Weaving fabric and sewing clothes has been "solved", but there is no shortage of garbage quality shirts.
If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
401–410 of 719 posts
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#402> My banking app requires, on average, three FaceID logins before the 3D Secure confirmation view appears. That's a different, equally big problem. Security mafia at every company will continue to rule everything and everyone. They do not have goals or constraints that are tied to productivity and user experience. We are heading to a situation where the security teams are causing much more damage compared to the poss…
That’s a hilarious comment in the world where companies are getting hacked left and right and consumer data is widely available from how many pieces of software have piss poor security. You might work at companies as where dumb bureaucrats have a tight grip on things, but in most of the world, security practices are not holding us back, they simply don’t exist.
The the op of this thread is really security clueless. The moment you're in most networks you can move laterally and get whatever you want. Locking these systems down and securing them is very difficult work. After C levels, developers are the worst at security in companies.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.
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.…
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Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#404Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#405The claim that software has regressed is hard to accept. Compared to the past, we now have far more platforms to support and far more things to memorize. And if you actually try using software from 15 years ago, you'll see it had far more critical bugs than today's software. I think most of this is just nostalgia bias.
It's just that complexity has skyrocketed compared to the past. The same goes for released software. In the old days, even small software could be competitive, but now the minimum level of complexity required to sell a program is completely different.
The best example of this is mobile games. Just look at the structure of early mobile games compared to modern games.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also clearly not a GNOME user...
It's no coincidence that PulseAudio and Gnome are Pottering-authored/Pottering-adjacent software.
Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.
If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, this 100%. When I see a "pending update" notification or icon somewhere, the first thing I think is "I don't want to update, they're just going to break something new". I _hate_ updates now. Doesn't matter what software it is, with the small exception of video games. (Except Dead By Daylight. Behavior, the devs, are the most hilariously incompetent devs on the planet, but at least their incompetence is confined…
Factorio or Minecraft change things every update.
At least Minecraft is generally additive as opposed to mucking up the previously working mechanics.
(This of course is excluding things like the big “Flattening” of data structures that happened around 1.13 or so)
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#408The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries. The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the…
> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users.
It’s not surprising that this sentiment is popular on a message board filled with engineers but I’m not so convinced by it. Nor do I think the current state of tech companies is acceptable, to be clear. But there needs to be some level of management outside of the engineers themselves. A lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers. And that’s fine, because there are other people to do those tasks.
If your utopia is a bunch of engineers given freedom to do whatever they want, however they want to do it… I suspect the dream and the reality will not match up. In the scenario you’ve outlined I strongly suspect you’ll have infrastructure on its third rewrite, full of power user features and tweaks… and near-zero adoption from newcomers. Product fit is a thing that needs to be managed!
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#409Earlier 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…
> Use Linux/KDE. Yep. I, too, get more productive by spending a PhD worth of effort on choosing a window manager.
Man, I should get a PhD if it's that little effort.
Sure, you can drive yourself nuts picking a window manager, but that's for the hardcore nerds who want to optimize everything about their WM. For a different example of the same pattern of behavior, here is the BITOG forums: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/
Thousands of pages and millions of words dedicated to choosing precisely the right oil for a specific motor. Does any normal person need to do this much research into what oil to use in their car? No, but if you want to optimize you can spend weeks going down a research rabbit hole involving lab tests.
For most people, just buy any oil that isn't the cheapest available. Same goes for window managers. I've never got into optimizing or customizing them, but for any mainstream distro the default will be absolutely OK. You can definitely invest thousands of hours into customizing and tweaking a WM, but you could also spend that time customizing emacs and making that your 'WM".
I've never understood why people present selecting a desktop environment/window manager as this huge hurdle. Just go with the default for your distro, if you want to get super nerdy you can change it but most people won't need to.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#410Even non-VC-backed software or open source projects suffer from this. At the end of the day, fixing bugs, especially those bugs only happen in certain environments, is a very tedious and thankless task.
Especially when you get outside of environment like phones and consoles the environments people run software in can be wildly different too, and the oddest things can cause weird interactions.
In enterprise software you can run into customers that 'use too much' of something odd that the developers don't really think about and QA fails to test right. Things like tags and identifiers that you think "Oh they'll use 5 or 6 max" then you run into someone that uses a thousand tags and report performance explodes.