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The rise of industrial software

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Re: The rise of industrial software

#171

Post by coryrc »

nchmy wrote: post #59
huevosabio wrote: post #13

I've been thinking about this for a while, and largely agree that industralization of software development is what we are seeing. But the emphasis on low quality is misplaced. Take this for example: ``` Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. ``` Industrial systems allow for low quality goods, but also they deliver quality way beyond what can be achieved in artisanal pro…

I generally agree. Industrialization puts a decent floor on quality, at low cost. But it also has a ceiling. Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea. Or I make sourdough bread and it would be very impractical/uncompetitive to start sellin…

Your Toyota Corolla is more reliable than any supercar ever made. Supercar owners just have money to pay people to handle the unreliability.

But reliability isn't the only measure of quality.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#172

Post by jcgl »

the_overseer wrote: post #125
tossandthrow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but decades of feedback, tuning and fixing On the contrary, this is likely the reason why we can disrupt these large players. Experience from 2005 just don't hold that much value in 2025 in tech.

It absolutely does. I cannot believe I am reading this on HN... Do you think the idea of a pointer changed? That you need locks when accessing variables when doing multithreading? That principles like "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept" have changed? In fact, almost nothing changed from 2005 to now in any conceptual form.

I agree with your general point, but Postel’s law definitely isn’t as universally accepted now as in 2005. Obviously its applicability is totally context-dependent. But I would say that there’s a trend to having smaller systems which are stricter with their inputs.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#173

Post by WJW »

throw0101d wrote: post #168
WJW wrote: post #47

This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA pu…

> What software developers actually do is closer to the role of an architect in construction or a design engineer in manufacturing. They design new blueprints for the compilers to churn out. Like any design job, this needs some actual taste and insight into the particular circumstances. That has always been the difficult part of commercial software production and LLMs generally don't help with that. As Bryan Cantrill…

I think what Cantrill is getting at here is that a running program necessarily consists of both code and hardware. If the software is missing, the hardware will be idling. If the hardware is not present, then the software will be just bytes on a storage device. It's only the combination of hardware and software that makes a working system.

What software developers produce is not a machine by itself. It's at most a blueprint for a machine that can be actualized by combining it with specific hardware. But this is getting a bit too philosophical and off track: LLMs can help produce source code for a specific program faster, but they are not very good at determining whether a specific program should be built at all.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#174

Post by handfuloflight »

bsenftner wrote: post #106
npunt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never found a term I liked for this particular concept at the intersection of education & business so I made one up a while back: A Knowledge Pool is the reservoir of shared knowledge that a group of people have about a particular subject, tool, method, etc. In product strategy, knowledge pools represent another kind of moat, and a form of leverage that can be used to grow or maintain market share. Usage: Resour…

The formal term that business people use is "institutional knowledge".

Now it's just... context.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#175

Post by handfuloflight »

K0balt wrote: post #64
ReptileMan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.

Huh. Your statement was probably hyperbole? But just back of the napkin: If we use about 20 TW today, in a thousand years of 5% growth we’d be at about 3x10^34. I think the sun is around 3.8x10^26 watts? That gives us about 8x10^7 suns worth of energy consumption in 1000 years. If we figure 0.004 stars per cubic light-year, we end up in that ballpark in a thousand years of uniform spherical expansion at C. But that a…

He said light cone, so not all of the energy of the sun.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#176

Post by hackable_sand »

why_is_it_good wrote: post #124
gverrilla wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could do a revolution. 100 rowers vs 1 captain - easy. Labor vs capital.

You mean murder, before capital understands its critics are as moraly bankrupt as capital itself, and deploys killbots?

Is this like a Randian roleplay fetish?

Re: The rise of industrial software

#177

Post by choeger »

pyrale wrote: post #48
choeger wrote: post #37

Thing is: Industrialization is about repeating manufacturing steps. You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost. The idea of automation creating a massive amount of software sounds ridiculous. Why would we need that? More Games? Can only be consumed at the pace of the player. Agents? Can be reused once they fulfill a task sufficently. We're probably going t…

> You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost. ...Or so think devs. People responsible for operating software, as well as people responsible for maintaining it, may have different opinions. Bugs must be fixed, underlying software/hardware changes and vulnerabilities get discovered, and so versions must be bumped. The surrounding ecosystem changes, and so, e…

You're describing maintenance of existing software or even existing deployments that's a completely different beast.

I am certain cost can go down there, but that will only compete against SaaS where the marginal cost of adding another customer is already zero.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#178

Post by choeger »

alexjurkiewicz wrote: post #66
choeger wrote: post #37

Thing is: Industrialization is about repeating manufacturing steps. You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost. The idea of automation creating a massive amount of software sounds ridiculous. Why would we need that? More Games? Can only be consumed at the pace of the player. Agents? Can be reused once they fulfill a task sufficently. We're probably going t…

The "industrialisation" concept is an analogy to emphasize how the costs of production are plummeting. Don't get hung up pointing out how one aspect of software doesn't match the analogy.

It's the central point of the metaphor. Software is not constrained by the speed of implementation, it's constrained by the cost of maintenance and adaptation to changing requirements.

If that wasn't the case, every piece of software could already be developed arbitrarily quickly by hiring an arbitrary amount of freelancers.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#179

Post by the_overseer »

tossandthrow wrote: post #144
the_overseer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely does. I cannot believe I am reading this on HN... Do you think the idea of a pointer changed? That you need locks when accessing variables when doing multithreading? That principles like "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept" have changed? In fact, almost nothing changed from 2005 to now in any conceptual form.

The short answer is that these things don't really exist anymore for most (business) applications when you stopped writing it in C. So the things you mention indeed is experience you need to get rid of as you move to other software stacks and other technologies.

And end up writing the usual garbage that takes 2 GB of RAM just for a chat application... No. Acting like those concepts disappeared just because you write Javascript instead of C makes no sense. It still does memory allocation. You still need to manage it. Thinking that the virtual machine/compiler is doing "magic" is exactly what is wrong with most code today.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#180

Post by bluGill »

cinntaile wrote: post #80
bluGill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make them better. It makes them exclusive since only a few could have one.

I still don't know what better means in this context, so I don't understand what your comment adds to the discussion?

Better is debatable. I would say things like quality and value (total costs including fuel) matter and I don't care about who made it. Probably some other things if I thought more. Ymmv.
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