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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

#231

Post by gkedzierski »

AzN1337c0d3r wrote: post #225
Leherenn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that was over 40y ago. Same thing for the Ariane 5 failure which is a staple of safety-critical classes (at least in Europe), it's not getting any younger. If all the examples you can conjure are decades old*, is it any wonder that people don't really take it seriously? Software power the whole world, and yet the example of critical failure we constantly hear about is close to half a century old? I think the…

> If all the examples you can conjure are decades old They're not ALL the examples I can conjure up. MCAS would probably be an example of a modern software bug that killed a bunch of people. How about the 1991 failure of the Patriot missile to defend against a SCUD missile due to a software bug not accounting for clock drift, causing 28 lives lost? Or the 2009 loss of Air France 447 where the software displayed all s…

In aviation, accidents never happen because of just a single factor. MCAS was mainly an issue in lack of adequate pilot training for this feature, AF447 was complete incompetence from the pilots. (the captain when he returned to the cockpit, quickly realized what was happening, but it was too late)

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

#232

Post by hodgesrm »

palmotea wrote: post #212
hodgesrm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. You're missing the point. In the past bad writing was just bad writing, and it was typically easy to detect. Now the main contribution of AI is bad…

> You're missing the point. In the past bad writing was just bad writing, and it was typically easy to detect.

If AI generated text were well written, would it matter to you? Is it bad to use Grammarly?

I don't see anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to write, as long as writers take the responsibility to ensure the final result is good. Fighting against use of LLMs seems like a fool's errand at this point. Personally I've been using Google Translate for years to help with writing in German, little knowing at the time that it was using transformers under the covers. [0] I'm pretty sure my correspondents would have thanked me had they known. Same applies for text written in English by non-native speakers.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

edit: fixed typo. Just proof this is not an LLM.

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

#233

Post by arwhatever »

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…

The most grating title/text pattern for me is:

1. Stop []!

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

#234

Post by arwhatever »

iamwil wrote: post #221
8s2ngy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been seeing this pattern of text crop up in many places. On LinkedIn, much of my feed is filled with posts of short sentences that follow this exact pattern. What's more, even the replies are obviously AI-generated.

I hear people talk like this on the phone. The one I hear a lot is: "It's not about X, it's about Y1. It's about Y2. It's about Y3." Where Y is usually something humanizing.

Proving or disproving intent is hard, in court trials often taking days of witness testimony and jury deliberation.

These hot-take/title patterns "X is about Y1" are exploiting the difficulty of disproving them.

I often see it in the pattern of "Behavior of Group I Dislike is About Bad Motive."

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

#235

Post by eikenberry »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #27
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 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…

> Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic.

Instead of home wiring, consider network wiring. We've all seen the examples of datacenter network wiring, with 'the good' being neat, labeled and easy to work with and 'the bad' being total chaos of wires, tangled, no labels, impossible to work with.

IE. The people using the datacenter don't care as long as the packets flow. But the others working on the network cabling care about it A LOT. The artistry of it is for the other engineers, only indirectly for the customers.

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

#236

Post by restalis »

pornel wrote: post #63
Tractor8626 wrote: post #10

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.

See "A plea for lean software" by Wirth. It's from 1995 and laments that computers need megabytes of memory for what used to work in kilobytes.

The transition from kilobytes to megabytes is not comparable to the transition from megabytes to gigabytes at all. Back in the kilobytes days, when the engineers (still) had to manage bits and resort to all kind of tricks to somehow make it to something working, a lot of software (and software engineering) aspects left to be desired. Way too many efforts were poured not so much into putting the things together for the business logic as were poured into overcoming the shortcomings of limited memory (and other computing) resource availability. Legitimate requirements for software had to be butchered like Procrustes' victims, so that the software could have a chance to be. The megabytes era accommodated all but high end media software, without having to compromise on their internal build-up. It was the time when things could be properly done, no excuses.

Nowadays' disregard for computing resource consumption is simply the result of said resources getting too cheap to be properly valued and a trend of taking their continued increase for granted. There's simply little to no addition in today's software functionality that couldn't do without the gigabytes levels of memory consumption.

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

#237

Post by palmotea »

hodgesrm wrote: post #232
palmotea wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're missing the point. In the past bad writing was just bad writing, and it was typically easy to detect. Now the main contribution of AI is bad…

> You're missing the point. In the past bad writing was just bad writing, and it was typically easy to detect. If AI generated text were well written, would it matter to you? Is it bad to use Grammarly? I don't see anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to write, as long as writers take the responsibility to ensure the final result is good. Fighting against use of LLMs seems like a fool's errand at this point.…

> If AI generated text were well written, would it matter to you?

Yes, of course.

1) I don't want to waste my time with slop pumped out with a mindless process by someone who doesn't give a shit. That includes turning half an idea into a full essay of bullshit.

2) You have to distinguish between "good writing" and (lets call it) "smooth text construction." One of the big problems with LLMs is they can be used to generate slop that lacks many of the tells you could previously use to quickly determine that you're reading garbage. It's still garbage, just harder to spot so you waste more time.

> I don't see anything inherently wrong with using AI tools to write, as long as writers take the responsibility to ensure the final result is good.

Yeah, but what about the writers who don't? That's what I'm talking about. These tools benefit the bad actors far more than the ones who are trying to do things properly.

> Personally I've been using Google Translate for years to help with writing in German, little knowing at the time that it was using transformers under the covers. [0] I'm pretty sure my correspondents would have thanked me had they known.

Honestly, I think Google Translate is a lot harder to misuse than an LLM chatbot. These things aren't all the same.

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

#238

Post by bulubulu »

SoftTalker wrote: post #145
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…

Numbered lists are an AI smell.

I know a lot of real people using numbered lists in their writing. That's not a decisive feature. Using an emoji for the bullet point is somewhere you definitely need to stop.

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

#239

Post by jjk166 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #203
jjk166 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You couldn't consume gigabytes because that amount of ram didn't exist. You still had apps with the same issues that would eat all your ram. 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 toda…

> You couldn't consume gigabytes because that amount of ram didn't exist.

No, they didn't consume gigabytes because they were written is such a way that they didn't need to. Run one of those programs on a modern computer with gigabytes of ram and it still won't. It was as easy then as ever to write software that demanded more resources than available; the scarcity at the time was just the reason programmers cared enough to fix their bugs.

> You still had apps with the same issues that would eat all your ram.

The worst offenders back then had objectively smaller issues than what would be considered good now.

> 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.

Because XP could handle more faults, not because the programs running on XP were better written.

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

#240

Post by restalis »

kettlecorn wrote: post #98

I've thought a lot about why software doesn't converge on higher quality and I don't know if I've ever come to a satisfying conclusion. The simple statement is that "Quality isn't what sells" and I think there's some truth to that, but I also think quality can sell and theoretically if all other factors are equal higher quality will sell better. What I've had a tough time pinning down precisely is I think there's alm…

"A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it."

From a software design prospective, the functionality that should go into a compiler is code compilation only. Taken it to extreme (as in Unix philosophy), if the code compiles, then the compiler should just build you the binary or fail silently otherwise. The code checking and reporting various aspects of the quality of the code is supposed to be a static code analyzer's job. (In reality, pretty much all compilers we have are doing compilation coupled with some amount of lighter code checking before that, and the static code analyzers left only with the heavier and more exhaustive code checking.) What Rust does is to demand its compiler to perform even more of what a static analyzer is supposed to do. It's a mishmash of two things (which still manage to stay separate things when it's about other programming languages, because that makes sense) and masquerades that as revolution.

So, (even when it's about code in blamed languages like C & C++) the "the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit" by not skipping the static analyzer kind of expensive checks, the kind that Rust happen to make impossible to skip.

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