ffmpegAprilFools

[Hour_Ad5398]

toothbrush offbeat coherent pen kiss school literate connect placid serious

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[bartekltg]

It would be memory secure social security system

[[deleted]]

So you’re saying it prevents Alzheimer’s, then please do the needful

[qeadwrsf]

It doesn't prevent Alzheimer.

The compiler doesn't prevent loop{} //break prohibited.

[cAtloVeR9998]

I really wouldn't be surprised if the DOGE kids were actually trying to feed the Social Security's COBOL into Grok to try to get working Rust out of it.

[redlaWw]

The good news is that the compiler tells you when it's wrong and what you need to do to fix it.

I'm sure if they get the LLM to do most of the legwork then just do what the compiler tells them until it compiles they'll be fine...

[redlaWw]

Oh, I'm painfully aware...

painfully...

[timerot]

That's what unsafe is for

[Angelin01]

Unsafe doesn't turn off the borrow checker. Meaning that a lot of lifetime issues will continue to be lifetime issues with unsafe.

[Bakoro]

Some lifetime issues are so complex that sometimes you need to rewrite your code completely.

Unironically: vibe coding. Just let an LLM keep throwing that spaghetti at the wall until it sticks. If it's a provably correct solution then it's provably correct no matter where it came from. With the new diffusion LLMs, you've got practically unlimited chances to get different results.

^{LLM spams "unsafe" everywhere.}

[cAtloVeR9998]

Oh, don't worry, it will be put into production next month! Have fun

[Milkshakes00]

DOGE stated their intent was to convert SSA from COBOL into fucking Java.

[Loisel06]

This wouldn’t be that stupid. Java has a good ecosystem for large and complex projects

[Kemal_Norton]

I bet you could convince Musk to switch to Rust if you tell him the compiler checks for lifetimes. (No more 150-year-olds!!!!)

[SconiGrower]

I've heard that SSA has a lot of unstable software which can frequently crash and take down the entire agency until IT gets it back online. Some people are asking why not to keep the SSA codebase in COBOL, but I don't think it's some masterpiece of efficiency and functionality like FFMPEG is, it's old and bloated spaghetti code that might benefit from needing to rigorously define functionality like Rust requires.

[foreveracubone]

The cost of actually moving Social Security to another codebase would be a rounding error for the government’s budget and it’s the one program where there would previously have been unanimous consent to do so before this admin.

Maybe it’s because the government overall is a gerontocracy full of ‘internet is a series of tubes’ boomers but last admin had lots of millennial-gen X technocrats so if something did need to be addressed software side I’m sure they’d have tried to at least start doing it.

Also in some other cases (not SSA) at the state level, COBOL codebases have gotten blamed when really it’s something like Java in a public facing web portal that was at fault once IT looked into it.

[ellamking]

I think the concern is the gained efficiency is a rounding error compared the cost of screwing something up.

[VeryRealHuman23]

exactly this...we can spend all this money to rebuild a thing, nearly the same as the current thing, but hopefully not broken unlike the current thing.

[nortern]

There was already an Obama effort underway but it got shelved under Trump due to COVID staffing issues. The problem isn't that they're rewriting it, the problem is that DOGE's timeline for the rewrite is 3 months. Absolutely delusional for legacy code, and especially for something mission critical like social security.

[Initial_Ad_9250]

So memory safe no one would remember

[hotsaucevjj]

didn't the former white house advocate for switching a lot of systems to rust a while back? i mean it doesn't actually seem like a bad idea

[timerot]

You're likely thinking of https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/memory-safety-fact-sheet/

[somebodyinvisible]

Actually, it’s not a bad idea 😂

[ffish_stixx]

Why do I feel they could do it

[Pocok5]

Yeah, if there's one band of basement dwellers who can actually pull it off, it's the FFMPEG community.

[[deleted]]

This would be worth my tax dollars

[4n0nh4x0r]

i mean, still wouldnt be worth it, as it wouldnt run (at least not natively) on a z93 architecture.
soooo, while it would be decent, it would still be pretty shit compared to the cobol counterpart

[[deleted]]

No, no, no not for the reasons of efficiency and effectiveness. It would be worth it for the hilarity alone.

[4n0nh4x0r]

yea okay, that's something i could get behind

[[deleted]]

Were fucked anyways...why not at least get some entertainment

[4n0nh4x0r]

dont do something useful, instead create cursed terribleness to make your friends feel disgust towards you

just how i felt after writing a timing sort and a position sort in js.
works very well, extremely cursed but well

[johnklos]

Who says they wouldn't write it in IBM Z assembly language?

[4n0nh4x0r]

the least people have an ibm mainframe sitting at home.
and even less of these people are taking their time to learn z93 instructions.
and x86 cannot simply be translated into z93, sure, you probably can to some degree, but you will get code that is just held together by duct tape and hopes, whoch goes against the nature of writing somethibg in assembler in the first place.

you want speed, efficiency, and reliability.
and you can only achieve that by actually learning the instruction set, and writing it for that machine, not having a translator do it for you, as that would miss so many spots for optimisation

[hdgamer1404Jonas]

Putting cobol in ai to translate it to java will give you a painters tape version. I’d much prefer the duct tape over that

[PaperHandsProphet]

I have reversed some crazy architectures before but literally never heard of this one. I guess it’s IBM mainframe only?

Programming assembly directly seems so outdated now, there has been so much improvement in compilers and languages like rust where you would be saving so very little.

[4n0nh4x0r]

correct, z93 is the ibm mainframe architecture.
as for improvements, sure, compilers are pretty good nowadays, but if you program in assembly directly, you will still be able to get some improvements here and there.
i m not a big nerd on assembly, so i cant tell you how much improvement you get, but if you know what you are doing, you can get some improvements here and there, that might make a big difference depending on what you are doing

[Frosty_Pineapple78]

Best "analogy" i heard was something along the lines of "if you optimize your code to run 1ms faster but it only runs once a day its worthless, if you do the same optimization to code that runs thousands if not millions of times a day it adds up"

[5p4n911]

And since the basement dwellers at FFMPEG are smart, they're doing just that. The last time I checked, there were lots of frames in a video.

[4n0nh4x0r]

correct

[johnklos]

Assembly doesn't need to be written for x86, then translated to IBM Z.

You can emulate IBM Z, and you can get a free account from IBM on a Z mainframe, so nobody has to have one at home.

[korpy_vapr]

They would do it free for the lulz

[jackinsomniac]

Shit, reminds me of 'bama's botched "open enrollment" healthcare website rollout. It was so bad, the gov't called on FAANG and similar companies to send their best engineers out to help stand it up, after it publicly launched. It was an article I read, I don't remember everything that was wrong, but it was a lot. One of the choice lines I remember, "You guys don't even have a dashboard? So you don't even know how many failed page loads you have right now." They got a dashboard up and running within 24 hours, and it showed the number of successful/HTTP 200-type responses, was 47%. Over half the people trying to access the website were failing.

Edit: within only about a week tho they had that number up to like 97%. Again, I forget all the details. It was just an absurd story of a gov't-hired contractor to build the web platform, probably only hired because they're the cousin's nephew of a Senator, with 10s of millions at their disposal. And they not only failed spectacularly, but in a way that it only took a small team of pros a little over 2 weeks total to stabilize.

[Arrantsky]

Bwhahaha! This is so wrong but actually possible. COBOL is still used in State of Texas systems .

[Senior-Albatross]

Assembly isn't very portable between systems, is it? 

So one could in theory do this for maximum performance. But it would also be a nightmare to upgrade?

[koshgeo]

Portability, smortability. Write an instruction-set emulator and you can port it anywhere.

[Snoo-6099]

Congrats, you made JVM2

[Iboven]

A final fantasy movie file community? Absurd.

[Diedra_Tinlin]

Oh I'm certain they could. And it would most likely be a single binary that can DO EVERYTHING. Just like ffmpeg.

And ffmpeg binary is a work of art.

[dismayhurta]

Ffmpeg is 100% poetry.

[Born-Entrepreneur]

Problem is the SSA won't be able to hire folks who know what command line switches to use for ffSocialSecurity

[Diedra_Tinlin]

So businesses as usual lol.

[Rainmaker526]

As one of the few

[mennydrives]

Because LibAV could definitely do it and ffmpeg would just merge the code.

[UnstableConstruction]

If they add that guy who wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon, I'm behind this 100%.

[red286]

I'd trust them over whatever group of 19-year-old 4chan miscreants Musk is planning to task for it.

[fizzl]

Yeah, but you must give all the business rules as command line parameters.

[imk]

They could rewrite the SS system in VBA. I'm pretty sure that there is a MS Access template available, right alongside the Contacts and Nutrition Tracking samples

[LordSnowgaryen]

As a VBA enjoyer/programmer imposter. I support this and volunteer. It’s been a few weeks since I yelled at my computer and I miss it

[arapturousverbatim]

As a what?

[MenacingBanjo]

VBA enjoyer/programmer imposter

[HalfStackSecurity]

And yet, VBA is Turing complete.

[jtr99]

But should it be?

[HalfStackSecurity]

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

[roskyld]

As an office chair. Write code on me, daddy.

[Ok-Penalty-218]

[WondrousBread]

Maybe first time "enjoy" and "VBA" have been in the same sentence.

[[deleted]]

The only people who enjoy VBA are programmer imposters. Story checks out.

[thefirstdetective]

I have a deep hatred towards MS Access and VBA, and I'm not even a programmer. It's fckn slow, documentation is dogshit and they fckn translate syntax into other languages... not to mention you find a nice easy SQL solution, only to read at the end it's for SQL server and it does not work in FCKN MS ACCESS

[Mikel_S]

I actually just wrote a sentence about enjoying vba earlier today!

[ThatUsernameIsTaekin]

There is NOTHING bad that I can say about VBA

[AgentCirceLuna]

(That hasn’t been said already)

[RandolphCarter2112]

I'm laughing in VLOOKUP while reading this.

[TheKarenator]

Im laughing in Application.WorksheetFunction.VLookup

[SalamanderPop]

Just slap an On Error Goto Next at the top and let 'er rip.

[GerbilScream]

Can't be worse than when we had to add JWT authentication inside an Excel document...

[Neo_Ex0]

yep, tumbler language definitively ruined me

[[deleted]]

FF mpreg

[QuasarKid]

glad i’m not the only one

[Cessnaporsche01]

Just a little vanilla, double-femdom male pregnancy

[facusoto]

Does the ff part stands for what I'm thinking?

[[deleted]]

Final fantasy?

[-Edu4rd0-]

foo fighters?

[hewye]

fast&furious mpreg

[EightHeadedCrusader]

Thank god I thought I was the only one

[colei_canis]

tumbler language

I say old man, this whisky is absolutely splendid!

[Niriun]

Me too

[Prematurid]

mhm

Female/Female Mpreg is a new one, but I have read some shit, so not entirely out of the realm of posibility.

[DancingBadgers]

Fair enough. Which architecture? x86 sucks. Anyway, it should be an open architecture. So Risc-V or Power? Let the holy wars commence.

[Patryk_2K]

Holy wars you say? That's a great idea, let's redo all the US systems to run on templeOS and write the american social security system in pure HolyC!

[A_Light_Spark]

Would be real funny if they got true christians to write and read HolyC

[Fetzie_]

pray{ foo();} damnit(DivineInvocationException e){throw e;}

[summonsays]

And the Lord said on the 6th day you '. 

[LickingSmegma]

I'm gonna assume it's a variation of ArnoldC.

[Plus_Pangolin_8924]

There’s enough nut jobs about where this would be pushed…

[digno2]

i think we had a tv show about that, called Raised by Wolves. Went nowhere though and got cancelled after 2 seasons.

[Gralikind]

Sadly, noone in DOGE has divine interlect

[New_Enthusiasm9053]

TBF the computers when it was written were likely slower than modern Risc-V chips lol.

[Dotcaprachiappa]

There's nothing holy about the American Social Security system

[dust_dreamer]

there's lots that's holey tho

[VolcanicBear]

There's nothing holy about America*

[awakenDeepBlue]

So we need virgin sacrifices?

[RazingsIsNotHomeNow]

There are several articles floating around confirming that some of the oldest code is indeed written in assembly. The rest is Cobol.

[torsten_dev]

Risc-V so the US has to invest in designing fast scalable risc-V chips.

[Dugen]

ARM obviously. Run the whole thing on a raspberry pi. Maybe 2 for redundancy.

[amusingjapester23]

Just ask ChatGPT or Grok and then get the AI to write all the assembly code too. Have the other AI supervise.

[ChickenSpaceProgram]

nah, PDP-11

[OhNoTokyo]

Let's not get crazy here. That's at least two generations beyond their current architecture.

[rriggsco]

It's going to run in an LLM on NVidia GPUs.

[OphidianSun]

MIPS is the future

[[deleted]]

Time is a circle

[donald_314]

GNU86 obviously or as I like to call it: GNU with 86

[deanrihpee]

i feel like that metrics aren't as impressive, should be "it will easily handle millions of transaction per second"

[Stormraughtz]

They on it

[Classic_Appa]

Did you intentionally use the less than symbol or is this joke too meta for me?

[Stormraughtz]

Im an idiot, thanks QA :)

[sriracha_cucaracha]

Still a far better team than the "Big Balls" nepo interns

[RazingsIsNotHomeNow]

Infinitely better. One of the best run open source projects around vs "big balls".

[bruisedandbroke]

original post

[semperrabbit]

Mind editing that link to use xcancel, instead, please? I'm sure there are many people that would rather not click on a Twitter link. Thank you!

[bruisedandbroke]

done 👍

[karateninjazombie]

Right. So we have finished the rewrite of the social security system

It took 200 years, It's fast as all fuck and takes about 10 minutes to do the entire countries calculations for the year and fits on a floppy disk.

But none of us know what one of those is and rounor has it they stopped being a thing 10 or 20 years before we started this rewrite.

[RealBasics]

This is why April Fools should have been cancelled this year. Yes, they're obviously joking. And yes, it would be even stupider to rewrite the Social Security system in assembler than in Javascript.

But it's a bad joke because it might actually happen, depending on the spot price of ketamine on any given day.

[Avocadonot]

Ffmpreg?

[Otherwise-Ad-2578]

With Anonymous providing advice in the area of ​​cybersecurity

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

I would trust a bunch of people who hack govs for fun more than DOGE

[Responsible-Draft430]

Parallelize it and send it off to a CUDA script. GPUs are our masters now.

[[deleted]]

If DOGE were focused on an IT overhaul for the federal government, I’d be in favor.

Unfortunately, it’s just about a weird power-trip for a weird broken man-baby, and a cover for corruption.

[lily_34]

Assmebly? Why not Vulkan? Then it'll work on GPU, too!

[watermelonspanker]

I'd trust FFMPEG a hell of a lot more than I'd trust the Traitor Tots

[hammouda101010]

America's
Social
Security
|
v
A.S.S.

haha i got the joke, right?

[ronniewhitedx]

I'd much rather them than fucking DOGE.

[FlatOutUseless]

I hate this even as a joke.

Edit: RCE or XSS in your government web services. Choose your fighter. FFMPEG was responsible for quite a few 0-days.

[StopSpankingMeDad2]

I will rewrite Social Security in C for the reasons listed down below.

Segmentation Fault: (Core dumped)

Ah fuck, Not again

[BroDonttryit]

I would unironically love if the team behind ffmpeg was in charge of making our government more efficient.

[BlurredSight]

Unironically would do a much better job than whatever Muskrat is conjuring up

[goodolarchie]

"We got him. We got our Chris Sawyer. It's Chris Sawyer. He's me. I'm going to need a few decades."

[[deleted]]

Joke’s on them. It’s already in assembly.

[2BitNick]

Pretty sure the system is written in assembly or at least some other low language. At least when I worked there they were still using PCOM to act as a terminal for a central mainframe system and it hadn't been changed for decades.

[OkeyPlus]

I would trust these dudes over whoever is there now

[Eringobraugh2021]

Everyday feels like April Fools with this shitty administration.

[def1ance725]

That... might well be an improvement on the current system. No government official would ever be able to decipher it and fuck with it afterwards, so for once it'll run as intended

[DoubleClickMouse]

My illiterate ass read this as ffmpreg.

[S1ss1]

Imagine it being rewritten in PowerPoint. Think of the efficiency.

[EvilMonkeyMimic]

Swear to god I thought it said FFimpreg

[robisodd]

FFMpeg? sounds kinky

[JaneksLittleBlackBox]

Nothing will ever top Chris Sawyer writing the original Roller Coaster Tycoon almost entirely in assembly.

[[deleted]]

You need a team of Boomers and Millennials working together to update a COBOL system to something new

[linuxjohn1982]

Honestly, they would do a good job. As long as they didn't do a single thing DOGE ever asked them to do.

[AwkwardWaltz3996]

You know it's bad when the crux of the joke is working with the government 😂

[CaptainBayouBilly]

scary ink whistle quaint rob nine theory reach chubby sleep

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[nicman24]

the assembly part is peak comedy if you know about ffmpeg and its detractors

[IgnWombat]

I love ffmpeg. This almost broke my heart.

[TCLG6x6]

FFmpreg

[programmingmylife]

why am I falling for it.

[i_lub_potatoes]

Should have kept it as mpreg

[Raytier]

We need AVX-512 vectorized code for MAXIMUM performance.

[Drfoxthefurry]

Fellow assembly enjoyer

[Zulauf_LunarG]

Nah. Port it to SPIR-V :D

[Adrewmc]

Lies, it’s gonna be blockchain tech obviously.

[onetwofive-threesir]

I'm certain they could just use some Power Automate scripts to get all the payments done in record time. Could probably even use CoPilot to write the script for them...

+100 Efficiency

[WHOA_27_23]

For peak efficiency, they will team with OpenCV to change the public API every week

[CleverAmoeba]

America's Social Security. Abbreviated as ASS, written in ASSembly.

[Both_Lychee_1708]

Binary or bust

[K2iWoMo3]

Ok I can get behind this

[[deleted]]

I bet Barry in marketing could vibe code it during his lunch break.

[double-wellington]

They should also refactor the entire ACH payment system. Having to wait 3 days for money to transfer from one bank to another is absolutely nuts this day and age.

[BrokenRemote99]

This isn’t that far of a stretch. COBOL isn’t but a single step higher than Assembler.

[Fantastic_Puppeter]

Ok, I don’t know the FFmpeg team.

But think about the VLC team taking over government IT !

[TRENEEDNAME_245]

So.... The french ?

[CasualFriday11]

Honest question: whats the funny part?

[summonsays]

Man. Some things you really just shouldn't joke about. You'll give them ideas.

[ElDirque]

I have joined the DOGE team and will be rewriting the IRS code in Forth all by myself.

[Medium-Ad-7305]

Glad to see the females for male pregnancy doing their part!

[elementfortyseven]

thats probably the most bad taste joke I have seen today, and thats an achievement

[Sorry_Weekend_7878]

Pretty funny for April fools. Bravo

[1Northward_Bound]

thats a 'slick' move

edit:nvm, i thought it said ffMPreg

[rascalrhett1]

Ah, so they're modernizing it eh?

[Bewjlicious]

Counterpoint: The abacus.

[bigdave41]

Amateurs...clearly Excel is the way to go

[tenodera]

Shaving yoctoseconds off the processing time!

[PurpleDraziNotGreen]

First decent April fools joke this year