If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

I think the article misses a bit the main focus. For instance:

> My LG fridge started making weird sounds, so I tried to file a warranty claim, through a multi-step form with countless fields. It failed with a submission error at the very end. And I only found out because I looked at the JavaScript console.

Has that JavaScript code been written by AI? It may be more likely that it was written by humans. Well, the design of JavaScript really sucks, the language is both successful and horrible to use, in my opinion. And we have that issue across the board. Most programming languages really suck. C, for instance - that language is an abomination. But it is even more successful than JavaScript. Today I ran into the issue that I can not compile libpng; I keep on bailing out at it unable to find setjmp. About two months ago compiling it worked fine. I most likely did screw something up on my local system but ... the compiler is an idiot. It really does not tell me WHY it can not compile it anymore. Yes, it shows on the commandline that it assumes setjmp to exist but it can not find it. The error messages are pure and bogus. And the whole design of C cascades this horrible crap downwards. The languages that supposedly try to replace C also suck. Go? Yikes. Rust? Even more verbose. C++? Trying to replace C since decades. There is a ton of inertia.

The whole stack is utter gutter trash really. Everything is build up atop layers of complexity that in turn are not really well designed at all. Meanwhile more and more software is added. Now I need python due to meson, and meson is better than what came before. But it adds complexity. And has its own problems too. AI does not really fix anything here, it just AI slop spams on top of this. We kind of lost big at engineering. People are in general also not critical anymore. The design of most programming language shows that - including ruby, but ruby is barely used, so really the issue is mostly about C. The fact that C is so successful makes this even worse, since nothing replaces it. We just keep on adding more and more. Or we go the C++ way - and make it about 50x as complex. Or Rust - that syntax is even worse than C syntax which is also horrible. Of course even with great syntax and a great language, horrible software will be written. Companies want to offer a billion useless features. Many years ago I thought it was cool if my fridge tells me what I should order. Since the day of companies spying on people, I go back to simplicity at all times.

I use KDE on Bazzite. It has a couple killer UI features over Windows. It can label bluetooth devices (so I can have blue dualsense controller, pink dualsense controller, white dualsense controller, etc.). No clue why this doesn't work in Windows lol. Also the super/win + arrow keys are more predictable, super pgdn is minimize and super pgup is maximize, so I never find myself accidentally minimizing windows when trying to move them to a corner. My wife was able to easily install and play the Sims with all her mods as well. I also use Bazzite specifically because it's atomic - so when I make the mistake of giving into temptation and updating shit once every month or so, if it's broken I can just revert it.

But I will say I've had a ton of failure to wake up from power saving issues (resolved by just disabling pretty much every power saving feature, which I was gonna eventually do anyway because I want to be able to remote into the machine), and VLC can cause the UI to lock up because of some XWayland nonsense that they're still trying to fix (I just use Haruna, KDE's default mpv-based player, and it's mostly fine). It's a little silly and was quite frustrating that Linux is still dealing with this shit. A more minor (but still irritating) issue is that each taskbar has its own set of pinned applications (instead of just being identical like in Win10/Win11), so if I change the order on one I need to manually go change it on the others.

Overall, I like it because it's good for development and creating other stuff, the filesystem is fast as fuck (way better than WSL) it's obviously less actively antagonistic than Windows 11, Photoshop has gotten worse so I've switched to Krita which works great in KDE, and I've not been surprised negatively by anything after dealing with the previous paragraph's issues, but a non-technical user might struggle to deal with maintaining it.

Amazon has a big problem with "unifying" products that are in fact not the same thing.

At one point I was looking through editions of the Arabian Nights and I noticed that, while the "kindle version" linked from the page for the paperback of one edition was an unrelated book, an actual kindle version of the edition I was looking at did exist elsewhere on the site.

I was annoyed enough that I opened a chat with customer support and asked them which of the two ebooks (one linked as "the kindle version of edition X", but with a different translator, title, cover art, etc; one not linked to the paperback at all, except for the identical translator, cover art, etc...) was the kindle version of the paperback.

A few days later, the links had been fixed, and the "kindle version" link on the paperback's page went to the kindle version of the same book!

people have been complaining about software going downhill ever since hand crafted assembler was replaced with C and a compiler. it's the classic "old man yells at clouds".

It's really not that bad. KDE is perfectly usable by default. More so than the only options you get on macOS or Windows. And, if you are so inclined, you can spend that extra effort to make it sing just to you. So, the hyperbole here is really not warranted.