By that measure shouldn’t Disney be considered a Tech company too? Or I guess banks and insurance companies.

Yeah, in the same way that every company that uses a phone is a phone company.

The age of consent in many developed countries is 16.

consent is often a factor in the severity of the penalty

If there’s no consent, it’s sexual assault at a minimum and more likely rape.

Teenagers fucking is without consent. Their brains, on the average, are not capable of making that level of decision.

What an absolute crock.

That’s the theory behind the law, OK, but the notion that someone is incapable of consent the day before their 18th birthday, but fully capable the following day, is manifestly stupid. I’ve raised three kids to adulthood. All of them had sexual relations before they were 18 and there’s nothing wrong with any of them. Don’t let religious nuts and the pathologically undersexed make your laws, it won’t work out.

Pretty solid way to identify the right person.

And that’s why entrapment is a legally sanctioned investigation strategy for law enforcement.

Oh, wait, it isn’t, because of all the abuses that resulted from its use.

When he suggested PayPal convert its data centers from Linux to Microsoft Server, I knew he was a wrong’un. That was one of the reasons he got booted out of PayPal, by the way. Even the other bullshitter tech bros knew how stupid that idea was.

I also know a 93-year-old lady who has loudly talked about taking a few of the bastards with her. The sentiment may be more widespread than we think.

Suicide bombers on mobility scooters. Be very afraid.

They’ll have backups. And those backups and associated restore processes would never have been properly tested.

I’ve come to places where that happened and there were very few remaining IT ops people after the mass firing that followed.

I’d be fine with the Musk in prison part. Launching him into the sun in one of his own rockets would be cooler, though.

I know how to code, how to manage programs, how to architect huge safety-critical systems, and quite a few other things, and I know that you are right. I’d give it 5 to 7 years if it were adequately resourced, there was political commitment, and the stakeholders could be made to agree a set of requirements, then not change them unless there’s a really convincing reason (conflicts with other requirements, impossible to implement, breaks everything, etc).

And the validation and verification of such a system could itself take a year or more, if it’s well-planned and correctly executed.

Java can be fast at runtime, but optimization is most effective on frequently-run, repetitive sections of code.

The slow Java interpreter spin-up time was a big annoyance for use of Java in serverless cloud functions. Now the big cloud providers have ways to minimize that spin-up delay.

Well, the other thing about COBOL is that most people would regard it as a living death to have to deal with it as a day job.

And I’ve had interactions with offshore COBOL shops. The ones I worked with were not at all good. You’ll never get 99th-percentile coders to work in that language, unless their only motivation is money.

COBOL code, like any code, was written to embody certain business processes, and also to work around the quirks and blind spots of COBOL. And the people who understood those business processes are likely to be dead by now, and any documentation they wrote might be current and correct, or it might not. And very few people under the age of 60 have ever used COBOL in anger. So any legacy replacement project is going to have to encompass a big reverse-engineering effort, including analysis of a code base nobody is familiar with.

I’m old. A friend of mine is a fair bit older, getting into his late 70s. He knows COBOL but his main area of expertise is OS services, database tuning and assembler on old IBM and Fujitsu iron. Those are critical to keeping those old systems running well. He works half-time, is booked over a year out, and has a jaw-dropping daily rate. He also has a rider: one provision is that they have to tell him where he can smoke on-site, and if the answer is “nowhere,” the deal is off. Also, he won’t schedule any work that conficts with Burning Man, and he looks like a homeless guy. I brought him in on a consulting gig once. He did his bit, including an amazingly effective presentation to the C-levels (despite his profoundly non-executive appearance), and went his merry way. Saved us a fortune. You need people like that in order to have even a remote chance of success, and they’re becoming exceedingly rare. Musk and his kiddies don’t even know what they don’t know.

Yeah, Java can run maybe half as fast as equivalently complex C, while being far more maintainable. But to see that kind of performance, you’ll want to use POJOs (plain old Java objects), not that enterprise bullshit. And there are many other optimization techniques that your average Java coder wouldn’t see in their average coding job. I’ve been there, didn’t like it. If I’m going to be dropping down to C for the hot spots, I’d rather use Python.

All that to say it doesn’t matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.

Schedule-driven development by people with no domain knowledge, with poorly understood requirements and life-and-limb-critical outcomes, led by an unpredictable moron. What could go wrong?

I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster

They’re neither necessarily simpler nor faster.

COBOL is simple, but outside its sweet spot, it can’t do much. That sweet spot is high volumes of relatively trivial calculations, coded by non-superstar coders. It’s moderately efficient because it doesn’t do all that much.

Of the oldest languages still in use, FORTRAN has gone through a few generations of incremental improvements, and for complex mathematical calculations, it can be faster than shit off a hot shovel. But again, it’s limited in scope, its data typing is lousy, its general-purpose programming capabilities are poor, and any integration you do with other systems is going to be a vision of hell. I still deal with a FORTRAN codebase on my job, there are some situations where it’s still one of the least-bad options.

Then, the last of the surviving languages of that vintage is Lisp. It can be insanely fast, but despite its simple syntax and semantics, nobody would call Lisp programming simple. Accounting-system coders would recoil in horror.

I’d think they’d put the commits onto the blockchain.

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Rust is not a language I’d use for financial apps, but it’s not a bad language. So I doubt that they’d use it. Musk is of a generation where he’d probably tell them to use PHP. Or if he listens to the twenty-something bros around him, maybe it’d be Dart, which is another decent language that’s not well suited to the problem domain.

Yeah, I’ve cleaned up the messes that idiots like that have left.