Talking about "software quality collapse", this blog post with 1 image ships 9mb of JS, 1mb of CSS spread over 14 files, makes 177 requests, takes 4 seconds to load on an M1 MBP, and completely screws up the scrollbar.
The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
151–160 of 260 posts
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#152This seriously reads as "old man yells at cloud". Hardware constraints are not the same as 30 years ago. Processing power and memory keeps getting cheaper. It will be fine
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#153Unrelated 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.
It's not a witchhunt for AI. It's a witchhunt for bad writing.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#154I 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…
> 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 been dead for a long time. The doubling rate of transistors is now drastically below Moore's prediction.
We're adding transistors at ~18%/year. That's waaaaay below the ~41% needed to sustain Moore's law.
Even the "soft" version of Moore's law (a description of silicon performance vs. literally counting transistors) hasn't held up. We are absolutely not doubling performance every 24 months at this point.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#155Just false nostalgia memory. 20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.
How is that not better? If you could do it without consuming gigabytes back in the day, and now you can't, something must have gotten worse. The cost of consuming gigabytes has gone down, but being able to tolerate a worse situation doesn't mean the situation isn't worse.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#156The fact that software quality plays zero role in commercial software engineering is one of the reasons why I think LLMs will easily eat our lunch. Bugs simply don't matter.
People have been developing neural networks since the 70's, and there's been two major hurdles to their usefulness for software development:
1. They require gigabytes to terabytes of training data.
2. A non-trivial percentage of output data is low confidence.
The first problem requires tens to hundreds of gigabytes of training data.
This first problem not only requires the slow but predictable increase in processing power and data storage capabilities that were unachievable until recently, but is also only possible because open-source software has majorly caught on, something that was hoped for but not a given early in AI development.
The second problem means that the output will be error prone, without significant procedural processing of the output data that is a lot of work to develop. I never would have thought that software writing by neural networks would be competitive, not because of effective error control, but because the entire field of software development would be so bad at what they do (https://xkcd.com/2030/) that error-prone output would be competitive.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#157Unrelated 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 seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#158Just false nostalgia memory. 20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.
There's almost no product or piece of software that I use today that doesn't have at least 2 bugs that I run into on a daily basis. Every website, web app, mobile app, console app, etc, they all have clearly user-affecting bugs. And nearly every one of those makes it hard for me to diagnose or report the bugs. I spent at least 15 to 30 minutes every day working around bugs so I can live my life. We have a vastly diff…
I was a software developer, and have some idea where this comes from. Keeping track of multiple versions of software to separate bug fixes from new features is hard, but calling whatever is in version control on the first Friday of every month "version N+1" is easy. Back when users had to pay for a stack of floppies or CDs to get a new version, you had to give them a compelling reason to do so. When it's nearly impossible for them to prevent the new version from being auto-installed, you don't.
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#159I recently experienced bad software at an airport that meant the wait in the passport queue was longer than the flight . I was in an airport recently waiting in the immigration queue for the automated passport gates - they had like 15 - of which 12 showed a red light and what looked like some C# error message on the screen ( comm problem talking to the camera ). As I waited in the very long queue, another of the gree…
I see. So you're saying you were also in Terminal 2 at Heathrow?
Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
#160The original Supaplex game is 287 kB ( https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/supaplex ). It was written in Assembly. Its remake on Steam (precisely the same levels) weights around 200 MB. Not sure what goes there, but I bet there is more than one wrapper.
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