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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?

#511

Post by lokar »

xingped wrote: post #331
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…

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…

I remember when OS vendors shipped à la carte patches. You could pick the ones you wanted (to some extent).

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

#512

Post by davkan »

charcircuit wrote: post #473
Gigachad wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes for most games where glitches end up becoming protected features. Being fun is more important than being correct.

How do you measure fun? People will always rush to that excuse if it's not properly defined. And not everyone finds the same things fun. Especially if you are looking to try and 10x your audience.

Most won’t fix bugs in non-competitive games are things that don’t prevent players from engaging the intended gameplay loop and are unlikely to be encountered randomly. Who cares if you can endlessly pickpocket that one npc in oblivion. No one but the people who want to exploit will ever be affected and why stop them if that’s what they want.

In competitive games unintended mechanics are much more frequently patched but there are plenty of examples that are straight up iconic. Wave dashing in melee, magnum damage in Halo CE, sword cancelling in halo 2, b-hopping and surfing in CS.

And when you get to games like mmos where saving time is of major value glitches are like gifts. I am still mad they patched out logout skips in classic wow.

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

#513

Post by charcircuit »

Gigachad wrote: post #474
charcircuit wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you measure fun? People will always rush to that excuse if it's not properly defined. And not everyone finds the same things fun. Especially if you are looking to try and 10x your audience.

TNT duping is a good example. It’s basically impossible to accidentally run in to this glitch, but the community has built tons of mechanisms around using it and generally like it. Patching it out would be more “correct” but serve to only limit user creativity and inventions.

TNT duping is a classic example of how players will optimize the fun out of the game if you give them a chance. Your claim that people won't accidentally run into is not true as it only takes one YouTube tutorial to discover it. Many popular farm designs rely on it so it is not hard to stumble upon it. Remember this is a game where people had to use third party sites to figure out how to discover how to craft anything. I don't think it's fair to discount discovering things on 3rd party sites.

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

#514

Post by viceconsole »

chongli wrote: post #265
ghusto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can not think of a single scenario where stealing focus would be desirable. Also, the presumption that I'm going to wait around for 5+ seconds whilst an opens is unrealistic.

That’s easy: a proper emergency. Let’s say you’re controlling a piece of machinery with an app in the background and the machine starts on fire. Wouldn’t it make sense for the app to steal focus so it can show you some alarms (in addition to audible alarms which you may not hear because they’re in another room).

Having actually worked with industrial machinery, the proper UI for this is 1) unimpeded view of machine and 2) big red physical emergency stop button.

If you're relying on focus stealing or popups or notifications to tell you when your equipment is on fire, you're doing it wrong.

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

#516

Post by j16sdiz »

voakbasda wrote: post #489
behnamoh wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, we're talking about updates to the OS, not users messing around and shoving a stick in their bike spokes.

Choose a niche distro, deal with niche update issues.

Choose a major distro, deal with poettering non-sense.

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

#517

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

Part of me wants to agree with you; I've seen a lot of lousy PMs in my career. But when placed in the driver's seat with the same mandate to bring in more customers and revenue (or else), I've also seen developers drive products straight into the ground just as hard.

It's a nice fantasy about nerds being able to do better at everyone else's but that's all it is, a fantasy.

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

#518

Post by yesnomaybe »

tmoertel wrote: post #475
linzhangrun wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Fedora user, I can say very clearly that Fedora is also very buggy...

Counterpoint: I have been running Fedora Linux on multiple systems for about two decades, including on my daily drivers, and it's been pretty much solid.

I have been on fedora 6 months now, done the upgrade from 43 to 44. All went well. Took all scare away from me. Admittedly, I run a more sophisticated ZFS boot manager (ZBM) setup and snapshot my entire OS (root FS) before any updates or upgrades. That helps but I was really impressed with the 43->44 being so effortless.

Updates only annoy me here, not scare me like they do in macOS or iOS.

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

#519

Post by vouaobrasil »

bodge5000 wrote: post #322
gyomu wrote: post #291

You can build software fast, but the more time you take the more you can be confident about it being correct. This was true already before AI code generation, but AI code generation means the definition of “fast” has shifted like crazy. An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in t…

> An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. From what I've seen, I don't think so if we're talking about like-for-like quality. Maybe as an absolute best case scenario, but more typically it's more like you can build in an hour with AI whereas without AI it might take you 2 or 3. Even thats highly task dependant, and doesn't scale as you'd expect (eg 1 hour == 2 hours, but 1…

> From what I've seen, I don't think so if we're talking about like-for-like quality. Maybe as an absolute best case scenario, but more typically it's more like you can build in an hour with AI whereas without AI it might take you 2 or 3.

The real problem is that the current paradigm in software design is to aim for the bottom of the barrel or a minimum working thing that can make some money and then move onto the next thing. I think in a way AI is a direct outgrowth of that mentality, because so little emphasis is placed on the final 5% of polish that brings software to the level of amazing.

It's much more evident in photography, which is what I started doing after I quit software. You can see that people are editing photos faster and better with AI, at least at first glance. But the end result is almost always sloppy compared to someone who takes time to think about their edit. I think that basically characterizes AI: yes, it makes things faster (or so I'm told, I've never used an LLM), but it also SHIFTS the emphasis onto rapid prototyping of superficial things.

Can those things be polished? Maybe. But it doesn't change the fact that less and less polishing will be done and people will focus more on creating new, superificial things in the long-term and we'll lose a lot of potentially great, hand-crafted things. Not to mention that AI adoption will likely accelerate even more levels of frameworks, which in turn means more hardware upgrades.

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

#520

Post by froggit »

moron4hire wrote: post #292
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…

> 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. What? That has nothing to do with KDE. And Ubuntu is one of the happy paths for driver support. The problem is squarely on either NVidia or overly pretentious commitment to FOSS and only FOSS.

It's been fairly well known for years that nvidia only supports linux gaming as an afterthought. In fact, if you'd read the whole post you'd have seen where they said:

"I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do."

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