201–210 of 260 posts
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…
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…
Just 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.
Computers crashed all the fucking time for dumb bugs. I remember being shocked when I upgraded to XP and could go a full day without a BSOD. Then I upgraded to intel OSX and was shocked that a system could run without ever crashing.
Edit: this isn't to say that these issues today are acceptable, just that broken software is nothing new.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases! I don’t use LLMs.
> It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases! That's not the only price society pays. It makes sense for us to develop the heuristics to detect AI, but the implication of doing so has its own cost. It started out as people avoiding the use of em-dash in order to avoid being mistaken for being AI, for example. Now in the case of OP's observation, it will pressure real humans to not use the fo…
X1 is bullshit to argue about, it’s about X2.
Since the models are so censored and “proper” in their grammar, you can pretty easily stand out
Try 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…
> Try 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. Yes, and now compare a fully-patched Windows 7 and Windows 11. You understand that there aren't just 2 valid points in time for comparison - it's not 2025 and 1995 that are being compared. It's trends of 2020+, or 2015+ > The only thing that has degraded a bit is…
Universal latency regression is a ridiculous claim. For one, 20 years ago it was common to have 1-5 minutes loading time for professional software, I spent way too much time staring at splash screens. Can you imagine a splash screen on a music player? It was a thing too. Nowadays splash screens are nearly forgotten, because even big software starts in seconds. SSDs have nothing to do with it either, the startup reduction time trend started in mid-2000s by big content creation shops such as Adobe, precisely because people were fed up with long startup times and started complaining. Jerky mouse movements, random micro-lags due to hard disk activity and OS inability to schedule I/O properly, it definitely wasn't all smooth and lag-free as some people paint it. MS Teams is pretty much the epitome of bloat, counterpoint would be software like Zed, which is really fluid and optimized for latency, so it's already not universal. Software like MS Word was laggy then and is less laggy now. (and crashes a lot less these days)
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…
We have always had, and always will have, the quality of software that people are willing to pay for.
"Willing AND ABLE" works here though.
The process will be harmful and lazy until someone or something recieves serious consequences for getting it wrong. That's all.
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…
Then I had to get familiar with the new stuff; waterfall, agile whatever.
They literally are all nothing but hacks that violate the basic points of actual project management. (e.g. Projects have a clear end)
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Any business that isn't prepared for the possibility of losing their production database and doesn't have a plan for recovering from that is not a serious business.
The database incident was a single example. Do you really think that most businesses are prepared to handle issues caused by their own bugs, let alone those caused by the software they depend on? That's nothing but fantasy. And your attitude is "they deserve it"? Get real.
But if you have a business, and don't have continuity and recovery plans for software disasters, that's like not having fire insurance on your facility.
Fire insurance (and backups/disaster recovery plans) doesn't mean there won't be disruption, but it makes the disaster survivable, whereas without it your business is probably ended.
And losing a database or a major part of one is as simple as one adminstrator accidentally running "drop database" or "delete from customers" or "rm -rf" in the wrong environment. It happens, I've helped recover from it, and it doesn't take an AI running amok to do it.
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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”
Most importantly, never ever abstract over I/O. Those are the ones that leak out and cause havic.