> Stage 1: Denial (2018-2020) "Memory is cheap, optimization is expensive"
I'm not sure if this first premise is right. Optimizing later on makes sense to me and isn't that expensive IMO (this can vary though)
The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
141–150 of 260 posts
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#142I love the idea of high quality code. I do, however, dismiss the energy efficiency issue.
> Data centers already consume 200 TWh annually.
That's 7.2 x 10^16 joules
Some estimates suggest that's low. Let's multiply by 5. Annually, that's
3.6 x 10^17 joules
The total radiant power of the sun that hits the Earth's atmosphere is about 174 PW, and about 47% of that lands on the surface. Even with the most drastic global warming models, approximately 100% of that is radiated away at the same time. Evidence: we're not charred embers. So the Earth's power budget, at the surface, is about 81 PW. Annually, that's
2.6 × 10^24 joules
Global annual oil production is about 3 x 10^10 barrels, that's
1.8 x 10^20 joules
So, the data centers consume 0.2% of the global petroleum budget and 1.4 × 10^-7 of the planet's power budget.
The digital economy is about 15% of global GDP, so I submit tech is thoroughly on the right side of their energy conservation balance sheet normalized against other industries and there are other verticals to focus your energy concerns on (e.g. internal combustion engines, including Otto, Brayton, Rankin, and Diesel cycle engines). Among serious people trying to solve serious problems, you would do your credibility a favor by not expending so many words and thus so much reader time on such a miniscule argument.
If you want to talk about energy related to code, take the total power consumption of the software engineer's life, and find a way to big-O that. I'm willing to bet they contribute more to global warming driving than all their compute jobs combined.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>A piece of garbage like crowdstrike or microsoft teams still wouldnt be tolerated in a startup's product but tech behemoths get away with it. Agree, but it's always been this way. Oracle, everything IBM, Workday, everything Salesforce, Windows before XP. Most software is its own little monopoly. Yes, you could ditch Teams for Zoom but is it really the same? It's not like buying a sedan where there are literally 20+…
>Most software is its own little monopoly. Yes, you could ditch Teams for Zoom but is it really the same?
I worked for a company where people did that en masse because it was genuinely better. Microsoft then complained to their assets within the company who promptly banned zoom "for security reasons". IT then remote uninstalled it from everybody's workstation.
That's paid software eviscerating the competition, which was free and better.
A month later teams was hit with 3 really bad zero days and nobody said a damn thing.
So, more secure, too.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because no one died. All the safety critical industries are already heavily regulated. E.g. check out for example standards like DO-178C (for software in airborne systems), where you even have to _prove_ correctness of every tool and dependency you use, on top of accountability and traceability of every single line of code in your own product.
Not to be pedantic, but people have died from software programming bugs being a primary contributing factor. One example: Therac-25 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 )
I only meant this in relation to Crowdstrike incident that was mentioned in the comment I replied to.
The standards and regulations in those other industries have changed dramatically (for the better) since Theract-25.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#145Unrelated 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…
Numbered lists are an AI smell.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#146I 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.
Every time someone says this I ask them “what is your solution for maintainable software architecture?” And they say “what is software architecture? I just write code”
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think another part of this, is that Tech is perhaps the only industry that hasn't quite gotten over itself yet. Writing code is artistic the same way plumbing is artistic. Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic. Writing code is artistic the same way HVAC is artistic. Which is to say, yes, there is satisfaction to be had, but companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too man…
I don't see working for most of my employers as "artistic." I do see it as more of a craft than a typical trade. There are just too many ways to do things to compare it to e.g. an electrician. Our industry does not have (for better or for worse) a "code" like the building trades or even any mandated way to do things, and any attempts to impose (cough cough Ada, etc.) that have been met with outright defiance and cont…
> I do see it as more of a craft than a typical trade. There are just too many ways to do things to compare it to e.g. an electrician.
There are sooo many ways to get electricity from one point to another. The reason that a lot of those options are no longer used is not because they don't exist but because they were legislated out. For example, if you want to run wild just run a single "hot" wire to all your outlets and connect each outlet's neutral to the nearest copper plumbing. Totally esoteric, but it would deliver electricity to appliances just fine. Safety is another matter.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#148Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago. The overall non-cherrypicked quality and especially security were actually a lot worse across the board, and stuff that won't fly today such as segfaults/crashes and lost data was pretty normal. There was a point in time (several, actually) when installing Windows X…
saying "windows 98 was bad too" is just an example that Microsoft has always had poor code quality. Back in the day Linux, for all its flaws, was generaly a lot more stable on the same hardware. microsoft has a lot to answer for after 50 years of normalizing poor quality software
Not sure about this. All OSes were janky and buggy, Linux desktop up until at least late 2000s (I've been using it since ~2000), early Mac OS X, I don't even want to talk about classic Mac OS which was an abomination. Software quality and user experience was notoriously worse than it is today. This applies to everything - I've lost a ton of work to bugs in ZBrush, Maya, Word, FL Studio, backup software, and more.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. Personally I've observed an increase of major system and security failures in the past 5 years, especially failures that impact very large tech companies. You could measure these public failures and see if frequency or impact has increased.
The number of security failures now is nothing close to the golden age of malware in the 90s/early 2000s. The #1 security exploit today is tricking the user into letting you in, because attacking the software is too hard.
You make a strong point, but now we also have smartphones, ioT devices and cloud networks EVERYWHERE and there is tons of shared open source code (supply chain attacks), and there are tons of open-source attacker tools,vuln databases and exploits (see nuclei on github).
Yes, many/most systems now offer some form of authentication, and many offer MFA, but look at the recent Redis vulns -- yet there are thousands of Redis instances vulnerable to RCE just sitting on the public internet right now.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#150I 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…
We have always had, and always will have, the quality of software that people are willing to pay for.
That would be the case under market conditions where buyers are making rational decisions with perfect knowledge based on all available choices. Does that sound like the system we have? To me, reality seems more like a small set of oligopolies or effective monopolies, byzantine ownership structures and a pursuit of short term profits pushing future costs elsewhere as externalities.