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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?

#241

Post by hypfer »

graemep wrote: post #217
hypfer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, yes, but you see, it's also an arsonist right-wing mob running amok in the real world.

Repeatedly!

I mean I get it. This is terrifying. But that's exactly my point.

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

#242

Post by volkl48 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #176

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…

USB 3.0 powered hubs that give you more USB 3.0 supporting USB-A ports are pretty easy to find these days.

USB-C ones (that actually give you more than 1 additional USB-C port) are still more challenging, but they do at least exist now (after having been virtually non-existent for years). Caldigit, Plugable, Sabrent, and probably others all have models that will go 1 device port to 3-6 USB-C ports now, and are powered with decent power per-port limits.

I do agree the landscape is far more confusing than it was a decade ago.

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

#243

Post by PaulHoule »

volkl48 wrote: post #242
PaulHoule wrote: post #176

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…

USB 3.0 powered hubs that give you more USB 3.0 supporting USB-A ports are pretty easy to find these days. USB-C ones (that actually give you more than 1 additional USB-C port) are still more challenging, but they do at least exist now (after having been virtually non-existent for years). Caldigit, Plugable, Sabrent, and probably others all have models that will go 1 device port to 3-6 USB-C ports now, and are powere…

Those hubs exist, but my experience is that you can't plug an arbitrary number of devices into them and expect it to work and it's not about power but about how resources in the computer are allocated to ports.

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

#244

Post by Kiro »

inigyou wrote: post #200
Hugsbox wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.

The same guy who also happens to be the creator of Rails.

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

#245

Post by robotnikman »

pjmlp wrote: post #226
ndriscoll wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 mi…

The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever. Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC. Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that…

Window 7 was the apex of Windows as an OS. Its been downhill since then.

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

#246

Post by graemep »

hypfer wrote: post #241
graemep wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, yes, but you see, it's also an arsonist right-wing mob running amok in the real world. Repeatedly! I mean I get it. This is terrifying. But that's exactly my point.

Where I think I can say things are not as bad as they might look is that these mobs are a few hundred people at a time out of a country of 70m. Maybe a few thousand at the most actually violent at some point.

As a visible ethnic minority person in the UK I can say I am not terrified. Concerned, yes, but its not even a major issue in my life.

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

#247

Post by layer8 »

cmiller1 wrote: post #143
frameset wrote: post #37

> 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 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…

It’s probably the lack of distinguishing between a window obtaining focus because the application just launched and the window of a running application requesting focus for some other reason.

Nevertheless, the OS could conceivably track whether there was any focus change since the process was launched or since it received the last key-press or mouse-click event, and only allow the focus change when there wasn’t (and otherwise use a non-focus-stealing notification mechanism).

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

#248

Post by layer8 »

timedude wrote: post #209
mrkeen wrote: post #17

I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI. My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens. Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponentia…

Uncle Bob has fully embraced AI and is risking becoming part of the problem these days.

Uncle Bob already became part of the problem by some of the stuff he wrote in Clean Code (like using mutable instance fields instead of method parameters). Luckily he isn’t perceived as very relevant anymore.

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

#249

Post by inigyou »

marcosdumay wrote: post #215
inigyou wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even my phone has a desktop. It calls it a home screen, though.

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

#250

Post by Gud »

"Nothing works" if you're using poorly designed software.

XFCE has worked more or less the same for me for the last 20 years.

Sure, nothing lasts forever, but XFCE has been rock solid and absolutely works as expected.

I've used it successfully on both FreeBSD and various Linux flavors.

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