Notices by Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 (riotnrrd@mastodon.social)

This idea of using #AI to translate #COBOL code into #Java has one big problem.

The goal is reasonable: ancient COBOL code is effectively a black box, hard to modify or extend and even harder to debug.

But who is validating the Java output? A big part of the problem is how difficult it is to understand the business logic that the COBOL was implementing — but all that analysis work is still required to evaluate the correctness of the Java, plus Java debugging!

https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/22/ibm-taps-ai-to-translate-cobol-code-to-java/

@Marty Oh, I did not mean to denigrate COBOL! While I have never written any, I know enough to understand at least the high points of why it’s still around. It’s the conversion by LLM that is the problem. If I’m the owner of a business process, and I’m presented with a bunch of Java code extruded by an LLM, I have no way of validating that output, whether against the original COBOL or against my actual requirements. At least if it’s written by humans, we can talk through it.

@jwz @dangillmor Absolutely true, and that is I think one reason behind today’s announcement by the Guardian that they are (finally) leaving Twitter. The other big factor is of course that with the way that Twitter suppresses links, it no longer gives any boost to reach, so why would a news org bother?

@jwz @dangillmor I didn’t use the official iframe; my then-host had a custom Markdown embed. It still sends some tracking info (see e.g. here from my old site pre-migration https://findthethread.postach.io/post/twitter-of-babel) but on the other hand I miss that it made it easier to embed replies. That’s what I meant beyond simply linking and quoting. Sometimes the tweet/toot on its own doesn’t give full context.

@jwz @dangillmor That is one of the things that I miss about Old Twitter: it was sort of a universal comment section for the Web, and the conversation moved fairly seamlessly back and forth: news article prompted tweet thread, reply prompted in-depth blog post, post was shared and discussed in further threads, and so on. The universality is the big thing that I miss.

@jwz @dangillmor I did embed Twitter posts in some old posts on my blog (and went through and replaced them all with screenshots a while back), but that was usually because one particular tweet or thread prompted more than a tweet’s worth of reply.
Still doing that *now*, though? Oof. That’s a choice.
I have wondered vaguely about embedding toots, but haven’t had the need yet.

@jwz There is always a @GreatDismal quote: “her life has left virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba's system, the nearest thing to innocence.”

The #ClimateChange stripes of #Milan, #Italy.

Find your area's stripes at https://ShowYourStripes.info!

#ShowYourStripes #ShowYourStripesDay @ed_hawkins

@Gargron There is also a free developer account. I want just enough of a hurdle that my parents or kids can’t be tricked into installing something nefarious.

And on the latter point, I disagree: especially past the one million user threshold, I think it’s reasonable for Apple to require payment. It may not be how you would like them to monetise their platform, but it’s how they have built their business. As a user, I like how this discourages abusive “freemium” business models.

@Gargron Yeah, as I said down-thread, a developer mode that allowed sideloading would work for me. The concern would be that if Apple made it too easy, the mechanism would be abused by Meta/Google/Epic/etc to inject their abusive apps. I’d rather err on the side of that protection, even if philosophically I agree with you.

I see this sort of argument from developers a lot, but they need to understand users’ perspective. One of the things we like about iOS is the increased trust we have that apps won’t do bad things. This trust is also good for developers because users are willing to try out apps much more freely. The alternative is to go back to the bad old days of Windows, where it was best practice just to blow the OS away every 6 months to get rid of accumulated cruft.

From: @Gargron
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111824854511299605

@ryanhoulihan I don’t like either football or TikTok, but that’s a me thing. When I was younger I did build (part of) my identity around not liking “sportsball” or whatever. These days I like to think I have grown up a bit and am happy other people have a hobby that brings them joy.
All this newfound equanimity goes right out the window though if people watch football matches or TikToks beside me using their phone speakers on loud!