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The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

techtrenches.substack.com

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Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#131

Post by dorkypunk »

ealexhudson wrote: post #57
fzeindl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way. I suspect when Moore‘s law ends and we cannot build substantially faster machines anymore.

Moore's law has kind of ended already though, and maybe has done for a few years, and even if you can make a chip which is faster there's a basic thermodynamics problem running it at full tilt for any meaningful period of time. I would have expected that to have impacted software development, and I don't think it particularly has, and there's also no obvious gain in e.g. compilers or other optimization which would ha…

Probably architecture changes (x86 has a lot of historic baggage that difficults newer designs) and also more specialized hardware in the CPU, probably this might also be one of the reasons Apple went this way with the M Silicon

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#132

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jayd16 wrote: post #111
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got your time ranges wrong. Almost exactly 20 years ago I worked for a company that did dashboards for analyzing and managing call centre traffic. The most important metric wasn't "how happy customers are" or "how many calls served" it was: "how many calls did we avoid having a human agent get involved for?" The metric of success was the degree to which they could avoid using expensive human labour and…

What part of that is inconsistent with what I said? Over a long period of time, including 20 years ago, the trajectory of cultural value has been going from consistency to usually acceptable but at least it's cheap. It wasn't started by AI but slop is the next stop.

I'm saying the experience sucked back then, too. I don't see it as worse, frankly.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#133

Post by cindyllm »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #94
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using phrasing like admitted anthropomorphizes it way too much.

It boggles my mind that folks continue to act that AIs are reliable narrators of their internal state despite all evidence to the contrary. The best I can figure is that too many people’s salaries depend on the matrix multiplier made of sand somehow manifesting a soul any day now.

[dead]

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#134

Post by yojo »

pdntspa wrote: post #113
ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

It's hilarious just how much of a witchhunt on AI is kicked off from a bunch of vague heuristics. Writing this as someone who likes using em dash and now I have to watch that habit because everyone is obsessed with sniffing out AI. Cliched writing is definitely bad. I guess I should be happy that we are smashing them one way or another.

I don't want to take the time writing up a cogent response to an article someone didn't bother taking the time to write. With this particular article, there were a couple of points I wanted to respond to, before I realized there was no human mind behind them.

I've always liked the HN community because it facilitates an intelligent exchange of ideas. I've learned a lot trawling the comments on this site. I don't want to see the energy of human discourse being sucked up and wasted on the output of ChatGPT. Aggressively flagging this stuff is a sort of immune response for the community.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#135

Post by rjmunro »

pydry wrote: post #30
codeulike wrote: post #8

Hes right that cloudstike was terrible incompetence but I find it hard to worry about the memory leak stats. If lots of software leaks memory these days its because people have accepted that and its probably not economic to trace and fox those bugs. A lot of software is disposable or transient these days, like an app you only use twice a month

Everyone else in this thread is missing that crowdstrike level bug would have taken down the company in the past. I had a friend practically scream at his C level management after the crowdstrike bug that it should be ripped out because it was making the company less safe. They were deaf to all arguments. Why? Insurance mandated crowdstrike. Still. Even now. This isnt really about software it is about a concentration…

The other way to look at Crowdstrike is that it prevented probably thousands of attacks by ransomware and other adversaries. Then it had a bug which meant you had to visit your computer and manually reboot it, with no data loss or leakage.

Would you rather have to deal with criminals who have invaded your systems wanting ransoms with no guarantee they will restore the data, or not leak private information, or would you rather have to reboot your machines with a complete understanding of what happened and how?

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#136

Post by sciencejerk »

I would argue that non-safety-critical Software can be sloppy, and continues to be so, because errors do not kill thousands of people.

I would imagine the quality bar for safety-critical Software is quite a bit higher...although I do hear about Software quality incidents in the aviation and transportation industries from time to time...

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#137

Post by marcosdumay »

dlcarrier wrote: post #65
ealexhudson wrote: post #3

I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java. 2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few…

I blame software updates. That's when software went from generally working on release to not at all. Agile management methods set up a non-existent release method called "waterfall" as a straw man, where software isn't released until it works, practically eliminating technical debt. I'm hoping someone fleshes it out into a real management method. I'm not convinced this wasn't the plan in the first place, considering…

> a non-existent release method called "waterfall" as a straw man

The person that invented the name never saw it, but waterfall development is extremely common and the dominant way large companies outsource software development even today.

The only thing that changed now is that now those companies track the implementation of the waterfall requirements in scrum ceremonies. And yes, a few more places actually adopted agile.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#138

Post by morshu9001 »

ealexhudson wrote: post #3

I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java. 2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few…

I don't think software has gotten worse, quite the opposite, but Java and OOP were mistakes.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#140

Post by jayd16 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #132
jayd16 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of that is inconsistent with what I said? Over a long period of time, including 20 years ago, the trajectory of cultural value has been going from consistency to usually acceptable but at least it's cheap. It wasn't started by AI but slop is the next stop.

I'm saying the experience sucked back then, too. I don't see it as worse, frankly.

There have always been things that sucked. The difference, in my mind, is that we now dismiss the idea quality ever existed, an impossible hypothetical.
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