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If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

ptrchm.com

51–60 of 719 posts

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#51
> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?

The issue is only partially within those who code. They get directions from those in charge, and they are just making idiotic decisions. And those who code, for some reason don't stand against those idiotic decisions in defense of a common sense and a great UX.

A blatant, exaggerated parallel would be: you are designing your kitchen and you've chosen a place for your washing machine such as that it will be unable to open its door. When inviting a professional, you expect them to correct such wrong decisions and explain to you that it won't work. But in programming, those who program, calling themselves "software engineers", would just place this washing machine where they're told, because it's "not my job". It's not a feature of an "engineer". It's being a coder lemming.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#52
post #47
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.…

He is simply racist. I do not disagree with what your said, but I think it just boils down to that.

Fix to what?

Sorry to say, but that word probably has an equally low impact on regular people by now. Worse if we look at what people actually think/vote/etc.

People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.

We do not actually want that, because (big surprise upcoming) racism is bad. But I think we might need to remind people why that whole cluster of ideas is bad.

This shouldn't be too hard, given that it's objectively worse in many many aspects, but for that to be seen, I suppose we need to point out what makes it objectively worse.

The shorthand is unfortunately dead and got killed by twitter dot com.

__

How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#53
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience. A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CS…

I have 400 orders a year on Amazon and never have any of those weird issues. How strange!

My grandma smoked until she was 90 and she was absolutely fine!

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#54

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it wh…

That is definitely needed. On Mac it is really infuriating how stuff (auto update etc) just take focus/pop up crap. I am literally never interested in it and am confused why I cannot just say [x] Force apps to mind their own business. We have f’ing notifications for this; why does it need a dialog window?

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#55
post #18
post #12

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

Software's absurd margins was like the whole pitch.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#56
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user. Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately. If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matte…

> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user. I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people. "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.

Sure. You need to relate to the overton window to not seem like a tinfoil hat alarmist hysteric to normal people. I can agree on that.

It is really hard to keep your cool.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#57
post #32
post #5

Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video. If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.

Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.

I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#58
My assumption is that AI-generated code explodes the flaws in your existing codebase. If your architecture is bad or not documented, your docs are out of date or the goal of the feature request is vague, how should the AI (or even a good human developer) develop high quality software?

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#59
post #18
post #12

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

Plenty of companies are willing to pick RHEL or paid Ubuntu for that very reason, even though they are infinity times more expensive than free Debian

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#60
God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious.

Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we?

Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks their entire OS (OS!), the whole suite of software it has for it, the developer suite with compilers and SDKs and god knows what else and also ensures that everything ever written for that OS for the old chips continues to work and it indeed does.

Then there's another big company that launched a file storage service around 20 years ago. Back then it was reliable and only gotten better over the years. They started offering their storage for a nanocent per gajibyte and twenty years of hard work allowed them to lower that cost to a picocent per gajibyte. They don't lose data, they are highly available, half of the internet stores their data at their servers.

And then there's a -- gasp! -- consortium of big companies (fools would reply to this with an XKCD standards strip) that works on improvements to a shared set of standards for 4G, one of the most widely used technology stacks in the world, agrees on it, calls it 5G and rolls it out across the world and the whole spectrum of hardware and software vendors in a manner that resembles replacing a wing of an aircraft mid-flight so that not a single pasta strand falls from the forks of the business class customers.

And here we have someone who thinks that a customer support page for his fridge (fridge!) thrown together by a low-paid second-grade developer in a third-world country is indicative of the whole industry decline.

"Nothing works", my hairy bum. Get real.

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