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Significant raise of reports

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Re: Significant raise of reports

#71

Post by SoftTalker »

jakevoytko wrote: post #45
glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

There are some rose-colored glasses when people say this. Programs didn’t auto save and regularly crashed. It was extremely common to hear someone talk about losing hours of work. Computers regularly blue screened at random. Device drivers weren’t isolated from the kernel so you could easily buy a dongle or something that single-handedly destabilized your system. Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to…

> Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to its knees.

Now, it's anti-virus (Crowdstrike) that does that. I don't think many or any virus or ransomware has ever had as big an impact at one time as Crowdstrike did. Maybe the ILOVEYOU worm.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#72

Post by BitsAndObjects »

SoftTalker wrote: post #68
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing that the world has largely forgotten the terror of losing entire documents forever. It happened to me. It happened to everyone. And this is the only comment I've seen so far here to even mention this. Bad old days indeed!

Indeed, but it was pretty easy to develop the habit of hitting whatever function key was bound to "Save" fairly frequently. I certainly did. Also auto-save is a mixed bag. With manual save, I was free to start editing a document and then realize I want to save it as something else, or just throw away my changes and start over. With auto-save, I've already modified my original. It took me quite a while to adjust to th…

I still occasionally make that auto-save mistake.

AI tools have caused me to trip up a few times too when I fail to notice how many changes haven’t been checked into git, and then the tool obliterates some of its work and a struggle ensues to partially revert (there are ways, both in git and in AI temporary files etc). It’s user error but it is also a new kind of occasional mistake I have to adapt to avoid. As with when auto-save started to become universal.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#73

Post by psychoslave »

>software that used to follow the "release-then-go-back-to-cave" model will have to change to start dealing with maintenance for real, or to just stop being proposed to the world as the ultimate-tool-for-this-and-that because every piece of software becomes a target.

Actually, some software are running the water-heater/heat-pump system in my basement. There is a small blue light screen, it keeps logs of consumed electricity/produced heat and can make small histograms. Of course there is a smart option to make it internet connected. The kind of functionality I’m glad it’s disabled by default and not enforced to be able to operate. If possible, I’ll never upgrade it. Release then go back to the cave has definitely its place in many actual physical product in the world.

I’ll deal with enough WTF software security in my daily job during my career. Sparing some cognitive load of whatever appliance being turned into a brick because the company that produced it or some script-kiddy-on-ai-steroid decided it was desirable to do so, that’s more time to do whatever other thing cosmos allows to explore.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#74

Post by IshKebab »

chromacity wrote: post #70

> people will finally understand that security bugs are bugs, and that the only sane way to stay safe is to periodically update, without focusing on "CVE-xxx" Linux devs keep making that point, but I really don't understand why they expect the world to embrace that thinking. You don't need to care about the vast majority of software defects in Linux, save for the once-in-a-decade filesystem corruption bug. In fact, t…

Yeah that attitude really makes no sense, and I don't see why AI finding security bugs would make people "finally understand".

I suspect it's just an excuse for Linux's generally poor security track record.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#75

Post by IshKebab »

glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

Yeah I don't think that is true at all. Plenty of software today is very well tested, and plenty of software back then was pushed out with insufficient testing due to short deadlines (some probably caused by the fact that they had to press CDs).

Re: Significant raise of reports

#76

Post by DarkNova6 »

chromacity wrote: post #70

> people will finally understand that security bugs are bugs, and that the only sane way to stay safe is to periodically update, without focusing on "CVE-xxx" Linux devs keep making that point, but I really don't understand why they expect the world to embrace that thinking. You don't need to care about the vast majority of software defects in Linux, save for the once-in-a-decade filesystem corruption bug. In fact, t…

And this is the best-case scenario. Because once updates become opt-out it simply becomes an attack vector of another type.

If the updated code is not open source, you are trusting blindly that not some kind of different remote code execution just happened without you knowing it.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#77

Post by wongarsu »

post-it wrote: post #63
jakevoytko wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some rose-colored glasses when people say this. Programs didn’t auto save and regularly crashed. It was extremely common to hear someone talk about losing hours of work. Computers regularly blue screened at random. Device drivers weren’t isolated from the kernel so you could easily buy a dongle or something that single-handedly destabilized your system. Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to…

Saving also often took a long time, so people didn't do it very often.

Certainly depended on the software. But disks were slow back then, and a save would commonly block the entire UI. If your software produced big files you could wait for an inconvenient amount of time

Re: Significant raise of reports

#78

Post by psychoslave »

glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

Not all software are done with the same quality, whatever the epoch.

It was possible to work with Ada as soon as 1980 wherever high guarantee of reliability was taken seriously, for example.

And not everyone is Knuth with a personal human secretary in well funded world-top institution.

In 2000s, Microsoft which was already sitting on insanely high mountain of resources released Windows Millennium Edition. Ask your greybeard neighbour if you are too young to remember. While commercialisation started in 2000, it is the last MS-DOS-based Windows version and so represent the pinnacle of what Windows 9x represented, before the big switch to a NT inheritance.

As always, the largest advantage of the good all time, is selective memory. After all, people that can remember know they survived the era, while present and future never provided much certainty on that point.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#79

Post by tyre »

I wish they wouldn’t call it “AI slop” before acknowledging that most of the bugs are correct.

Let’s bring a bit of nuance between mindless drivel (e.g. LinkedIn influencing posts, spammed issues that are LLMs making mistakes) vs using LLMs to find/build useful things.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#80

Post by _se »

tyre wrote: post #79

I wish they wouldn’t call it “AI slop” before acknowledging that most of the bugs are correct. Let’s bring a bit of nuance between mindless drivel (e.g. LinkedIn influencing posts, spammed issues that are LLMs making mistakes) vs using LLMs to find/build useful things.

It can be correct and slop at the same time. The reporter could have reported it in a way that makes it clear a human reviewed and cared about the report.

Slop is a function of how the information is presented and how the tools are used. People don't care if you use LLMs if they don't tell you can use them, they care when you send them a bunch of bullshit with 5% of value buried inside it.

If you're reading something and you can tell an LLM wrote it, you should be upset. It means the author doesn't give a fuck.

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