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

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

#171

Post by ghusto »

eviks wrote: post #98
jagged-chisel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any app should be ready to accept focus. It should never steal focus. When I start an app, and wait for it to launch, I am attempting to give it focus. I can withdraw that intent at any time by doing something else (e.g. switching apps) and the launching app should finish launching and wait in the background.

Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll. You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification…

So many strange assumtions, but the most striking is that you're presuming the user doesn't know what they want to happen.

"you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for"

Would I? How do you know? Why do yo think so? This is such an odd thing to be sure about.

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

#172

Post by eviks »

1718627440 wrote: post #142
eviks wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll. You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification…

> You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible For that it suffices if the window comes to the foreground, but it does not need to steal the focus.

So you want to continue typing, but in an invisible field hidden by a different foreground app?

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

#173

Post by ToucanLoucan »

pixard wrote: post #165
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use. I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats…

Hey may I suggest CachyOS + KDE? It’s very gaming oriented and you have a lot of great built in features. Everything just works. So far in 6 months I ran into a single issue: On day 1 of the new Subnautica early access I had to do some debugging and downgrade nvidia drivers to a previous release. But this was fixed after about a week. No other game gave any issue what so ever. I run everything on the cachy proton ver…

Oooooo. Does it support HDR? Because that seemed to be entirely broken in KDE despite using Wayland.

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

#174

Post by palmotea »

ensemblehq wrote: post #131

While there is increased complexity on top of all the software thats being built today, I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. When business schools and tech leaders prioritize the idea…

> I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years.

I wonder how much of that is just what management always wanted. Peopleware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...), a VERY GOOD book about software development written in the 80s, talks about managers wanting to sacrifice quality an how corrosive that is. It's just that in the past technology forced them to pursue quality: Software shipped on disk needed to be bug-free, because it made bug-fixes almost impossible. Software written by a human needed a human that understands it, who might have some pride in his work.

But now, with the internet and LLMs, we get to live in the slop-world the management has always dreamed of. More tickets, closing faster! Less headcount, less talk! Artificial workers that don't talk back! Who cares about all the rest?

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

#175

Post by schneems »

Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad:

- URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words.

- Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content.

- I sometimes cannot click to play videos on the feed. I can click through the comments and then click play on the player.

- Comments pasted from perfectly valid markdown render as whitespace deleted garbage

- Clicking "reply" then tapping in the box makes it disappear. I literally cannot see what I'm typing. I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.

- After typing into the comment box the "comment" button to submit it is not visible

- Being a mod: The dropdown for selecting a removal rule will not let me scroll past what shows on the initial dropdown.

- Rare but critical interfaces like banning a user (or managing an existing ban). Essentially cannot be used on mobile.

- When typing responses to people as a mod, depending on the box sometimes I "lose" the comment button.

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

#176

Post by PaulHoule »

AI might have made things worse in the last few months but there have been a lot of bad trends on the desktop in the last decade, both software and hardware.

It is little appreciated how USB has regressed. If you have a full-size top-of-the-line desktop machine with plenty of I/O channels you have a huge number of USB 3 and USB C plugs and will have mostly a "just works" experience -- like you can plug in an external hard drive and not regret it. Try a laptop or a pint size machine (say a Mac Mini or a Dell Optiplex 1.5 l) and you'll discover there is no reliable USB 3 hub on the market Maybe you can plug in your keyboard and mouse, maybe, but plug in a USB DAC and a memory card reader and an external drive... "BONG!" "BONG!" "BONG!" Windows starts screaming that devices are dropping out and reattaching and God forbid there is a filesystem you care about on one of them. (MacOS is too smart for that shit, it just assumes the hub is crap and won't reconnect until you reboot)

Plug a cooler master keyboard into you dev workstation and you'll find it overloads the interrupt handling system and causes everything to be janky.

Probably the worst thing about Electron is that the #1 applications use it, instead of making a web application, is that they can't stand that you might be able to find the application and start it the way you start a usual application (or web page) or be able to find the window when you are using it or be able to close the application or move the application window like a normal application window or resize the application like a normal application window or that you might be able to see anything in the tray -- so applications like Slack automatically become crapplications by virtue of inhabiting your tray. It makes everything worse. It reminds me of the later 90's when every crapplet for your printer had to have a completely custom widget set and window chrome.

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

#177

Post by cmiller1 »

ghusto wrote: post #164
cmiller1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the…

As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.

On the current M series hardware, in my experience, it's rare for the icon to land from its first bounce before the software is up and ready.

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

#178

Post by ghusto »

> Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. ... The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile.

It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX.

Complexity does not equal quality. In fact, it usually points to poor design. Programs used to be seen as utilities, which enabled the same kind of mentality you have to any specialised machinery: "Here's a thing that can make your life easier. Learn how to use it". Now programs try to be all-singing-all-dancing-all-the-time-changing.

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

#179

Post by eviks »

ghusto wrote: post #171
eviks wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll. You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification…

So many strange assumtions, but the most striking is that you're presuming the user doesn't know what they want to happen. "you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for" Would I? How do you know? Why do yo think so? This is such an odd thing to be sure about.

My real presumption is that the user knows exactly what they want to happen, but can't encode that knowledge into OS configuration because people have no imagination for trivial use cases, so demand blanket bans. While another group is just as limited and encoded blanket allows

> Would I?

You would

> How do you know?

By being the omniscient being that came up with the conditions in the first place

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

#180

Post by inigyou »

schneems wrote: post #175

Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad: - URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words. - Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content. - I sometimes cannot click…

I presume that's in addition to all the intentional enshittification.
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