André Breda
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andre.breda.pt
André Breda
@andre.breda.pt
15 followers 34 following 2 posts
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Reposted by André Breda
feralkittee.bsky.social
"If we had to PAY slaves we wouldn't be able to run our plantations!" (yes, this was an argument used before the Civil War).
May 27, 2025 at 8:15 AM
Reposted by André Breda
dianacatarina.bsky.social
Estamos a caminhar para uma cidade onde apenas há espaço para a publicidade comercial ou, por outro lado, institucional da CML, que se transforma na voz política dominante no espaço publico e construtora de narrativas. Se vamos falar de ruído visual, podemos falar dos JCDecaux por todo o lado?
May 26, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by André Breda
clivethompson.bsky.social
Remember back during COVID, when there was a sudden influx of people applying for unemployment benefits?

The New Jersey system crashed ...

... and governor blamed it on old COBOL systems

Nope

He was wrong

the COBOL ran *fine*

It was the newer web-site code that croaked

5/9
Screenshot reading: "A good example of this could be witnessed during the pandemic. In the early days of Covid-19, businesses shut down en masse. Laid-off employees swarmed online to apply for unemployment benefits, and the websites for many state governments crashed under the load. In New Jersey, the governor told the press that their COBOL systems desperately needed help to deal with the new demands. “Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” he noted. But technologists who were working behind the scenes to fix the problems knew that the number-crunching COBOL wasn’t the problem. That old stuff was working fine. No, it was the newer stuff that had crashed — the programs powering the website itself. “The thing that went bananas was this web application in between the mainframe and the outside world. That was the thing that sort of fell apart,” says Marianne Bellotti, a programmer and writer who worked for years on government systems, and who observed New Jersey’s system. But it’s too embarrassing, as the historian Hicks points out, to admit that “oh, our web systems broke down.” Bellotti’s seen the same thing happen with other government agencies, like the IRS. She was called in once to help with an IRS web app that wasn’t working. When they investigated, they found that, indeed, the problem was in newer programs, “this chunk of poorly written Java code”. The mainframe running COBOL, in contrast, was racing along like a Ferrari."
March 30, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Reposted by André Breda
clivethompson.bsky.social
This idea -- that a really *old* code-base can be far more reliable and rock-solid than something written in a newer language?

It violates a lot of Silicon Valley mythos, of course ...

... where "new" is nearly always seen as "better"

4/9
Screenshot reading: "This idea — that older code can not only be good, but in crucial ways superior to newer code — is at odds with a lot of Silicon Valley myth-making. Venture capital-backed startups usually tout the shiny and novel. Founders do not prance around boasting about how old their codebase is. Quite the opposite: They brag about their code being cutting-edge, pounded out in all-night sessions by bleary-eyed genius 21-year-olds. But as nearly every programmer will tell you, the newer and more recently written the software, the more likely it is to be a hot mess of bugs."
March 30, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Reposted by André Breda
littlenomad.bsky.social
Thing is, there are secure, government-approved ways of having these conversations that follow legal guidelines for records retention. Signal ain’t that. If they were using Signal for this, they’ve been using Signal for all kinds of other things, probably to avoid recordkeeping. For obvious reasons.
March 25, 2025 at 11:33 PM