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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?

#461

Post by MiddleEndian »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #266
StilesCrisis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I am pretty sure most of the examples he lists predate AI. Mac OS apps stealing focus certainly does. Horrible laggy car infotainment systems--hard to say without any specifics, but I've certainly had the same experience pre-LLMs. I've navigated the LG website pre-LLMs and it was busted then too.

The complaint is not the focus stealing the complaint is the lag of the chat application starting. So the problem in this case is electron and all the shit that slack has bolted on on startup because "who cares about start up time, everyone has it on all day."

Both of them are bad

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

#462

Post by dhorthy »

mancerayder wrote: post #277

> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring. Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/lap…

the one good thing about the current ios version is that it is the best it will ever be from this point forward. all future versions will be worse

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

#463

Post by thelastgallon »

thelastgallon wrote: post #449

Incentives. People get promoted, get bonuses based on some shiny new tool they developed. Every year, they create something 'new', claim lots of features. Their managers/directors/VPs also encourage this because they need some 'winning' and 'automation' slides to brag about. Nothing gets solved. In fact, things get worse. The new tool and old tool and oldest tool all coexist with 20 other tools developed for the exac…

Coding has been solved, but for who? Only for those cowboys who create POCs and get big bonuses. The 'product' they make is largely irrelevant. Sure, they can make it faster and claim to be masters of AI. Again, bigly bonuses, because now the incentives are driven by mandates from C-suite/VPs who are desperate to claim successfully using AI. There is very very little that can be realistically solved with AI. People have tried and the first thing they do is replace perfectly working internal search tools with AI or AI chatbots. Think about something like your people portal, for a large company, this would be thousands of document. The AI driven search portals are a million times worse than the earlier full-text-search engines that are usually pretty accurate. After that, they will be lots of dashboards generated for executives. Its as if execs have any clue about the business, they know nothing about the business and now they get thousands of dashboards tracking millions of meaningless metrics.

AI is an enshittification accelerator. And the enshittifiers (individually as people and collectively as companies run by scumbags) are richly rewarded for this 'success'.

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

#464

Post by tedggh »

I don’t think we can objectively say software is getting worse. I don’t expect an appliance website, a car infotainment system and a banking app to be the beacons of software quality and user experience. All those things would probably suck at any point in time.

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

#466

Post by pigeons »

benoau wrote: post #398
formerly_proven wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really look forward to new Fedora releases.

I really look forward to Pop OS updates... but it's because they broke a bunch of stuff and stripped most apps down to their basics.

Including the linux kernel.

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

#467

Post by nxc18 »

entropy47 wrote: post #397
alphazard wrote: post #388

The 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…

There are good PMs out there watching in horror as their peers make changes and features that are obviously doomed (to anybody with a functional brain). I also write as much code as the median engineer on my team (skews junior). Please don't write off the entire profession based on many (most?) being awful - if you work with a good PM some day I promise you will find there is an important point to the job.

I want to agree with this, but I’ve watched the PM discipline, in concert with the even more dastardly MBAs, ruin everything I hold dear.

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

#469

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

Why do you need linux preinstalled on a new computer?

Take a user friendly distro, boot up the installer, accept the defaults on the few questions it asks... done.

It's no more difficult than the first-time configuration MacOS or Windows will walk you through on a new system.

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

#470

Post by customguy »

risyachka wrote: post #359
mancerayder wrote: post #277

> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring. Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/lap…

The only way something can be “solved” if it is eliminated. Otherwise it is never solved.

You can solve a puzzle, but what would "eliminating" a puzzle even mean?
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