Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

breakingdefense.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 279 posts

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#201

Post by bastawhiz »

encoderer wrote: post #176
bastawhiz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't get Copilot to generate Python that adds numbers together correctly sometimes. Getting an LLM to generate correct, working code for a language that hardly anybody writes anymore is almost assuredly going to lead to failure.

yeah I agree but when you look at the slope not the y-intercept it’s getting obviously better. one advantage the government would have is training/fine-tuning on a hundred million lines of domain specific cobol.

The slope doesn't really matter, because the target is "better than a human, and able to identify and fix its own errors". The slope will decrease as you approach this threshold.

It's also wildly bad to plan to train and fine tune on code that you know has bugs. Already we have Copilot generating code with trivial vulnerabilities because that's what it's trained on.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#202

Post by marricks »

pstuart wrote: post #50
marricks wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eisenhower warned this would be a thing and here we are, it's a thing. The best we will ever get is the illusion of spending being under control. It's wild, but whenever a big change occurs there's always smart folks who knew what was going to happen and exactly called it out. Usually as a "ok guys be careful cause X could happen" and X inevitably does.

Equally wild is when "fiscal conservatives" complain about spending, it's only on social programs they disagree with. Fraud and/or waste should be a subject of concern regardless of the program that experiences it.

The government isn't a household and its finances don't need to be treated as one. I think everyone in government knows this they just don't want constituent's to realize it so they hem and haw about any spending they don't like. Neither side super cares about social programs, dems just aren't the ones to cut them typically.

If you notice, whenever dems have launched a plan in the past 30-40 years they always say how it's almost always going to be "deficit neutral" or help because they actually don't want to increase spending (or help people all that much, is my take).

Both sides have and will continue to green light defense spending and other "important issues" so deficit goes up anyways.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#203

Post by warner25 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #157
warner25 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not save any money at all. I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?). I'd rather see a number of "e…

> like you said about warehouse storage space(?). I think that's about much more than space, and more the operational drag of managing all that stuff. Here's the Army Undersecretary and also the Chief of Staff talking about it and plans to reduce inventory: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/10/army-doesnt-know-w... From the article: “I'm working really hard with Army Materiel Command to find ways to more rapidly…

Oh yeah, when I was a platoon leader and company commander, we spent 20-30% of our time - like a day per week, or a week per month - just looking for stuff, counting stuff, and annotating on paper the locations of the stuff (e.g. which building, office, shipping container) to help us find it again next time.

But you also weren't allowed to get rid of any of it, even if it was obsolete and just hanging around since the 1970s like I said earlier.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#204

Post by wubrr »

bogota wrote: post #43
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system. Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it. Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.

That could work if the existing code is actually up-to-date, correct, and if you have knowledgeable users of the systems backed by this code. The part about 'code corruption' makes me thing this is not the case.

Worked at a big bank migrating some old code to new stack one time:

  - Original developers are gone.
  - Existing users don't understand the systems outside of their own narrow use-cases.
  - Code which was committed to repositories didn't match the actual running code, because people would go into production servers, manually edit the code there, in place, not document or commit the changes to repo. There were like 20 years of adhoc changes made in this way.
We had some business analysts which were supposed to talk to the users and gather requirements - they very quickly simply gave up and asked the developers to 'reverse engineer' everything.

Anyway, it was a hilarious shit-show, but kinda fun at the same time (if you're able to ignore incompetent leadership pressure - a skill I mastered during this time).

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#205

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #167
bumby wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Murphy's Laws of Combat: No combat ready unit ever passed inspection. No inspection ready unit ever passed combat. Managers need to be careful of Goodhart's law. (in this case "passing inspection" may not be the best target)

And yet hundreds of thousands of companies pass the same audits. The call for audits came from ridiculous amounts of misreporting and waste. Accounting systems that can't do accounting and deal with trillions of taxpayer dollars should not have the goalposts moved. A 0.001% error in a trillion dollar system is ten million dollars. That's taxpayer money that could fix derelict bridges or pay for thousands of children…

[deleted]

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#206

Post by wolverine876 »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #184
wolverine876 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.

> It's a signicant issue in Congress What are you basing that on?

Lots of discussion and pressure on it, going back 10-15 or more years.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#207

Post by wolverine876 »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #159
thelastgallon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives only work on low-skilled labor that is quantifiable. Eg. more money for flipping more burgers. It is not a settled science paying people a lot more will automagically solve problems. People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. The…

>People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy, mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me the check so I can be on my way.

> I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash

I thought you were against reductionism?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#208

Post by VoodooJuJu »

wolverine876 wrote: post #207
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash so I can take care of me and my family. 250k/yr for a COBOL position would suit that end just fine. You can keep your autonomy, mastery, purpose, and all the other foofoo, just hand me the check so I can be on my way.

> I'm not a sack of chemicals whose desires can be reduced down to some pithy pseudo-scientific Maslowian quip. The only thing I crave from my job is cash I thought you were against reductionism?

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/reductionism

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#209

Post by wmf »

uticus wrote: post #44
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today. Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code. But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various liter…

COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general

This is the same code that uses two-digit years and doesn't support lowercase letters?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#210

Post by Mizza »

wolverine876 wrote: post #104

The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago, when it began a project to make their organization auditable. From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years: You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation: They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organi…

I don't know anything about either the military or accounting domains, but it's kind of a fun problem to think about solving.

What data structure do you organize the problem into? Is it a tree? Depth first search? Breadth first search? Maybe you just pick a point at random and walk from there.

Post reply on HN