I recall a coworker being excited several years ago about catching someone lying about their linux experience before their interview. If what they said was true, they'd have to have been working on it during it's first year.
He was then excited after the interview because the individual had been working at transmeta with Linus, and his resume was accurate. He didn't end up working with us, but I wasn't privy to any additional information.
It's still there at the accounting/backend level. Automated Financial Systems Level 3 and it's replacement Vision are commercial loan systems.
LVL3 is pure cobol. It has been recently deprecated but there are many banks who own the code and are still self hosting it, along with it's IBM green screen support.
Vision is a java front end in front of an updated cobol backend. When your reputation is based on your reliability and long term code stability, at what point do you risk making the conversion, versus training new developers to work on your system.
No, we are not afraid of our own systems. The idea that there is some fabled computer system which everyone is too scared to touch doesn’t exist (I work in payment processing). There are levels of controls way outside these systems which provide these safety nets (e.g settlement / reconciliation controls).
If the cobol is still there, it’s not due to risk. If anything, the cobol is a much higher operational risk than replacing it.
Analogously, GDSes like SABRE still ran on mainframes until very recently (c. 2023) [0]. SABRE was written in some combination of assembly and some kind of in-house dialect of PL/I, if I recall.
Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the result is not actually important. We may be discovering many people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of garbage Quora posts.
My understanding is the most deadly/destructive parts of hurricanes are usually:
1. the storm surge, the potential wall of water brought by the continuous winds and waves near the shore, followed by
2. the flooding from heavy rains, then
3. followed by the wind.
So your example might also be hitting the same issue you're trying to avoid.
Note, the worst storm surge is from the eye towards the side where the winds are blowing in the direction of the shore. That's only part of the area with the peak winds.
Good points. Where I am at it’s mostly the wind because I am a well drained higher elevation, so I’m sure that coloured my perception. But you are right, the storm surge and flooding also do a great deal of damage.
Granted, a journey to a new location would make this accurate.
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