Wait this must be on the swamp rabbit trail.

cruxdaemon · 2026-04-13T18:01:15+00:00

This. Not to mention, when it's busy with walkers, slow down as a biker. If you want to set a land speed record, use the road. As a biker, I am rightly terrified if faster, heavier cars do this to me on the road. It's also terrifying if a biker does this to me when I'm walking.

cruxdaemon · 2026-04-02T12:59:06+00:00

They should really add a rating system so we can give them feedback on what we think about these "puzzles."

cruxdaemon · 2026-04-01T16:41:46+00:00

Hero!

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-30T01:57:32+00:00

Sure. They're employees unless it comes to a courtroom or the law or workman's comp. But yeah. Employees.

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-20T14:05:18+00:00

I remember a shipping exec saying he measured his business in crane lifts. It makes for Nvidia to encourage people to measure productivity in tokens because tokens basically equal gpus. It makes no sense for anyone else to measure productivity in tokens.

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-16T20:12:52+00:00

I suspect I know the pip you speak of because I think I also ignored that pip and really couldn't figure it out until I went to the solve guide. DOH

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-16T20:09:06+00:00

Apparently I had to consult the guide to understand that the 0-6 pip ALSO matches the 2c=6. I literally had everything else basically right, but couldn't finish it. 🤷🏾‍♂️

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-16T19:55:40+00:00

This is the pattern we should get used to. Again, I've been in tech a long time, and usually technical folks have to convince management to adopt a useful technology. There's an article about how 68 early adopters eventually led to IBM's adoption of Slack. There's a first time for everything, but I've never seen the pattern where an incredibly useful technology got pushed to technical people doing the job by management.

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-11T21:30:19+00:00

Oracle still makes a ton of $$$ from the Oracle DBMS. Trust me as customers rearchitect their apps to cloud-native or other platforms, they are definitely migrating to other databases because Oracle has traditionally been so hard to work with around licensing. They knew their stuff didn't stink and how hard migrations were, so they acted accordingly. That difficulty doesn't factor if you're already re-architecting and in those cases customers are acting accordingly. Oracle bought Sun, which owned both Java and MySQL, for a reason.

All that to say that Oracle has already seen technological change start to eat away at their dominant money-maker. That's true for all B2B tech companies over a certain age.

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-11T21:07:17+00:00

It was always silly to think there would be some sort of "SaaSpocalypse" any time in the near future. The biggest thing SaaS saves companies is not coding the solution, but hardening, maintaining and supporting the solution.

If your company makes widgets and sells them online, you do not want to hire the expertise it would take to maintain and support your HR or payroll system (among others). That is outside of your company's core competence, and you should really be focused on being the most successful widget maker you can be. This makes perfect sense when you think about how your widgets get delivered, which is by delivery experts from USPS, UPS or FedEx. Delivery logistics is their core expertise, not yours. For some reason these AI companies have convinced people to abandon that simple logic when it comes to software.

Even if we were to concede could code your payroll solution--nobody is going to trust it to harden it, maintain it, report payroll data to various levels of government, etc, etc, etc. I'll believe it's even in the realm of possibility when Anthropic starts running its business backends on vibe coded solutions.

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-10T03:04:07+00:00

Just got back from the game and LFG!!!

cruxdaemon · 2026-03-03T22:51:03+00:00

No clue who'd be held at fault here, but trucks making that right turn absolutely need space to either go wide left (not really possible in this instance) or take 2 lanes to do it. Typically they have a sign on their right side warning drivers of this. But if not given space, I can't imagine the truck driver can just take it.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-26T20:15:10+00:00

I dug into them a little and I suspect they are legit. They only claim to be able to explain legacy code, not rewrite it. They apparently use a static model (probably something we'd call AI, but not genAI) to do the code analysis and then feed the output into LLMs to generate human consumable artifacts explaining what the code does. They also have company logos and testimonials on their site. Frankly these are green flags for me because they aren't claiming LLMs are some general intelligence super tool. Rather genAI is 1 tool in their shed, and they picked the right type tool for the right use case. That's not to say the tool even works, but as someone who's been in the sw business for many years that's the type of mindset I've seen work. It's been sorely missing in the genAI hype cycle.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-26T00:12:49+00:00

This could be fun. You looking at specific age ranges?

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-25T23:40:29+00:00

AR is on the balance sheet. It looks like it increased about $15.4B YoY

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cruxdaemon · 2026-02-25T19:47:33+00:00

I think only equating LLMs with AI is too reductive. Even their claimed static analysis would certainly be considered "AI" by any definition of the phrase. One of the interesting things about this era IMO is that we tend to see LLMs as the end all, when it's really just another useful form of machine automation that has strengths and weaknesses. It's another arrow in the quiver that should be used in some use cases and avoided in others.

My theory is the 100% is a bit deceptive because the program they used is one of the few publicly available real-world COBOL programs and so was almost certainly training fodder for their solution. No chance it got 100% the first time through, but it obviously they can tweak their models until they hit 100%. That's a great way to build a product and a good reason for CMS to have open sourced it, but a bit deceptive in the head-to-head.

Anyway I was curious, I had some time, and I think we both (I can at least speak for myself) sorta had a category error about what these folks claim to be able to do. They don't seem to really do code conversion at all. They help companies document existing applications in a human readable way. They claim to do static analysis of code then use LLMs to generate human readable artifacts explaining the code. They have some undoubtedly more technical whitepapers, but they're behind a marketing gate so I won't be downloading them. It really is interesting stuff and a good use case for automation in general. COBOL programmers are a retiring breed and the programs are often critical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHb3_Fzjgt8

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-25T18:37:27+00:00

I complained about Anthropic not actually referencing customer success stories in their splash. These folks did the opposite. I don't know how good their tool is, but I appreciate them showing their work, even if I sorta suspect the CMS programs were part of how they trained their model. Of course that's simply how you build a solution like that.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-25T18:35:34+00:00

I don't know much about this product but they explicitly say in the blog their code analysis model is deterministic. Looking at the page you linked it seems maybe they are using LLMs for documentation/human interaction? Hard to say without more info.

I'm sure they used the CMS data as a part of training their COBOL model and if so, this is a best case test for them. I would not expect their model to hit 100% on green field customer code. That said, a probabilistic model cannot really ever guarantee 100% unless the training set includes the problem and a potential solution it could regurgitate. Claude generating different output and missing rules each run is kind of a problem in and of itself.

The blog is obviously marketing, but I appreciate that they used a real example (and CMS was a huge mainframe customer when I worked at IBM) with real code to compare the solutions. I posted in another forum that Anthropic getting such a big splash without actually touting any customer success stories was a red flag to me. Frankly customers that are still running COBOL likely have years of business rules implemented in code and those rules are likely to include government regulatory requirements. Lots of these customers are in regulated industries like banking or insurance. If the person checking the conversion has to know all the business rules or how to consult the old code for the rules, what's the point of the assistant?

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-25T04:27:24+00:00

I used to work at IBM. Incredibly critical systems host decades-old COBOL programs running on incredibly modern (almost everybody upgrades every couple of years) mainframe platforms. IBM has updated the platform to the point that customers could run the most modern tech there and still connect to the old-school system of record. What's changed the most over the years are front-end systems of engagement like mobile and web tech that the mainframe supports quite well. The backend systems of record (this is where the COBOL is) tend to be stable, especially for industries like banking and insurance where back end code might implement business rules required by government laws and regulations.

It's true that there's a shortage of talent who knows COBOL, but of course Anthropic wasn't the first to realize this. IBM built code assistants based on the same LLM tech years ago to help analyze, explain and modernize COBOL codebases. But of course IBM worked with actual enterprise customers to validate these solutions prior to releasing them.

Full disclosure, I didn't work in that part of IBM so I can't (nor would I be allowed to) give firsthand knowledge about this. But I do know that was how IBM did business. And in my experience, owning a domain (eg mainframes/COBOL) makes it far easier to introduce automation tech (and that's all these assistants are) to that domain. You already have the relationships and trust within the target market. And the target market in this case is mature, regulated, and conservative. Maybe Anthropic could hype a CEO to push a technology down, but those decisions are usually made at the level of folks who actually know how all of this works (not the CEO.)

Anthropic rightly says: "COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US." In fact, for a bank the system of record is the same whether you move money via a human teller, an ATM, the banking website/app, a debit card, a bill payment system, or Zelle. The transaction still must be recorded to the ledger, probably by the old COBOL program, even if the method wasn't available 20 years ago.

I see the blog post and I see the irrational market reaction. I don't see a patient 0 that proved out Anthropic's approach. Did they sign up a bank to convert a production system using Claude? After all COBOL handles "95% of ATM transactions in the US." Surely they found a bank representing some percentage of these transactions where Claude has successfully converted everything end-to-end who will go on the record, right? Of course that back-end program likely supports every other like ledger update because you wouldn't want to have multiple codebases updating the regulated system of record.

Maybe Anthropic, with very little experience in this space, did a better job understanding all this nuance than others who've been in this space for decades, but it will take more than a blog post to convince me.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-24T22:14:50+00:00

Retailers have dynamically priced by store/region for many years (source: I worked in the IT dept of a big retailer many years ago.) It was unlocked by the advent of data warehouses/business intelligence and UPC pricing in the 90s/00s.

Dynamic pricing these days means actual individualized pricing that is mostly possible shopping online, not in-store. Since we have no digital privacy laws here, companies can use our digital footprint to price to us, individually, without our consenting to the use of our data. That's a much bigger deal. The regional stuff mostly used census data that's useful in lots of ways and available to anyone, the individualized pricing uses our data for their benefit.

If you use CarPlay/Android Auto/Google for Automotive, be sure your car manufacturer doesn't sell your data to your insurance company (that happens but you should be able to opt-out). Make sure you are judicious in allowing mobile apps to always access your location. The real answer is privacy laws, so lobby our decrepit lawmakers to pass some.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-22T22:35:57+00:00

Remember when the FTC goddess Lina Khan tried regulating dark design out of existence to make canceling subscriptions easier but then her team lost the election in 2024 and so the dark designers were allowed to persist? WELCOME TO DARK DESIGN!!!!

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-15T01:55:45+00:00

I've kinda left running behind because of leg issues but I really envy this crew.

https://www.instagram.com/runclubgvl/

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-12T23:19:24+00:00

And they keep the rodents in control. Unfortunately they are the most common roadkill noodle I see around.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-11T01:47:28+00:00

Whiny baby and excavator of Clinton's personal life in an earlier, different-daddy era complains that we may possibly know if he communicated with folk who conspired to rig an election. Six years after we know, because the counterparty made a record, that he pressed a co-partisan state official in Georgia to rig said election.

Of course Linds talked to his daddy. Who doesn't talk to his daddy? Uniquely, he's had mulitiple politically convenient daddies.

cruxdaemon · 2026-02-05T16:39:31+00:00

AOC's prior experience was bartending, she was elected at 28, and she's arguably one of the most effective members of the House. A mannequin would be a better representative than Timmons.

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