan

Disposable Glove Design – Kathryn Croft

Ice Cream Maker – Nancy Johnson

Electric Refrigerator Improvements – Florence Parpart

Fold-Out Bed – Sarah E. Goode

Flat-Bottomed Paper Bag Machine – Margaret Knight

Square-Bottomed Paper Bag – Margaret Knight

Street-Cleaning Machine – Florence Parpart

Improved Ironing Board – Sarah Boone

Underwater Telescope – Sarah Mather

Clothes Wringer – Ellene Alice Bailey

Coffee Filter – Melitta Bentz

Scotchgard (Fabric Protector) – Patsy Sherman

Liquid Paper (Correction Fluid) – Bette Nesmith Graham

Leak-Proof Diapers – Valerie Hunter Gordon

FOOD/CONVENIENCE/CULTURAL IMPACT:

Chocolate Chip Cookie – Ruth Graves Wakefield

Monopoly (The Landlord’s Game) – Elizabeth Magie

Snugli Baby Carrier – Ann Moore

Barrel-Style Curling Iron – Theora Stephens

Natural Hair Product Line – Madame C.J. Walker

Virtual Reality Journalism – Nonny de la Peña

Digital Camera Sensor Contributions – Edith Clarke

Textile Color Processing – Beulah Henry

Ice Cream Freezer – Nancy Johnson

Spray-On Skin (ReCell) – Fiona Wood

Langmuir-Blodgett Film – Katharine Burr Blodgett

Fish & Marine Signal Flares – Martha Coston

Windshield Washer System – Charlotte Bridgwood

Smart Clothing / Sensor Integration – Leah Buechley

Fibre Optic Pressure Sensors – Mary Lou Jepsen

#women #inventions #technology #world #history #invented #creations #healthcare #home #education #science #feminism #feminist

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months ago

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Women pulling Lever on a Drilling Machine, 1978 Lee, Howl & Company Ltd., Tipton, Staffordshire, England photograph by Nick Hedges image credit: Nick Hedges Photography

* * * *

Tim Boudreau

About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.

Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?

I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.

Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.

A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?

It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.

There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).

Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.

They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.

We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).

It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.

Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.

Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.

Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.

They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.

We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?

The people involved in this have ZERO technical judgement.

#tech #software engineering #reality check #DOGE #computer madness #common sense #sanity #The gang that couldn't shoot straight #COBOL #Nick Hedges #machine world

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stevebattle · 4 months ago

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"Grace" Micro Nova Hopper (2025) by Intuitive Machines and NASA. The Micro Nova Hopper is a propulsive drone designed to 'hop' across the lunar surface, so who better to name it after than Grace Hopper, the pioneering computer scientist who helped to develop the COBOL programming language. The IM-2 Athena spacecraft carrying Grace landed in the south polar region of the Moon on March 6, 2025, but may have come to rest on its side just like the ill-fated IM-1. If it can be deployed from the Athena lander, Grace is planned to perform a series of five hops, each one getting progressively higher, and traveling up to 2km from the landing site. The first hop would ascend to a height of 20 metres, the second to 50 metres, and the third would reach a maximum height of 100 metres. The plan is to hop into a permanently shadowed crater and then hop back out.

#cybernetics #robot #2025 #Intuitive Machines #hopper #lunar rover

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misfitwashere · 3 months ago

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March 28, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 29 READ IN APP

“Another wipeout walloped Wall Street Friday,” Stan Choe of the Associated Press wrote today. The S&P 500 had one of its worst days in two years, dropping 2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 715 points, losing 1.7% of its value. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.7%. On Tuesday, news dropped that the administration’s blanket firings and wildly shifting tariff policies have dropped consumer confidence to a low it has not hit since January 2021. Today’s stock market tumble started after the Commerce Department released data showing that consumer prices are rising faster than economists expected.

AIG chief international economist James Knightley said: “We are moving in the wrong direction and the concern is that tariffs threaten higher prices, which means the inflation prints are going to remain hot.” Business leaders like lower interest rates, which reduce borrowing costs and make it cheaper to finance business initiatives, but with rising inflation, the Federal Reserve will be less likely to cut interest rates.

Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change.

Experts have expressed concern. Dan Hon, who runs a technology strategy company that helps the government modernize its services, told Kelly: “If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead.” More than 65 million Americans currently receive Social Security benefits. Today Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) recorded himself calling the SSA and being told by a recording that the wait times were more than two hours and that he should call back. And then the system hung up on him.

Musk told the Fox News Channel today that he plans to step down from DOGE in May, apparently at the end of the 130-day cap for the “special government employee” designation that enables him to avoid financial disclosures. In February, White House staffers suggested Musk would stay despite the limit.

Today the State Department told Congress it is shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) altogether by July 1. Whatever agency functions the administration approves will move into the State Department. Founded by President John F. Kennedy and enjoying bipartisan support, USAID administers programs for global health, disaster relief, long-term economic development, education, environmental protection, and democracy. It is widely perceived to be a key element of U.S. “soft power.”

USAID was created by Congress, and its funds are appropriated by Congress. Congress and the courts have established that the executive branch—the branch of government overseen by the president—cannot kill an agency Congress has created and cannot withhold appropriations Congress has made. The authors of Project 2025 want to challenge that principle and consolidate government power in the hands of the president. It appears they have chosen USAID as the test case.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shatters science and health agencies, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired. Dan Diamond of the Washington Post noted that Marks has been at the Food and Drug Administration since 2012 and has been at the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research since 2016.

In his resignation letter, Diamond says, Marks expressed his deep concern over the ongoing measles outbreak in the Southwest—now more than 450 cases—and warned that the outbreak “reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined.” Marks said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

On Tuesday, news broke that Kennedy has tapped anti-vaccine activist David Geier to lead a study looking to link autism to vaccines, although that alleged link has been heavily studied and thoroughly debunked. Infectious disease journalist Helen Branswell notes that Geier does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license.

British investigative journalist Brian Deer, who has written about the hoax that vaccines cause autism, told Branswell: “If you want an independent source,… [you] wouldn’t go to somebody with no qualifications and a long track record of impropriety and incompetence.” But, he said, “[i]f you wanted to get in anybody off the street who would come up with the result that Kennedy would like to see, this would be your man.”

Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported today that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has done some targeted staffing, too. His younger brother Phil Hegseth is traveling to the Indo-Pacific with the secretary in his role at the Pentagon as a liaison and senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security. Hegseth also employed his brother when he ran the nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America, where the younger Hegseth’s salary was $108,000 for his media work. Copp notes that a 1967 law “prohibits government officials from hiring, promoting or recommending relatives to any civilian position over which they exercise control.”

Hegseth and his colleagues are still in the hot seat for uploading the military’s attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen to Signal, an unsecure commercially available messaging app. Yesterday, Nancy A. Youssef, Alexander Ward, and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal reported that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz identified a Houthi missile expert whose identity Israel had provided from a human source in Yemen, angering Israeli officials.

Americans, especially those with ties to the military, aren’t happy either. Military, the leading news website for service members, veterans, and their families, titled a story about the scandal “��Different spanks for different ranks’: Hegseth’s Signal scandal would put regular troops in the brig.” Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the story had “angered and bewildered” fighter pilots, who say “they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.”

At a raucous town hall held today by Republican representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN), the crowd booed Spartz loudly when she said she would not call for the resignations of Waltz, Hegseth, and the rest of the people on the group chat.

All the mayhem created by the administration has created enough backlash that the White House appears concerned about upcoming special elections on April 1. One is for the seat in Florida’s District 6 that Waltz vacated when he became national security advisor. In 2024, Trump won that district by 30 points, and Republicans considered their candidate, state senator Randy Fine, whom Trump has strongly endorsed, to be such a shoo-in that he barely campaigned. His website features pictures of him with Trump but has only bullet points to explain his stand on issues.

Democrat Josh Weil, a middle-school math teacher who has outraised Fine by almost 10 to one, is polling within the margin of error for a victory in a contest where even a 10- to 15-point loss would show a dramatic collapse in Republican support. Weil has tied Fine to Musk’s unpopular DOGE and to the president, as well as to cuts to Social Security and Medicaid.

Trump is now personally campaigning for Fine and for the Republican candidate to fill the seat vacated by former representative Matt Gaetz in Florida District 1. There, Democratic candidate Gay Valimont is running against Republican Jimmy Patronis in a district that elected Trump with about 68% of the vote. Like Fine, Patronis is strongly backed by Trump and wants more cuts to the federal government; Gay is a former state leader for Moms Demand Action and focuses on healthcare and veterans’ services. She has criticized DOGE’s cuts to VA hospitals. Like Weil, she has significantly outraised her opponent.

Republicans are concerned enough about holding the seats that billionaire Elon Musk, who poured more than $291 million into the 2024 election to help Republicans, has begun to contribute to Republicans in Florida. On Tuesday he spent more than $10,000 apiece for texting services for the Florida candidates.

Musk has contributed far more than that—more than $20 million—to the April 1 election for a ten-year seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Trump loyalist Brad Schimel is running against circuit court judge Susan Crawford in a contest that has national significance. Wisconsin is evenly split between the parties, but when Republicans control the legislature and the supreme court, they suppress voting and heavily gerrymander the state in their favor. When liberals hold the majority on the court, they ease election rules and uphold fair maps. Currently, the state gerrymander gives Republicans 75% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives although voting in 2024 was virtually dead even. The makeup of the court could well determine the congressional districts of Wisconsin through 2041, through the redistricting that will take place after the 2030 census.

Musk has told voters that if Crawford wins, “then the Democrats will attempt to redraw the districts and cause Wisconsin to lose two Republican seats.” Not only has Musk said he is going to Wisconsin to speak before the election, but also he is handing out checks to voters who sign a petition against “activist judges,” a suggestion that it would not be fair to unskew the Republican gerrymander. Last night, Musk advertised a contest that would award two voters a million dollars each, with the condition that the winners had to have already voted.

This morning, Wisconsin Democrats issued a press release noting that Musk had “committed a blatant felony,” directly violating the Wisconsin law that prohibits offering anyone anything worth more than $1 to get them to “vote or refrain from voting.” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said that if Schimel “does not immediately call on Musk to end this criminal activity, we can only assume he is complicit.”

Musk deleted the tweet and then, eliminating the language that said people had to have voted, posted that he would give the checks to spokespeople for his petition. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul sued to stop Musk “from any further promotion of the million-dollar gifts” and “from making any payments to Wisconsin electors to vote.” “The Wisconsin Department of Justice is committed to ensuring that elections in Wisconsin are safe, secure, free, and fair,” Kaul said in a statement. “We are aware of the offer recently posted by Elon Musk to award a million dollars to two people at an event in Wisconsin this weekend. Based on our understanding of applicable Wisconsin law, we intend to take legal action today to seek a court order to stop this from happening.”

MeidasTouch reposted Musk’s offer to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote” and noted: “No matter what side of the aisle you are on, you should be appalled that a billionaire thinks he has the right to buy elections like this.” Former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party David Pepper posted: “Have some pride, America. We are so much better than this guy thinks we are.”

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#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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nixcraft · 3 months ago

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The Union of Software Developers

Alright, alright, settle down everyone! So, the software developers are trying to unionize, right? But first, they're stuck in this endless meeting.

"Okay, so for our official documents, are we going with Python?"

"Python? Are you kidding? It's dynamically typed! We need the rigor of Java!"

"Java? That's so verbose! We should use Rust, for its memory safety!"

"Rust? What about the learning curve? Let's keep it simple with JavaScript!"

"JavaScript? That's... well, JavaScript. We need something functional, like Haskell!"

"Haskell? You want to write a union contract in a purely functional language? Good luck with that! How about C++?"

"C++? Are you trying to make this negotiation take longer?"

A lone voice from the back: "Anyone considered... COBOL?"

The room erupts in chaos.

"Okay, okay, how about we just write it in pseudocode?"

Another voice: "But... which pseudocode standard?"

#sysadmin #programmers humor #devlife #devops #IT #shitpost #programming

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sunnylovescats · 8 months ago

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Since men are so ready to take away women’s right to vote and say we’re sooo uneducated and need to know our places, please, have these inventions and scientific discoveries that were credited to men instead 🥰

Hedy Lamarr: Wireless communication. Hollywood actor Hedy Lamarr should actually be the person credited with the invention of wireless communication. During the second World War, Hedy worked closely with George Antheil to develop the idea of "frequency hopping," which would have prevented the bugging of military radios. Unfortunately, the U.S. Navy ignored her patent —and later used her findings to develop new technologies. Years later, her patent was re-discovered by a researcher, which led to Lamarr receiving the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award shortly before her death in 2000.

Alice Ball: Cure for leprosy. Alice Ball was a young chemist at Kalihi Hospital in Hawaii who focused on Hansen's disease, a.k.a. leprosy. Her research sought to find a cure for the disease by figuring out how to inject chaulmoogra oil directly into the bloodstream. Topical treatments worked, but had side effects patients weren't interested in. Sadly, Ball became sick and returned home, where she died in 1916. Arthur Dean took over her study, and Ball became a memory—until a medical journey now referred to the "Ball Method." Her method was used for over two decades all over the world to cure the disease.

Elizabeth Magie Philips: Monopoly. The invention of everyone's favorite board game has been credited to Charles Darrow, who sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935. But it was Elizabeth Magie Phillips who came up with the original inspiration, The Landlord's Game, in 1903. Ironically, she designed the game to protest against monopolists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Marion Donovan: Disposable diapers. In the '40s, new mothers had very few options for diapers. There was cloth...and that was pretty much it. The daughter of an inventor, Marion's first patent was actually for a diaper cover. She later added buttons, eliminating the need for safety pins. Her original disposable diaper was made with shower curtains, with her final one made from nylon parachute cloth. This new method helped keep children and clothes cleaner and dryer, not to mention helping with rashes. But, of course, diaper companies at first ignored her patent.

Vera Rubin: Dark matter. Rubin is the astrophysicist who confirmed the existence of dark matter in the atmosphere. She worked with astronomer Kent Ford in the '60s and '70s, when they discovered the reasoning behind stars' movement outside of the galaxy. She's dubbed a "national treasure" but remains without a Nobel Peace Prize.

Margaret Knight: Square-bottomed paper bags. In 1868, Knight invented a machine that folded and formed flat, square-bottomed brown paper bags. She built a wooden model of the device, but couldn't apply for a patent until she made an iron model. While the model was being developed in the shop, a man named Charles Annan stole the idea and patented it. Though he received credit for it, Knight filed a lawsuit and finally won the rights to it in 1871.

Dr. Grace Hopper: Computer Programming Language. Hopper created the first computer language compiler tools to program the Harvard Mark I computer—IBM's computer that was often used for World War II efforts. Though it's noted in history that John von Neumann initiated the computer's first program, Hopper is the one who invented the codes to program it. One of the programming languages she pioneered, COBOL, is widely used today.

Ada Harris: Hair straightener. Marcel Grateau is often credited for the invention of the hair straightener, but it was Harris who first claimed the patent for it in 1893. (Grateau made his claim to fame with the curling iron around 1852, and we certainly know there's a difference.)

Esther Lederburg: Microbial Genetics. Lederberg played a large part in determining how genes are regulated, along with the process of making RNA from DNA. She often collaborated with her husband Joshua Lederberg on their work on microbial genetics, but it was Esther who discovered lambda phage—a virus that infects E. coli bacteria. Despite their collaboration, her husband claimed the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries on how bacteria mate.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Pulsars. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered irregular radio pulses while working as a research assistant at Cambridge. After showing the discovery of the pulses to her advisor, the team worked together to uncover what they truly were: Neuron stars, AKA pulsars. Burnell received zero credit for her discovery—instead, her advisor Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974.

Chien-Shiung Wu: Nuclear Physics. Often compared to Marie Curie, Chien-Shiung Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she developed the process for separating uranium metal. In 1956, she conducted the Wu experiment that focused on electromagnetic interactions. After it yielded surprising results, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, the physicists who originated a similar theory in the field, received credit for her work, winning the Nobel Prize for the experiment in 1957.

Ada Lovelace: Computer algorithm. In the mid-1800s, Ada Lovelace wrote the instructions for the first computer program. But mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage is often credited with the work because he invented the actual engine.

Rosalind Franklin: DNA Double Helix. Franklin's X-ray photographs of DNA revealed the molecule's true structure as a double helix, which was a theory denounced by scientists James Watson and Francis Crick at the time. However, since Watson and Crick originally discovered the (single) helix, they ended up receiving a Nobel Prize for their research.

The ENIAC Programmers: First electronic computer. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first computer ever built. In 1946, six women programmed this electronic computer as part of a secret World War II project. Inventor John Mauchly is often the only one who gets credit for its creation, but the programmers are the ones who fully developed the machine.

Lise Meitner: Nuclear Fission. Discovered the true power of uranium, noting that atomic nuclei split during some reactions. The discovery was credited to her lab partner Otto Han, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944

Katherine Johnson: Moon landing. She l discovered the exact path for the Freedom 7 spacecraft to successfully enter space for the first time in 1961 and later for the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in 1969. She often went unrecognized by her male colleagues and faced racial discrimination.

Mary Anderson: Windowshield wipers. Anderson first came up with the idea of windshield wipers while riding in a streetcar in the snow. She tried selling her device to companies after receiving the patent for it in 1903, but all of them rejected her invention. It wasn't until the '50s and '60s when faster automobiles were invented that companies took to the idea. By then, Anderson's patent had expired, and later, inventor Robert Kearns was credited with the idea.

Nettie Stevens: Sex chromosomes. Stevens discovered the connection between chromosomes and sex determination. Despite Stevens' breakthrough, her colleague and mentor E.B. Wilson published his papers before her and is often noted for the discovery.

Caresse Crosby: The modern bra. Caresse Crosby, who developed the modern bra. She was the first to acquire the patent for the modern bra, AKA a "Backless Brassiere," yet is often left in the shadows because she sold her patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company.

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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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Elon Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” rife with fraud, waste, and abuse. President Donald Trump argued in his State of the Union address that there are millions of people over the age of 100 who are fraudulently on the Social Security rolls, with some receiving government benefits. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers are calling Social Security Administration workers inefficient and threatening to make major reductions in its workforce based on that argument.

The problem with these arguments is none of them are true and represent only the latest in high-level disinformation directed at federal programs. As Elaine Kamarck and I argue in our recent book “Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation,” disinformation has become rampant in many different areas and threatens public understanding of policy issues. False data claims undermine trust in government and weaken confidence in the effectiveness of public programs.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme; it is a government program into which people pay while they are working and later retrieve benefits after they reach retirement age. It is a public fund financed by payroll taxes paid both by businesses and employees that funds around 59.6 million people. While the Social Security Trust Fund faces financial shortfalls, increasing the taxable income cap beyond its current $168,600 limit could significantly extend the program’s solvency.

According to Social Security Administration data, about 89,000 people over the age of 100 receive benefits, and nearly all are legitimate recipients. The agency, along with the General Accounting Office, routinely audits beneficiaries to detect fraud and has found no evidence supporting Trump’s claim of millions of dead or fraudulent beneficiaries. Indeed, Wired Magazine reported on February 17 that computer programmers pointed out how the list of extremely old people on the Social Security rolls is the result of “…a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.”

DOGE investigators suggest Social Security staff are inefficient and wasteful, independent analyses showing the agency is among the most cost-effective in processing claims. For example, Professor Pamela Herd of the University of Michigan notes that the agency’s administrative costs have declined “from 2.2% in 1957 to just 0.5% today”, making it one of the federal government’s most efficient agencies.

These attacks are not isolated, as other agencies have also been targeted by false narratives. Shortly before its budget and personnel were massively slashed, Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development a “criminal organization” without evidence to support that claim. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was dismantled on the grounds that it harms corporations and no longer protects consumers, while the Department of Education faces substantial cutbacks with critics arguing it does little to advance public education.

The harsh and often inaccurate rhetoric surrounding federal agencies represents a way to delegitimize government and justify deep cuts in agency operations and staffing. If government enterprises are seen as criminal, unlawful, or engaging in fraudulent actions, it becomes easy to justify draconian measures that dismantle those agencies—highlighting the powerful consequences words have on shaping beliefs and actions related to government functions.

The disinformation risks for Social Security are particularly worrisome. As its former commissioner, Martin O’Malley has argued that inaccurate claims about waste and abuse could lead to wholesale employee layoffs and harm the efficiency of agency operations. That may happen soon. Without persuasive evidence, Musk has claimed in a Fox Business News interview that there is over $500 billion in wasteful spending at the Social Security Administration, and the entitlement program could be reduced without any harm to beneficiaries.

That is not likely to be the case because a shrunken agency with fewer workers will likely suffer problems in claims processing and beneficiary payouts. Without experts who understand its IT systems and payout processes, there could be interruptions in services or difficulties for people filing claims who no longer are able to go to local offices to check on their eligibility.

Right now, Social Security is one of America’s most popular government programs. Eighty percent of Americans in a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation survey held favorable views about Social Security. Around 40% of seniors rely on it as their sole source of income. For Americans who live in three-generational families, cuts or delays in Social Security payments to seniors could impact their children’s ability to support their grandchildren. Social Security is a government success story that serves both taxpayers and beneficiaries quite well. The spread of disinformation about Social Security threatens not only the program’s future but also the sustainability of numerous other government initiatives.

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osakanone · 4 months ago

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Tech workers in 2028, when RFK tries to take away HRT, SSRIs, ADHD, Ozempic, etc:

The fragility in tech created by move-fast-break-stuff is gonna be how we get any leverage when the political fireworks really start going off.

Big Tech can't "fix" this or make it go away: its baked into the culture.

Change would demand changing the culture, and it would neccesitate due-dilligence, review, transparency and understanding none of which are profitable or concealable.

All it takes is one COBOL boomer to retire, or one person to change a few lines of code.

The bottleneck is not workforce capacity: Its contextural vacuum and code discovery.

We've got them by the balls, whether they realize it or not.

#Tech #Technocrats #Tech workers #History #Hoooo boy #politics

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erik-even-wordier · 3 months ago

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About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code

Posted to Facebook by Tim Boudreau on March 30, 2025.

About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.

It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.

Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.

The people involved in this have ZERO technical judgement.

#shared from facebook #social security administration #doge

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