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

ptrchm.com

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

#211

rant first: oh, I recently heard about you from a friend working in a company after I mentioned that I also got into photography. Nice work on pixelpeeper.com to the article: Yeah, it's different world out there. We need to filter ideas instead of focusing on more features, as lack of staggering revenue growth suggests it might be that more doesn't equal better. The stability of apps is getting worse lately. I couldn…

thank you, I didn't expect to see pixelpeeper mentioned here :) feel free to reach out via email - I'm happy to nerd out about photography

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

#212
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "solution" is just as bad as the Mac's bouncing icons described in the article - while it doesn't steal keyboard focus, it does steal user focus

What else do you expect though? You launched a long running task. It is done. Microwave goes ding.

My expectation is described in the comment you replied to and side comments

Microwave's ding is also bad UI, especially when it's repetitive as it's just useless noise. But even the first ding - what value does it have if you already have exactly the same notification category - audio cue - built right there in the process: the machine noise disappears when it stops working.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE has a much older and richer history than windows 7. It’s been trying to be a safe harbor for Windows users to land in Linux for a long time.

What they really meant is it's like Windows if Windows didn't enshittify. I don't understand the plasma desktop though. Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.

Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person.

The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.

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

#216

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…

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc: - "Something went wrong" - "It's not you - it's us :-(" - "An error occurred" - "Uh-oh..." - "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable] People used to…

> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Oh, I wish...

We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...

Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.

Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.

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

#217
post #95
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet. Where are you? It makes a big difference. I am talking primarily about the UK, where I have lived in different areas and know a variety of people in many different places. It is, in my experience, a society where racism is relatively rare: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

Uuuh idk man. I'm just seeing this stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots https://www.dw.com/en/racist-riots-break-out-across-united-k... But glad to learn that there is actually nothing to worry about I guess.

I would not say there is nothing to worry about - I find the riots nasty and definitely worrying. There is definitely greater hostility towards certain groups: asylum seekers and Muslims for a variety of reasons. There are lots of complexities about this, and some genuine issues too that have not been dealt with, which creates an opportunity racists exploit.

However, I think its very much a minority view. Even Tommy Robinson's "Unite The Kingdom" protest which DHH blogged about and Musk backed etc. and was supposed to be the far right's big show of support was much smaller than many other protests for many other causes over the years (for and against Brexit, Gaza, etc.) in recent years. I also think it likely even a lot of those who joined the protest have far narrower causes (e.g. anti-illegal immigration) than being fully alt-right.

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

#218

> 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…

I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet.

Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for.

And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file.

All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.

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

#219
post #21

Software quality has been declining for long before AI was a thing. Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is. The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.

> Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is.

I dunno what they needed, but Windows 11 was a lot less bad before they started using AI.

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