> Why it has worked flawlessly since the first iPod with a monochrome screen and quarter of computing power of modern watch, but can’t be done in a flagship product of the most advanced operating system in the world?
Because of the mythical man-month.
Apple's operating systems have grown from just iOS/macOS to include ipadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, audioOS with a myriad of new capabilities. They are also behind the scenes migrating a lot of older Objective-C code to multi-platform SwiftUI which explains why Music.app in particular has seen so many regressions.
Now their development teams have grown but not proportional to the overall scope. And that's not going to change because teams simply can't scale linearly for ever and Apple likes smaller teams. So there are inevitably going to be far more times where quality ebbs and flows as priority shifts.
But hey that answer is only a paragraph and not a provocative answer about society collapsing, men getting weaker or some other incoherent nonsense.
I just wish everybody and all the shareholders could freaking understand this. Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap.
Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately and makes it hard to be familiar with their actual range of products in tangible way
>Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap.
It's interesting that Orwell got this one wrong: turns out that endless war isn't necessary as a sink for meaningless production after all. We can do that just fine on our own.
Just because it's such an important and correct quote.
> War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
> This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
> This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
To be fair this was the case all the way until world war 2 which was ended on the Japanese side by nuclear weapons. Since the age of nuclear, it is no longer possible to have minor conflicts between super powers, only mutually assured destruction.
Meanwhile Russia can't generate domestic demand. They got their GDP growth from their war industry.
> Since the age of nuclear, it is no longer possible to have minor conflicts between super powers, only mutually assured destruction.
Its not only possible, its happened multiple times, but downplaying it (Syria recently) or outright pretending it wasn't happening when both sides were fully aware (Korean war air combat) have been part of managing escalation risk.
WW2 "not ended on the Japanese side by nuclear weapons", it ended when U.S. bombed out of existence 2 whole Japanese cities with nuclear weapons and with subsequent defeat and subordination of Japan witch to this day is puppet of U.S.
Since then U.S. waging wars and launder money out of pockets of tax payers into conflict zones it created and back into its own industrial military complex. Here is some punchy whataboutism for your, deal with it.
Maybe they think they are. But they still have to live in the world full of products that are worse than they need to be. In a world that is spiraling into derpification all you can buy is crap that you have to then fix with more crap.
Economists: The shareholders only care about return on their investments.
Shareholders: I would prefer to not watch my kid die of leukemia. And it would be nice not to have to replace my dishwasher every three years. And while we are at it...
Exactly! I so often think about this. I don't know anything about sociology or economics or statistics to even have the words to meaningfully phrase my concern, but can give examples.
First, to make it easier to reason about, assume that with any given thing, what you go along with becomes commonplace and is done by everyone, all the time -- and if you resist, it is not done by anyone. (On smaller scales, especially 1-on-1 relationships, this might be literally true, so)
So, for example, you can increase profits a bit by making your website take 2 seconds longer to load for the benefit of JavaScript fuckery. Never mind privacy, just load times. Now, in the universe where everyone mirrors your actions, now every website you load takes 2 seconds longer to load. In some cases that means going from 20 seconds to 22, so no big deal... but HN goes from 0.1s to 2.1s, hah. Can you imagine how much time that would take up, for maybe not even that big amount money, that can't buy you time?
Or advertising, propaganda, etc. Yeah, you can sell your thing for more, or to people who don't really need it or would be better off without it... but unless you have a huge corporation, you don't even have that many products, yet now you live in a world full of advertising, and the pollution, waste of energy, and bad choices of people you love, or maybe people who end up hurting you because of the shit choices they made based on propaganda.
You can make "sponsored content", sure. But now philosophy and deep thought are dead, because everybody else is lacing whatever they say with a nod to some sponsor.
I really wish I could describe what feels like this hugely important thing that is kind of invisible to us, because we have nothing to compare it to, or the time or resources to carve out a large enough space in which to be different and then compare the results. If we only could see (I can't, it's more like a hunch, something I can't put my finger on but also not shake off) how all these things add up, with a kind of bird's eye view...
I imagine it would look like a local optimum, right next to a HUGE optimum. Like thirsty people fighting over a stone to suck on, next to a lake with clear, fresh water, unbeknownst to them.
I get you. Your image at the end is hauntingly vivid.
This is what government is for. Should be for: should be doing.
I don't mean at the micro-level of regulating website loading times: that would be ludicrous. I mean at the macro-level of guiding society away from harmful equilibria. I can't suggest policies which will accomplish all of these, and reasonable people can disagree about implementations. That's OK: so long as we are aligned on that purpose we can iterate on attempted solutions. With that said, here are some harmful equilibria to address, and at least a top-level approach to take, or goal to set:
- Carbon (and other pollution and waste) taxes which internalize costs that are currently born by everyone, in order to profit a few.
- Privacy protections which make business-models built around surveillance and micro-targeted advertising impossible.
- Corporate governance and financial market models which discourage short-term "line goes up" thinking.
- Tax structures and business regulations which encourage research and development instead of stock buy-backs, and increasing workers' wages instead of executive compensation.
I'd bet that at least a couple of those would improve website loading times, too.
One thing I noticed that went by the wayside during my lifetime was companies basically stopped paying to train workers. Would be good to implement tax policies that strongly encourage companies to go back to doing that.
I agree with all the complaints about the state of a lot of software today but users don’t care enough to start boycotting companies that make apps in Electron. Until they do shareholders won’t give a toss.
Users don’t know any better. Most people in the public have just accepted that their computers get slower over time as hardware degradation or something and then go buy another one.
If the average person understood how shit tier software is today, they would care.
I think people care when things beyond their control force them to needlessly spend thousands of dollars.
Nobody likes dropping a couple Gs on a new laptop because the software has become so utterly shitty that their 2 year old I7 and GTX 3090 with 32 gigs of ram can no longer run a web browser.
I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care.
> I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care.
Funny take. I generally have a punk attitude towards marketing. As a man, the fashion world (the most fickle consumer industry) doesn’t prey too strongly on my buying habits. But given all that, I was still hit with a fugue state when I had to replace my iPhone 5s—in 2020. Haha. I’m still on that replacement, an iPhone SE. But Oh Man was I struggling with the top of the line envy. Making up scenarios where I _needed_ these products.
With all that said, I think the corps are happy to have both. All the appearances of new New NEW and for anyone who’s paying attention, we will upgrade when necessary. But in between are a bunch of people who can scrape up 2k for a new phone every year. Like buying a Cadillac when you can’t afford a house.
Don't even get me started about how ridiculously big (phabletized) the standard is quickly becoming. Its like these people are all begging for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and have kangaroo pouches for pockets. Also the camera fixtures are beyond inelegant and annoying even on a solely practical basis. I literally have nothing good to say about most phones nowadays. How much cpmputing and camera power does the average person truly need and should it start at like $1500-2000 for the "pleasure"?
There is no requirement to upgrade every year. While I agree with you, companies are dumb machines that respond very slowly to customers. Sure, they even started this by suggesting these quick release cycles in the first place, but consumers bought right in.
I might not have been super clear that I was referring to the production/marketing cycle, like, yes, I believe it in the personal context as well but my main focus is the actual cycle in which Apple designs/produces/markets "new" products (turnaround)
This a byproduct of a much larger issue that affects all faculties, not just the tech sector. This won't change unless we as a nation choose a different economic model.
Umm. The line between compound interest and simple interest is both larger and smaller than one would expect.
The thing that capitalists get wrong is to simply project the present into the future, forever.
Let's say you get 30% returns in 10 years, that is 2.65% interest. But we might be talking about a one time investment that only existed for those ten years. What happens before and after can diverge arbitrarily. Meanwhile a capitalist would just keep projecting 2.65% interest into all eternity, giving ridiculous numbers within 1000 years.
The thing about simple interest is that it gets consumed. No exponential growth necessary.
Nobody ever got promoted for saying "hey, this is good enough, let's just leave it alone and coast." The incentives for changing things that work go far beyond just management.
I just wish they would stop moving around the UI deck chairs. Seriously. In Ventura (or the previous release, who knows, I don't keep track, why should I, it's a waste, I honestly care zero), they completely reorganized how System Settings is laid out. Like why in tarnation is that even necessary? There absolutely NO WAY that some UI study or UX principles led to the redesign of this thing. It was just done on a whim (well, a corporate whim, some PM and their little team got a big boost to their egos to make some kind of impact).
Stop taking away my skills. I have to relearn everything all the time, for no damn reason.
Settings was re-designed to align macOS to iOS, ipadOS and visionOS.
So that people who have bought an iPhone and buying a Mac for the first time can change their computer settings in the same way they are used to on their phone.
That’s a good point, yet one I find disappointing. I believe settings is one of the biggest pain points of iOS. It’s extraordinarily unintuitive, which can be seen comparing it to settings on Android. I find the Android settings a lot easier to navigate. This would have been a great time to rewrite the iOS settings rather than adopting its style elsewhere.
It’s as if knowing how to use Apple products efficiently has developed into requiring a very specific domain knowledge, and Apple continues to develop for these pseudo experts that know the quirks rather than improving the intuitiveness and usability for those less familiar.
This is interesting all the same but are you seriously arguing they should have designed iOS Settings in the likeness of MacOS Settings? Do you know if there's any like artist renderings or something that could help visually/graphically represent that? Just can't see it but I'm open to entertain it if there's something to demonstrate its validity...
Worst case scenario, it should basically always be customizable. This shit where they block of the defaults:write option until the next OS version if ever or there's a blowup in the media/scrutiny or they pull the bullshit SIP card when nobody fucking needs AppleTV or AppleNews or iMessage etc on their Mac, yeah. I wish MacOS would get to Microsoft levels of uniquity so various Justice Departments around the world could cut the cord on this horseshit.
Almost every setting can be automated via `defaults write`, so there's barely never a need to even look at the system preferences/settings UI. [1] lists many of them.
Is there a way to make sure you can automate shutdown of your Mac where its like non-negotiable and doesnt matter if its closed and theres no stupid menu that can screw it up? Like not sleep or hibernate but just shut down?
> But hey that answer is only a paragraph and not a provocative answer about society collapsing, men getting weaker or some other incoherent nonsense.
But The Mythical Man Month is about communication/knowledge transfer, just like the linked article and it’s video.
You also said a some regular stuff about teams and schedule pressure that weren’t novel at the time of The Mythical Man Month.
e: I understand not liking the style of blow’s doomsaying, or titling a blog post with a reference to a meme that gets some people salty. But those aren’t the thesis of either piece.
If the title bears no relation to the thesis, that's the author's fault, not the readers' for misinterpreting.
And this article isn't about communication and knowledge transfer, it's about the evils of abstraction. I'm not sold on the idea that layers of abstraction are always going to be problematic—most of civilization is built on layers upon layers of abstraction, with different people specializing in different layers. That makes things less simple than they were before the layers were added, sure, but it doesn't inherently make everything worse.
> migrating a lot of older Objective-C code to multi-platform SwiftUI which explains why Music.app in particular has seen so many regressions
Sorry, but this is objectively not true, having been subscribed to Apple Music for years prior to SwiftUI. It was always extremely bad relative to Spotify and the first regressions started when Apple dropped the standard iTunes UI in favor of embedded webviews.
And to be clear, the issue wasn't "web tech is bad", it was that Apple Music design team has been rudderless and disorganized for years.
Also, the FAANG obsession with efficiency, layoffs, etc. will potentially make it much worse in the next decade. It's been evident with Google products for quite some time.
To be fair, I think Google's software looked just as bloated, half-baked, directionless and so on its fat and happy low-layoffs era. The firing spasm certainly doesn't seem to have brought any improvements, though ...
I'm not sure to what extent that was really true before, but it definitely became false in 2023: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-emplo... . And it seems as if the cause was the sudden vibe shift to "kick the lazy bums" in the tech-chief locker room—apparently sparked by Musk's Twitter firings, of all things, as if that looked like a smart model to emulate.
True entire world has this failure mode - we pretend that infinite growth exists and expect large successful companies to do the same or better every year, ignoring the diminishing returns and exponential R&D costs involved with almost everything.
After 100 years, a 0.5% efficiency or emissions reduction gain on the internal combustion engine costs likely as much as the first 20-50 years of exponential gains made. And so Volkswagen cheats.
Moores law is strained so we do wild branch prediction to meet the expectations and eventually roll back entire processor generations with mitigations. But executives got their bonus already at that point
The enshittification is built into our world as a result.
Somewhat off topic, but whenever the "Good times create weak men" idiocy comes up I always think of this F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about WWI:
> "That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers."
> “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
> “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
Fitzgerald's thesis in this passage is that the western powers' prosperity in the 1890s and 1910s - and, more broadly, the social capital built by their national identies across the entire 19th century - created a generation "tough" enough to endure their unspeakable mutual slaughter on the western front.
If he is correct, then it refutes the proposition that prosperous societies are "soft".
That quote seems to support the exact opposite of your opinion, that you need a generation properly raised to tough it out, and the spoiled post-war generation is too soft.
Weird title (one of these "true but wrong" things humans keep doing when they reason by analogy), but the post itself meshes with things I've been saying for a few years in order to explain the otherwise inexplicably awful and continually worsening quality of software coming out of companies with effectively infinite resources.
I think there's an additional aspect, though: insufficient supply of "people who care" coupled with compensation levels attracting too many people who don't. That maps better to the weird title, I suppose.
> I think there's an additional aspect, though: insufficient supply of "people who care" coupled with compensation levels attracting too many people who don't. That maps better to the weird title, I suppose.
You can care as much as you want, but if the people responsible for making the final decisions and cutting your paycheck don't care, your ability to write good software in that place is limited.
I have 4 tickets in this 2 week sprint. I lose a couple of productive days for scrum ceremonies and meetings. The last 2 or 3 days must be spent scrambling for code reviews and QA sign off. With the time that’s left I can make the software as good as I want.
That's a terrible bastardization of agile. Agile and related practices aren't about delivering increased volume of work but just about making the team more responsive to changes. If you feel like you're always rushing to finish a sprint either your manager is pushing on the gas to squeeze past a deadline (a good sign of bad management) or you're in over your head and not performing at the level expected of you. In either case a manager should see this and work out a solution that lowers your workload.
"Agile," as advanced by management and coaches peddling Scrum and various "methodologies," is exactly like this in practice. It's micromanagement in disguise.
You can argue that's, "not true Agile," but then... what is? The process being forced upon developers the world over or the ideal version you have in mind?
I agree, as described, it generally leads folks to burnout. And anecdotally it seems most organizations are fine with that.
On the one hand, yes, at this point "that's not true Agile" is starting to sound like a no true Scotsman fallacy.
On the other hand, the way the term "agile" is used now really has no relation to anything in the agile manifesto.
And this is in part due to ignorance (people adopting agile trusting that their "scrum certified" trainers know what agile is instead of just ... reading the short manifesto), in part due to how (intentionally) vague agile is, and in part due to complacency of the people who _do_ know what agile is not pushing back more against the idiocy.
I don't think you can blame people who happen to have actually some clue as to what agile was supposed to be repeatedly complain that the crap which most organisations implement and call "agile" has nothing to do with agile.
I like terrible analogies so here is one:
It's akin to finding a paint bucket in the building supply store marked "red paint" and finding it filled with blue paint, and then when you go to the store to complain, they say: "but this _is_ red paint, you will find the same colour paint in these buckets in _every_ store". Then when you do a bit of research you realise that the only reason this happened is because people who really liked to paint walls blue heard about "the red paint craze" and started calling blue pain red to avoid having to change the colour of their walls.
> On the one hand, yes, at this point "that's not true Agile" is starting to sound like a no true Scotsman fallacy.
Always has been. There's nothing wrong with the manifesto as some food for thought. But the moment people started calling their development process "agile" we were all fucked. It became a brand.
The core con of agile is that there is something under the covers as long as we push beyond doing it wrong.
There is no there there.
The manifesto says: Along all the dimensions that exist in software development, here are four dimensions where the common practice in 2001 are wrong. Any other meaning is invented while interpreting scripture.
For what it's worth, the "Twelve Principles" document [0] is both more explicit and constraining. As you say, though, it is a framework for change (a goal to be incrementally approached), not a brand.
Because you just haven't seen a correct implementation of AGILE.
If we look at the AGILE Manifesto then we know for sure that there is no way this would ever be allowed if applied perfectly.
And humans excel at perfect implementations.
Begone with the naysayers that keep deriding our objectively pure implementation of AGILE.
Okay, okay, I can't anymore, its too much, I agree.
So how about we just fight fire with fire.
I propose a new religion named JOUST.
I don't have the energy or time to invent more than the name. Use AI to create the system.
Start amplifying the signal that JOUST is the new AGILE and soon, we will have a new word for micromanagement.
I have seen two distinct implementations of AGILE and neither has left me thinking that anything was gained.
I also have a deep resentment for the word sprint.
Sprint means go at the fastest possible pace, yet there is no downtime in between sprints?
Bad analogies are great.
Show me a cheetah that sprints 5 days a week for 9 hours a day with 2 days of "rest" in between.
When a group of people pick a manifesto and are empowered to work towards improving their own working conditions, it's great.
My comment has the flavour of a, "no true scotsman," situation but it's not necessarily, in my view, a matter of calling a spade a spade.
The problem is that the spirit of the manifesto is a socialist one which runs counter to how capital runs businesses. The manifesto says "we," meaning the developers doing the work, should prefer customer collaboration over negotiating contracts. However most developers in most companies do not have the power to enforce this preference. The executives, founders, and managers sign the contracts. The developers are hired to write the software. There is no negotiation: your team doesn't meet their deadlines people will start getting fired or the business will go under.
"Business people and developers must work together daily," they sure do. Every stand up, every morning, to tell the manager/lead what you did yesterday, what you got stuck on, what you're going to do today. "But that's not how it should be," well... again, what should it be? The manifesto isn't prescriptive about this. Agile-as-practiced is what we observe teams and companies doing out there. This is often how it's done.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools? What part of agile-as-practiced isn't about processes and tools? Capitalists love processes and tools ever since they brought their own clocks and bells into their factories and started docking people's wages when they didn't show up for work on time. Planning poker, retrospective meetings, kanban boards... all processes and tools.
No businesses I've heard about or worked at have enabled developers to self-organize. This, again, would be anathema to how capitalists expect to run businesses.
The other problem with the manifesto is that it's starting to show it's age. "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation," is a good way to ensure that your later maintainers have no idea how the software works anymore... and hasn't been true for decades: most of Linux and much OSS is developed by remote teams who've never met face to face. Writing is generally considered the best way to pass on information and it has been quite effective for a good portion of human civilization.
I don't think this has anything to do with capitalism.
We have carpenters under capitalism and the companies hiring them don't force them into stand-ups every morning with some guy who has never nailed two pieces of wood together who insists on following a rigid process of chopping up the work of framing a house into sprints, user stories and story points.
I actually don't work as a programmer anymore (instead as a security consultant) and suffer no micromanagement (in fact, almost no management at all). I think this is just a unique nonsense which has developed around the practice of programming.
Genuinely whether I am working on a project individually or as a team, myself and my teammates get complete freedom of how we go about doing our work as long as we uphold certain standards and produce certain deliverables. This definitely seems possible in the world of software development.
The certified coaches peddling Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) certainly don't advance micromanagement or anything like that. I have been in their training sessions.
> Agile and related practices aren't about delivering increased volume of work but just about making the team more responsive to changes.
"Making the team more responsive to changes" so they can start "delivering increased volume of (often poorly specified, decided on the last minute outside of quarterly planning ceremonies because it will make the engineering middle manager look good to the CTO) work" has been my experience with agile everywhere I've done it.
Why would any publicly traded business pick a development model that _decreases_ the volume of changes?
Being "responsive to changes" has absolutely no relation with "volume of work".
Agile is about being responsive to changes. And yeah, the bad specifications are included. Anybody that makes it about volume of work is dishonest (but I do agree that's the norm).
We should not let dishonest people bastardize our language to the point we can't communicate. And the most obvious way to fight back is to call them on their lies.
(And yeah, it's implicit but it's very clear that agile is supposed to decrease the volume of work. You can't decide to optimize for something else and not suffer there.)
> Being "responsive to changes" has absolutely no relation with "volume of work"
To you and me, yes, that's a true statement. To the business, it's not. Being "responsive to change" means we're constantly polishing the turds the CTO-adjacent crowd has laid, and we do no service to ourselves by pretending otherwise, or trying to reclaim the language of "agile".
Well, what you work on has also absolutely no relation to how much work you do. Or with how responsive you are for changes.
You seem to have an emotional issue linking those concepts. They are all different things. But yeah, lying about what you do is harmful too. The top management not wanting to solve real problems or making real products is about as bad as any other kind of management failure.
> You seem to have an emotional issue linking those concepts.
Hey, I wanted to thank you for this comment. I was really tilted yesterday about adjacent issues and was inadvertently bringing that here. Your comment made me take a step back, look at what I was posting, and stop posting while I was emotional.
If you're scrambling at the end of an iteration to complete quality control tasks in order to accept user stories then you need to shift those left. Split the user stories into smaller chunks (as long as they still deliver value), have multiple team members work together on a single story to complete all the tasks (swarming), and write the automated test scripts in parallel with coding or even before (TDD). People sometimes try to tell me that this approach is impractical or won't work, and yet when I led Scrum teams and forced them to do it that way it produced good results and the team members were happier.
I think for people that care the biggest obstacles are when a company makes it very clear that you’re just wasting your time by caring. I had a previous company where I worked my butt off on a product for a year and got a bad review. The next year I basically slacked off and didn’t care anymore and got a good review that year (my theory is I socialized and went to meetings more, which got me “seen” lol). After that I found a new job.
There are many dimensions of good. On a large project I have to assume someone else is doing good useful work in order to get my own work done. Thus if I'm not assigned some issue I assume someone was it will take care of it. I might write up a bug report, but that is as far as it goes: I don't prioritize them or track them. Things do fall through the cracks all the time. However in the end the software I'm writing is still good, it just that I'm sitting in my level and not jumping around.
I find it's the exact opposite in FAANG: hiring people who care too much, but in directions not aligned with delivering value.
If you hire the best in a narrow sense, you get people who find problems where others wouldn't. That's fine in theory but it becomes downright crippling if these people don't understand where their output falls in terms of the final value delivered to customers.
You end up with organizations where precious little ships, and it's usually a crappy product because every team was convinced their little nugget needed to be perfect, and eventually market forces forced them to shove all their half-polished nuggets into a ball of filth.
Normally managers are supposed to be a counter for that, but at engineering driven orgs they just get sucked into the games too.
It's incredible to me how often YouTube is broken on Safari. Like, broken to the point where clicking on a video just doesn't work. Two trillion dollar companies cannot make clicking work. Don't get me started on the constant UI redesigns. They're just rearranging the deck chairs endlessly now.
your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural
I don't think this is in any way related to "good" or "bad" times, but rather something much simpler: software made by way too many people is invariably bad. Software made with the wrong incentives first (promotions, pleasing the board) is invariably bad. That's it, really, and it's completely orthogonal to "good" or "bad" times.
Linus pretty much set the culture for Linux development, it is strongly guided by the taste of a handful maintainers. You could never take something from the two week sprint people and get it merged, it would be scrutinized in minute detail by maintainers that have an opinion on exactly how the whole is put together and understand every part under their watch.
So you could argue that Linux in reality is developed by only a handful. The orbiting thousands of developers is the force multiplier. Once in a while someone drenched in the culture slowly dissipates to the inner circle. That's how it survives. By way of a strong culture. The downside is that it can also be a bit unforgiving.
Linus style of project leadership is quite well known, but the guy has very good taste and is in it for the long run. That's the secret to making it all work. That, and the luck of being at the right place at the right time.
it had many contributors, but organized through very few reviewers, and in a very organized fashion. It's a good example of reasonably well executed software IMO - nobody pushing code to get promoted or pushing for growth hacks in the codebase.
I don't think there's a specific number that makes a software team suddenly "too big", but you can clearly see how different the dynamic is when you're in a team that's too big
On a flight back from overseas recently, I was impressed how the entire process was plagued by bugs the whole way through, from cosmetic to functional. Nothing to do with flight controls, as it should be, but little things like HTML tags printed on my boarding pass, self check-in kiosks failing for me and everyone around me, in-flight entertainment systems needing rebooting...
I figured none of these things stopped me from paying them, so they have no reason to fix them.
But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it.
I'd have been embarrassed, but since having a dev fix it would apparently be a net loss to the company, it would have been wrong to do.
In my line of work I happen to get insight into just how many applications most companies have. Just how many millions of lines of code are floating out there.
And you're right, most companies tier their application importance. "Does the business die if this doesn't work" gets the top tier. "Does it make us money" comes next. Then after that point the amount of oxygen left in the room starts dropping significantly.
And you think "Well, if I was working on that low tier project, I would want to do a good job". And that's the thing, if you start doing good work there, you're going to get yanked off that team and moved up to something more important. You end up with either a dead sea effect on unimportant projects, or so little time for them it cannot possibly be polished.
In Gulliver's travels the hero travels to Laputa, a city where everything is devised by mathematicians and engineers.
The hero notices everyone is looking kind of off, which he understands to be because none of their clothing is fitting properly.
Instead of measuring everything, they have devised a formula to deduce everything from only one measurement. The implications of this wondrous formula he could already have observed. And everything is like this, nothing really works properly.
Fast forward a few centuries, everything is being automated, and what happens...
>> But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it.
Or it was fixed, but not commited
The fix wasn't the right fix, or applied to the right place, because the bug report was bad
Doesn't your last line belie the rest of your comment? There may well have been similarly embarrassed people who worked on these things, but were either prevented from or simply incentivized not to fix them.
Speaking of airline bugs, something about the spelling of my first name confuses the heck out of Air Canada. For the last 10 years of so, they've been printing my boarding passes with my first name as "Dr. Alexan" instead of "Alexandr". Luckily, it has never caused a problem at the gate so far.
Operations is time-sensitive, and airlines are real-time operations with actual lives at stake.
Introducing bug fixes may ship additional bugs. That's a real risk.
The scale of the system needed to get you and your luggage flying overseas in an economically viable way says a lot about how amazing the current system is. But sure, complain about HTML tags being printed and assume you could do better.
This is all looking at it from the wrong direction. Software only needs to be good enough to do its job. In the OP they're complaining about a recent iTunes release ... so what if its buggy? Apple are still raking in the cash every minute of the day.
There is more software being produced now, all the time, then there ever has been before. It just has to be good enough. There are javascript errors on the page? But does it mostly work? Then just forget about it. The whole thing will get rewritten anyway next year and then there will be new bugs to ignore. That JIRA backlog will never go away.
This may sound pessimistic but I'm just being pragmatic. Software has bugs, and now all around us there is a crap-ton of software all the time. It just has to be good enough. Or even 'barely good enough' will do in a lot of cases. This is how the world works because producing perfect software is ridiculously expensive.
I find it baffling that this is so hard to understand. TFA talks as if there is a secret conspiracy to produce bad software, or as if everyone else is an intellectual midget that cannot produce any work competently.
...Let's just take the iTunes examples again: the previous version already existed and was good enough to do its job. Why spend the effort on a new, worse version? The Apple would still be raking in the cash, even more of it since they wouldn't have spend some of it on this pointless endeavour.
By your dint of logic, we could have just stopped programming tomorrow altogether and most of the things would be just fine, and we could spend all this huge amount of human effort on something else (something presumably more important). That'd be quite pragmatic, wouldn't it? So why do we not?
That doesn't make sense. If I'm on x64 Mac OS, why should Apple switching to ARM on their newer computers that other people are buying necessitate an update treadmill for me? Or anyone for that matter, even the people buying the new computers? Apple could just port the existing software over.
>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it
Docker is really useful though. It let's you run a completely different set of software than your os stack without the overhead of virtualisation. I find it very useful and I learned programming with basic and 6502 assembler so I have no problem understanding all the abstraction layers down to metal.
As for electron it's just a Web browser packaged as an app.
In general I agree that "good times create weak people (not just men)" But I very much doubt we can blame the current state of software quality on "good times".
Perhaps some of it can be blamed on the fact we didn't really have to optimise a lot of software for performance because new faster hardware would become available like clockwork.
But the main problem of today's software quality is not slowness, but as the author shows, crappy ui design and implementation. I have my own theory why that is.
Its "agile". Yes, there is good stuff in agile, but designing the UI for an app the user interacts with all the time should be properly designed from the start with a lit of forethought. Not split into 2 week long sprints and 3 day long features people are pushed to undervalue time required for.
If we do that, this is the result. If you're a startup running out of cash go for agile. Of you're making devops tools go for agile, but for the UI design? No way.
Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse.
Anecdotal experience/rant: UX designers seem to increase complexity (maybe to justify their position?) of apps, rather than simplifying. And often "common sense" loses in favor of an over engineered solution.
>Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse.
Lets say you have a population of 1,000 people and 1 doctor.
Then lets say you increase the amount of doctors to 3, but by that time your population is 5,000. Yea, you have more doctors than ever, but you also have more problems than ever. And we also see in the medical community more people want more treatment for more things. More staff, less time.
It is really easy as the end user to say "Oh, I could have made this much more simple for my workflow". But that's the thing, it's your workflow, you have no idea if that's the average users workflow. You have no idea if the 3% of the customers that pay by far the most money have a different workflow.
Complexity typically increases and keeps increasing till market saturation occurs. It's very unlikely we're anywhere close in software saturation (hell this could involve near complete replacement of people in most jobs). Competition means even if you want a simple app, another 'simple' app but with more features is apt to out compete you.
It usually isn't possible to "properly" design a UI from the start. When it happens it's more luck than skill. Especially with vertical market software where proper UI design requires deep domain expertise that no designer has.
The better approach is to put out something crappy as fast as possible and then ask real users for feedback. Iterate on this every 2 weeks until it's good enough.
I am. I went from vim to Atom, and then to VSCode, because it was Absolutely Fast Enough (I was using a 2014 rMBP in 2020! it was fine!). You can write slow, chunky crap in Electron, granted. But IntelliJ has been doing that in Java and Swing for years and nobody grinds their axe about that.
Electron isn't the problem here. And neither is JavaScript (well, TypeScript--JS itself isn't great). If anything is, a combination of competence and scheduling are the culprits.
Electron is a different problem: lowest common denominator crap. Apps that don't form a cohesive platform, because some product middle-manager wants to piss all over the users desktop to leave their own "branding" scent. The fact that most of them are also poorly engineered is orthogonal.
So maybe it's different from your use case, but I use the same applications on multiple platforms so I don't care about the underlying OS. I'm a browser/terminal/editor sort for the most part, so VSCode acts close-enough to native on Mac, Linux, and Windows, in terms of keyboard shortcuts and affordances (hitting enter to rename on MacOS, for example)--the look of it is completely transparent to me. Balena Etcher's another good example of that. Thing just works.
That's pretty much the definition of lowest common denominator, and as you say, the exact opposite of what I want - regardless of what platform I happen to be using.
That Jon Blow video is one I always tell people to watch
That video and Casey Muratori's "The Thirty Million Line Problem" video
Similar theme, and really a call to action.
We, as an industry, need to fight entropy and chaos. Not through regulation or authoritarianism, just every one of us needs to take the responsibility and try to make things better
jon blow is a great example to bring up. he's extremely talented and focused on his craft, and has been churning for decades, unburdened by family, to produce his work, with very talented engineers contributing (including muratori). in the last twenty years, they have shipped two puzzle games.
i don't say that to suggest it's unimpressive, but rather to point out that adopting his methodology of avoiding anything resembling modern languages and tooling comes at a cost. the cost includes a huge hit to productivity. if everyone built games the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude fewer of games available. if everyone built software the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude less software available. i'm sure they would be fine with that outcome. the rest of the world probably would not.
Eh, Rare was putting out multiple games in a short timespan of larger size in programming teams fairly small in the 90s. The tools themselves don't seem specific to inducing incredibly large development times when the game developers before Blow managed to do it faster and better.
Your point still stands (there's research floating around proving it) but Blow isn't the best example.
"Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with.
That Jon video was hard to finish. Guy complains about software complexity, uses Windows 10. If you want simplicity, go use Ken Thompson's 3-week v0 UNIX that had an editor, a compiler and some syscalls. What else do you need? Oh, you want drivers, networking and GUIs?! Too bad, because these have multiple orders more complexity! Also by his logic, you're only allowed things that you could recreate from scratch.
For balance, he does make a good point about the upper limit of complexity and how hard it is to transfer the knowledge required to the next person doing the job. Perhaps if we normalized documenting everything to the point where someone new could just pick it up by reading the docs as well as get the time from the company to actually do it, there might be more incentives to keep things simpler.
So it's good enough - the mantra of software development that explains a lot of what he's talking about. He's not entitled to being able to "just put pixels on a screen" while also distributing his games to be ran on his users' computers. He could develop his games for MS-DOS, but he has chosen not to.
Look, I complain about software quality probably more than most, but it's good to remember that it's more of an emotional issue rather than an objective one. I did not find his arguments about programmer productivity convincing. As a whole, software is doing what it's supposed to and, besides, it could have always been worse.
I feel like this topic, last generation was better than now, has been going on forever.
For the software argument, you don't need to know how to write a compiler or how the language itself was built to code any more. And that's fine.
The block of knowledge required to do software dev has simply shifted. Instead of low level, it's mid to high level.
About the software being bad part, I wouldn't really say it's on the devs. But rather as things became more cog in the machine, deadlines and rush work became The norm. Even if it's bad, it's expected to finish something by the marketing departments launch.
See cyberpunk on first release, clearly not ready at all, despite everyone working overtime for over a year. Yet, it was still released. It's not like the game devs didn't care, but rather what are they gonna do about it? Their all real option was to soften the blow as much as they feasibly could.
Apple's slightly buggy music app and Twitter's slow load times are strategic prioritization. If they wanted to, they would write fast and/or extremely reliable software. These companies understand that minor imperfections won't deter users and allocate resources accordingly.
In contrast, there are certainly platforms where reliability directly affects revenue. They prioritize stability and speed, proving that near-perfection is possible when it's a priority. Finance, for example, has a fair amount of these.
This article simply highlights a common modern business strategy: understanding and leveraging user tolerance to prioritize resources effectively.
This article is not great. People ship buggy products all the tine. Yes even companies like Apple and Microsoft. Windows Vista at release was a complete disaster. You don't need bizarre, all-encompassing theories to explain it just because you don't know the actual reasons. That is a very bad intellectual trap to fall into.
Most cities are built on top of the ruins of old cities. Or nature eventually reclaims the territory, e.g. Chernobyl. I think the software crisis is a non-issue. The stack works well enough for most people and most software consumers don't care if the software has bugs as long as it does the job 90% of the time.
What is the total number of cities today in a world of 8+ billion?
No cities in Australia were built on ruined former cities .. cities such as Dublin and London appear to have been continuously cities since their founding.
It's an interesting claim, is it one that you can back with any data?
Most cities exist where they do for geographical reasons that have existed for longer than humans. Until the railroad (~200 years ago) you couldn't have a large city unless it had a good port as the only possible way to get enough food in to support a city was by boat. There are only limited places that support a great port so once humans start a city we can't abandon it. Today we could abandon NYC - the port itself would have to remain but everything else could move elsewhere (the port could not move elsewhere as most places don't have a way for ships to get in without massive ocean floor projects) - that won't happen because there is so much inertia of people already living there, but it could.
I don't know what the natives in Australia did. however I can report without looking that if they had the numbers to build cities they would be about where the current cities are.
London was (almost entirely[1]) burned to the ground in the great fire of 1666[2]. The new city was built on the smoldering wreckage of the old one.
[1] Pretty much the only things that survived were the tower of London and a few streets around The Cathedral of St Bartholomew the Great near Smithfield Market which most people even in London don't know about even though hundreds of people pass just one street away every day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great
I recommend you look into it at your local library. You'll probably need to ask the librarian about archived city plans. The place I live had train tracks running through the middle of the city and now that area is a paved bike path with parks and recreation centers. Cities are more dynamic than most people realize.
Cities are dynamic in much the same manner as axe's that have handles and axe heads replaced .. while growing larger and spawing smaller axes about them.
The "Great Fire of London" took out a large chunk of the city which allowed for a clean slate redesign and rebuild of a district - it didn't wipe out the entire city, modern London is vast compared to the original Londinium Fort.
The original quote, as given, was that most cities in the world were built on the implied total ruin of prior cities - I'd argue that relatively few cities (not most) were built on the smoking ruins of near total destruction (74 cities at least in Japan fit the bill, along with roughly that number in Europe) with most having a more organic growth based on a long series of partial rebuilding of districts in rotation.
Thank you for your advice - I did once work on digitising a few hundred years worth of city records some 40 years ago.
No, seriously, there's a saying that if construction engineers built buildings the way software engineers do, thousands of people would die each day because of buildings collapsing without any reason. Even if you build on the ruins of an old city, you still have to dig a hole that's deep enough (securing archaeological remains if necessary), create a stable surface with concrete piles or similar, and then you build a new building. You don't just stack miscellaneous boxes one on top of each other like in this XKCD (https://xkcd.com/2347/) and hope that they don't fall down...
What your describing is how modern cities are made. Go back about 200 years and we did build that way and if an earthquake happened... well the results were not great. Some places in the world still build this way, and if and when the earthquake happens... ya.
I guess we're still in the earlier ages of software development.
The rebounding of casual toxic masculinity/macho-ism in Tech, as demonstrated in the title, makes me sad. As a stereotypical nerdy kid who got into computers in the 80s, I saw Tech as a refuge where who you were didn't matter nearly so much as what you could do.
To a large extent, I think the money to be made in Tech after 2009 has attracted kids to CS who in another time would have majored in business. The only saving grace is that the popularity of CS as a major seems to be drawing in talented women and minorities who haven't been exposed to programming.
99% of these "macho" people are just normal dudes who are pumped to the gills with propaganda. They have a pathetic need to convince as many people as possible that:
1. They aren't pathetic
2. You are.
It has as much depth as talking to an edgy teenage boy.
Three affirmations made from a borderline perspective, no arguments given.
Macho-ism is a psychopathetical ideology, it's the worst part of being human. It's the reason of wars and absurd conflicts, and everything bad that has come from it. You don't need theories to conclude about its toxicity.
The reasons for war are rarely absurd, and are about groups competing for limited resources. Saying it's anything to do with 'macho-ism' (which is certainly nothing like an ideology, if it is anything at all) is smug feminist nonsense.
I would love to hear a full analysis from your part on the question of "are the reasons of war absurd" because I am not convinced by your argument about "groups competing for limited resources" and honestly it felt like a clumsy generalization of some facts (which could be made-up).
Well, macho-ism is an abstraction constructed/used in order to communicate about some system of ideas or ideals related to "having pride in one masculinity". I am not interested in discussing whether or not this is a cause of war or not (but obviously it is a cause of conflict).
My previous comment was a parody of its parent (even if I tend to agree with what is said in it), the desired effect was to reveal how intensely absurd was the previously evoked " parent".
Times have been bad for me all of the way and so now everyone I meet looks like they're living in some kind of delusion/trance/bubble. Hopefully bad times for these people will mean good times for me at last.
It's hard for me to imagine how times could get any worse. Maybe some Stalin-like mass purges of intellectuals...
It is statements like this that honestly question what kind of delusion bubble you live in...
I implore you to study a lot of history from all over the world. History you like, history you don't like. History of democracy, history of authoritarians. History of kings and of the elected.
And I'm saying this because while things may be bad for you, in general they are better for more people than ever. There is no bottom to worse, it can always get so much more worse than you can imagine, and that's even at the point where you believe it cannot possibly get worse.
It really does require understanding how things to go bad to make a world that gets better.
I worked in crypto. It seems that if you work in that industry and actually try to improve a project, the whole social apparatus turns against you. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of scam projects where the founders keep getting funding from government organizations and they just waste all the money and keep receiving more investment even though they objectively achieved nothing.
After leaving crypto, I saw opportunities dry up, people seemed to pull out of my projects for no reason, friends/colleagues I worked with closely for over 2 years stopped answering my texts, also for no reason. I also got fired for no reason after the boss had been praising my work for 6 months straight. Just a lot of weird stuff. Not sure if it's because cryptocurrency sector has stigma behind it or because of something more sinister.
Anyway, it's a mistake to think that things are good for everyone. There is a lot of nasty stuff going on behind the scenes. Many people's good fortune is built directly on the back of the suffering of others, often without them realizing.
Well, this could be part of the problem. The average person looks at this and associates it with a scam.
>After leaving crypto, I saw opportunities dry up, people seemed to pull out of my projects for no reason
I wouldn't say for no reason, SBF did a really good job of making anything even close to the coin world completely and totally toxic.
>Anyway, it's a mistake to think that things are good for everyone
I never said that exactly... I said on average things are getting better and just because you're having a bad day it is not a legitimate excuse to elect the next hitler and burn the world down. Making things worse is easy, making things better is extremely hard.
I love the specific combination of petty complaints and melodramatic title. "The Roman Empire is falling! We don't do the little folds on the tunics in our marble statues as well as we used to."
Legacy Java Enterprise Edition projects are at the top of that list, and they keep coming back and haunt you years later.
The other problem is that C/C++ and Python have terrible build systems. I respect CMake, because it works, but the DSL and documentation is terrible. Using raw make is awful, because you need to generate dependencies.
Many companies these days appear to be struggling to produce software that is not glitchy and they cannot seem to find people who can write bug-free code (at least not to the same standard as before).
Many of the bugs we see today in software are related to glitches caused by some deep framework, library or engine issue which most developers cannot make sense of and tend to hack around instead of fixing the root issue. When I started my coding career, most bugs were pretty obvious and easy to reproduce; some feature either worked or it didn't work. Nowadays, a lot of the bugs manifest themselves as vulnerabilities, strange flickering, state not being saved correctly or rolling back, app slowing down to a crawl after prolonged use, or weird issues that seem to rarely happen and are difficult to reproduce.
That's infuriating. But I'm saddened to tell you things are not much better in the world of Android.
I frequently use timers to make sure I don't overcook the spaghetti or beans ("Ok Google, set a timer for X minutes"), and it works about 80% of the time, only to betray you with direst consequence.
And it's not that it's just not hearing me; it'll register the instruction and show confirmation on the screen, but then no timer actually starts.
I think it's the other way around. Strong man create hard times because of all the fighting between themselves about principles and honor and what not. Only after they eliminate eachother, weak man that remained can build good times on the cinders. But the good times inevitably spawn new breed of strong men. Which again ruin everything. Decades after World War two were so prosperous because so, so many brave, strong principled men killed each other in World Wars. So the weak men that were left were finally free to build the prosperity in relative peace. That adventage we had is gradually lost as new generations replenished the stock of strong man, so the world seems to be ripe for another war and devastation cycle.
There is a inverse relationship between ease of developer experience writing a program and ease of user execution of that program on an arbitrary platform slightly different from the developers. This is taken to the extreme in two languages that otherwise are very similar in origin and use: Python and Perl.
Python is a great language to write things in. It's super popular and always getting new features. But it is one of the worst languages for people who aren't the developer to try to run what the developer wrote. It is just implicitly assumed these days that the system python install simply won't be able to install or run the dependencies the developer used. But it's not just dependency hell of a normal type. In python you need a dependency manager manager (conda/poetry/pyenv to a lesser extent) to set up the container in which you'll use your actual dependency manager in isolation (pip, pypi, etc) to try to set up the depencies needed for the python script(s) to run. An even within the multiple layers of management overhead python changes from version to version (even minor version sometimes) and a python script written 10 years ago won't actually run today and vice versa.
Perl is notoriously not a great language to write (and maintain) things in. It also no longer popular and doesn't get lots of new features. But it is one of the best languages for people who aren't developers to run what the developers wrote. The system perl on your distro will be able to install the dependencies without breaking anything and run the script, usually from disto repositories, but at worst from cpan which is universal. A perl script written today can be run on a system perl install from a decade ago and vice versa.
I mean, yeah, Amazon was never known for producing quality software. Yet, I insist, the task is SO trivial, it's so impossible to fail that it only demonstrates how bad people understand or control their tool.
Twitter newly rebuilt UI takes 7 * longer to load first tweet, giving you essentially the same stuff but much later and with much more effort:
I don't have numbers, but I've heard Gmail rewrite also made it much slower with no apparent new functions. It's still pretty drastic if you put GMail next to Fastmail, or Twitter next to Tweetdeck, both of which didn't get any full rewrites in the last decade, so you can see how fast even Web UI could be if we weren't constantly climbing up the abstraction ladder.
Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with."
Are there problems like this in FOSS? All I can remember is unfamous 12309 Linux bug which might affect system if the user uses to much IO operations like copyng 100 files from A to B while copying 100 files from B to A especially if A and B are different disk drives. Haven't experienced the bug since 10's though.
>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it
If you can't figure out docker and how it simplifies things, you aren't ready to write shitty think-pieces. As if manually installing things across 40 people's workstations is simpler?
It is really not that hard and shows a lack of experience and resistance to adopting new techniques, which is BAD for a SWE.
If you can't figure out Docker, you're pathetic.
---
Also hate the "Good times create weak men..." because it is implies an "unlike me" that I find very cringe.
I work for a large company, global leader with 100k+ employees.
Originally I was hired at the business side to build internal applications. These were grey zone apps as I wasn't part of the IT and dev team and did not follow all the company guidelines.
I was free to use whatever I wanted to build apps. One of these makes over £150k annually, another one is has 700+ internal users.
My tech stack and process was the following:
-Python-Flask backend
-Object oriented plain vanilla JS frontend with Redux state management (yes, it works without React)
-MySQL db
-Docker
-Good enough documentation to be able to hand it over at any point of time if necessary
-Test cases for critical things
-Deployed everything to an on-premise server with using WinSCP
I really enjoyed the whole process as I only had to focus on the actual business problem and very actively worked together with the stake holders. The results: bug free apps that I rarely have to touch; great satisfaction and feedback from both clients and internal users; short product to "market" time.
Recently I joined the company's dev team. Mate, it's hell. We have to use React for even an app that has a login page, upload page and report page. The db is Snowflake that makes everything freakin' slow. We have mindlessly have to follow the company guidelines to pass all the "cloud gates" before we can go live. We have to pass Snyk, Sonarqube, use Azure Dev Ops, dev-qa-prod environment, 80% test coverage, less than 3% code duplication (nobody cares if it screws up readability); use Jfrog and god knows what, there are 15 different criteria that we have to pass.
The result: extremely sluggish development; slow application; the whole thing can break at 10 times more places; and it does break; the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building; user satisfaction is awful; no time for running experiments or deeply explore the problem.
We add such a complexity to so tiny apps that I could build over 1-2 weekends that it suffocates the application itself.
I'm looking for the way out, I'm sure there are better places but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense. If it's a large app then let's follow a strict process but when it's almost like a toy project then let's keep it simple and only invest in sensible amount of energy.
I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day, I have never got close to that but I was so productive, adding multiple features on a single day and that made me so satisfied. And now it's all about the "gates".
> but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense.
Common sense doesn't get customers. This at the end of the day is what matters. Not code correctness. Not perfection in the functions. Not how fast the application boots up/loads/executes.
Will anybody pay you for it and ever use it is the selection function that really matters.
These big companies have the users. The big companies also have insane rules (mostly to protect themselves from the massive number of incompetents they've hired). Welcome to the trap of modern software.
Yes, I know. I've been listening to podcasts about how to setup a company and create a product for some time. I have an idea about creating a physical product with software (customizing a physical product, it involves using Blender). To test the product market fit I setup a fake webshop where the customers could describe in a textarea how they wanted to customize the product but when they clicked add to cart button, it threw an error. I logged all these clicks. I advertised it on FB, only at a limited region and I could get people add the product to their cart. The cost of getting one user clicking on add to cart button was way-way-way below then the expected profit margin so very likely I can make money out of it. So now I'm 1000% on it. If I'm lucky I can make at least as much as I make now and can leave my day job. I know it's not a full sw company but a sw enabled one and that would satisfy me. I want to go live with an MVP but later on want to make the customization process fully automated -> the users would do it, I'd just create the product and ship it. My goal is to make the UX so good that it would limit others to replicate it. Later on I can think about building a real sw company. Or not.
> the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building
It probably is to them. You might be forgetting that large companies also have large exposure to liability, and so are more risk averse. The processes might have been put in place to reduce risk of such exposures, like security holes that leak customer details. If such large companies were populated only with good developers then these processes might be a waste of time, but how likely is that?
Kids these days... Back in my day nothing f*ing worked and we liked it!
I'd like to load up a PC with Win 3.1 and some of the apps back then and let people today use it. Not only would you realize how much software sucked back then, but it required rebooting the entire PC to get the thing functioning again.
I wonder if anyone has done a study of the relation of market share to software quality. It seems as though there is an inflection point of the market share measure above which software quality declines significantly because the fear of being outdone is diminished.
A bit off-topic but watching the linked video and the videos inside it, it's worth noting how in 2019 Elon Musk was still considered some kind of good reference in the tech and engineering world. This has changed dramatically in the last 4 years. And by the way, we are not going back to the moon in the next 12 months, unfortunately.
That's why mental health in tech industry is so important. The immense pressure on the mind takes it's toll.
What are good example of people who were "productive" for a long periods? All I can think are examples from science like Feynman,Einstein, but I think it's a different field and diffent pressures. Linus? nope.
Rarely delivering? That's just not in line with reality. Tesla has produced over 2 million vehicles, and has produced the best electric car since its inception over a decade ago. SpaceX has reusable rockets which is an insane feat of engineering.
Elon over-promises on deadlines, but he always delivers.
> The Hyperloop concept has been promoted by Musk and SpaceX, and other companies or organizations have been encouraged to collaborate and develop the technology.[9] Hardt Hyperloop demonstrated a Hyperloop lane switch without moving components in the infrastructure in June 2019 at its test site in Delft, The Netherlands.[10] Technical University of Munich Hyperloop set the hyperloop speed record of 463 km/h (288 mph) in July 2019[11][12] at the pod design competition hosted by SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.[13] Virgin Hyperloop conducted the first human trial in November 2020 at its test site in Las Vegas, reaching a top speed of 172 km/h (107 mph).[14] Swisspod Technologies unveiled a 1:12 scale testing facility in a circular shape to simulate an "infinite" hyperloop trajectory in July 2021 on the EPFL campus at Lausanne, Switzerland.[15]
> In 2023 the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization released the first technical standard for hyperloop systems.[16]
It's coming eventually. Like I said, Elon is bad with deadlines. Sometimes it's hard to provide accurate time estimates for your human-machine interface, AI-powered electric car, and rockets.
Hi, in this case, the title is referencing a quote and internet meme and is just referring to men. However it's quite problematic here IMO as it presents a cyclical view of history and masculinity that is both simplistic and incorrect.
Firstly, it promotes toxic masculinity by implying that men are either "weak" or "strong," with the former being undesirable. This feeds into harmful stereotypes that equate strength with aggression, dominance, and lack of emotional expression while devaluing attributes like empathy, emotional intelligence, and vulnerability. It also suggests that war and conflict is a necessary component for the development of "acceptable" masculinity. This dichotomy of "weak" and "strong" men reinforces an outdated and harmful ideal of masculinity and promotes a culture that shames men, among other things, for expressing emotions.
Maybe 1000 years ago, when "man" really just meant person and there was a different word for males in particular. Nowadays, to refer to people as "man" it just sounds archaic and vaguely patriarchal, but people do it anyway because sounding slightly archaic can give your words more power.
Hard times create traumatized people with learned helplessness.
Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, ... keep thinking of names of profoundly accomplished people in areas like science, business, sports, art, etc. Then tally up how many of them had traumatic hardscrabble origins. Not many. Most grew up middle class or better and had the benefit of good education, solid family life, and a stable society.
This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much.
The points brought up in this talk are valid though, but I don't think the answer is "good times." I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." (Fixing it later usually involves enshittification.) There are other types of good times that favor more balanced sustainable business models, and those tend to encourage software with a bit more of a focus on quality.
I think there's some survivorship bias at work here too though. There was a lot of total crap software in the 80s and 90s that we don't remember. There were lots of DOS and Windows apps with horrible UI/UX that would crash your entire machine because operating systems were much less solid than they are today. Security almost didn't exist unless you were on a Unix-type OS or VMS, and even there it was pretty basic and coarse grained.
Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: it is much more bloated today. Some of that bloat is explainable by things like high-DPI displays and larger data sets, but much of it is a result of bad architecture and perverse incentives.
I've read an article about why there are less geniuses around and what "creates" geniuses. Usually it was high quality mentorship which helped the kids to get into deep knowledge faster. And from there they were able to build upon it.
You could also approach this from the other direction: our focus on productivity, efficiency, monetization, etc. prevent people from pursuing things they are interested in and developing skills that don't directly translate into profit.
I had a lot of niche interests as a kid that apparently make me interesting as an adult. All of them are because I grew up in a small Wisconsin river town with parents who worked in the arts. Lots of time, minimal media exposure, and plenty of freedom to just… putter, learn and make. As my dad would say back then, ‘only boring people get bored, go find something to do’.
> I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later."
I need to re-read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to double check you haven't just grabbed an example from the last five minutes.
You know I never thought of Rome this way: grow at all costs, consolidate, enshittify.
I have a contrarian view on Rome: it was good that it collapsed, though it would have been better if more effort were made to save works of knowledge and maintain expertise. Even with the consequences though, the collapse of Rome made way for the eventual rise of enlightenment thinking and modern republican democracy. I doubt that would have happened under the Roman imperium.
This is what Rome's leadership looked like by the imperial period. It was pretty bleak.
Roman statue avatar Xitter accounts can suck it. We have more freedom and prosperity today by many orders of magnitude, and we build greater marvels too: space stations, reusable rockets, 3nm integrated circuits. We've taught the sand to think for f's sake.
... which leads me to yet another view I sometimes feel is contrarian: Western civilization is not in a state of collapse.
Yep. It's a limited analogy. Other than Pharaonic Egypt and Confucian China (maybe also Mayans/Aztecs), empires back then didn't have a clear understanding like we do today about planning for sustainability. And even those two aforementioned ones couldn't do so without technological ossification and internal social repression, which led to their demise.
Today we know more about economic cycles, natural disaster preparedness, population planning, pollution, etc., even if our leaders don't always do it.
Maybe that's true, but the examples you picked are pretty bad.
* Isaac Newton lost his dad before he was born and his parents gave him up to live with relatives. He had a very rough childhood.
* Andre Carnegie's family went broke when he was a child, they had no money and had to restart their lives moving to the United States with basically nothing.
* Steve Jobs was adopted, though maybe not exactly poverty it still doesn't sound like a great way to grow up.
That's about 3/7 having rough childhoods and 4/7 having good or average.
The real issue is authentic versus simulated rough childhoods. Freemasons fucking up their kids to see how they behave and try to correct/program their behaviour based on the responses is more fucked than authentically fucked experience and the simulated experience doesn’t build true character. It’s only as good as the simulation and its parameters and behavioural engineering has a long way to go. Non-consensual behavioural engineering is worse than rape.
Yes it is, especially at scale. This is most obvious in the cloud where zero interest rate era companies blow ludicrous amounts of money running comically inefficient code. The cloud bills at some of these companies are hilarious.
Even on the desktop hardware is a constraint if you are trying to do anything that pushes the boundaries of the medium, which is why endpoint-first AI is only possible thanks to hyper-optimized code like llama.cpp.
I hate hearing this but I know it's true because I've tried to build my career as a software engineer around minimalism, simplicity, maintainability and efficiency at scale but it has constantly felt like a struggle; that there is no market for that. You're totally right in pointing out that a lot of valuable software is comically inefficient. Sometimes it almost seems like only bad, ridiculously inefficient software is allowed to succeed financially in this system. Freaky. I've literally seen projects with horrible code be worth billions and witnessed their market cap drop over time as the code quality improved. I don't know WTF is going on in this industry but it's weird.
> This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much.
Usually the line is pretended to be a digest of Ibn Khldun thought, unfortunately this is quite inaccurate, as Ibn Khaldun's theories are wider and more sophisticated than that.
Now that I think of it Ibn Khaldun is precisely this example of an accomplished thinker that went through the hardest times possible in the Old World : he went through the Black Death in the 1340, his whole family died while travelling to reunite with him after many years of forced separation, he was imprisoned, deported, exiled many times...
Good times may create weak men, but authentic experience is what develops real character growth and wisdom and NOT the kind of synthetic fraudulent experience that is all too often synthesised today. Synthetic experience is about as useful as tits on a bull.
> Why it has worked flawlessly since the first iPod with a monochrome screen and quarter of computing power of modern watch, but can’t be done in a flagship product of the most advanced operating system in the world?
Because of the mythical man-month.
Apple's operating systems have grown from just iOS/macOS to include ipadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, audioOS with a myriad of new capabilities. They are also behind the scenes migrating a lot of older Objective-C code to multi-platform SwiftUI which explains why Music.app in particular has seen so many regressions.
Now their development teams have grown but not proportional to the overall scope. And that's not going to change because teams simply can't scale linearly for ever and Apple likes smaller teams. So there are inevitably going to be far more times where quality ebbs and flows as priority shifts.
But hey that answer is only a paragraph and not a provocative answer about society collapsing, men getting weaker or some other incoherent nonsense.
I just wish everybody and all the shareholders could freaking understand this. Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap.
Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately and makes it hard to be familiar with their actual range of products in tangible way
"Are the bean-counters and ad-men at the helm" has unfortunately become a very good heuristic for predicting a downward turn in virtually anything.
RIP HP
Nah, good riddance
HP is Keysight now. The current business with the HP name is a totally different industry from where Hewlett & Packard started (test equipment).
I'm glad they're (mostly) dead now, but their death came from "the bean-counters and ad-men at the helm"
>Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit, they should be expected to slowly and carefull craft quality products and systems and release like a new generation whatever like no sooner than like 3-4 years. I hate this new year, new phone/laptop/whatver crap.
It's interesting that Orwell got this one wrong: turns out that endless war isn't necessary as a sink for meaningless production after all. We can do that just fine on our own.
Just because it's such an important and correct quote.
> War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
-- George Orwell
Is this commentsry on like inflation or something?
No, it's on war.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
> This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
> This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-- Dwight Eisenhower, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowercr...
To be fair this was the case all the way until world war 2 which was ended on the Japanese side by nuclear weapons. Since the age of nuclear, it is no longer possible to have minor conflicts between super powers, only mutually assured destruction.
Meanwhile Russia can't generate domestic demand. They got their GDP growth from their war industry.
> Since the age of nuclear, it is no longer possible to have minor conflicts between super powers, only mutually assured destruction.
Its not only possible, its happened multiple times, but downplaying it (Syria recently) or outright pretending it wasn't happening when both sides were fully aware (Korean war air combat) have been part of managing escalation risk.
WW2 "not ended on the Japanese side by nuclear weapons", it ended when U.S. bombed out of existence 2 whole Japanese cities with nuclear weapons and with subsequent defeat and subordination of Japan witch to this day is puppet of U.S.
Since then U.S. waging wars and launder money out of pockets of tax payers into conflict zones it created and back into its own industrial military complex. Here is some punchy whataboutism for your, deal with it.
Korea and Afghanistan are obvious counter-examples.
I'm pretty sure Apple shareholders are doing just fine.
Maybe they think they are. But they still have to live in the world full of products that are worse than they need to be. In a world that is spiraling into derpification all you can buy is crap that you have to then fix with more crap.
Economists: The shareholders only care about return on their investments.
Shareholders: I would prefer to not watch my kid die of leukemia. And it would be nice not to have to replace my dishwasher every three years. And while we are at it...
Exactly! I so often think about this. I don't know anything about sociology or economics or statistics to even have the words to meaningfully phrase my concern, but can give examples.
First, to make it easier to reason about, assume that with any given thing, what you go along with becomes commonplace and is done by everyone, all the time -- and if you resist, it is not done by anyone. (On smaller scales, especially 1-on-1 relationships, this might be literally true, so)
So, for example, you can increase profits a bit by making your website take 2 seconds longer to load for the benefit of JavaScript fuckery. Never mind privacy, just load times. Now, in the universe where everyone mirrors your actions, now every website you load takes 2 seconds longer to load. In some cases that means going from 20 seconds to 22, so no big deal... but HN goes from 0.1s to 2.1s, hah. Can you imagine how much time that would take up, for maybe not even that big amount money, that can't buy you time?
Or advertising, propaganda, etc. Yeah, you can sell your thing for more, or to people who don't really need it or would be better off without it... but unless you have a huge corporation, you don't even have that many products, yet now you live in a world full of advertising, and the pollution, waste of energy, and bad choices of people you love, or maybe people who end up hurting you because of the shit choices they made based on propaganda.
You can make "sponsored content", sure. But now philosophy and deep thought are dead, because everybody else is lacing whatever they say with a nod to some sponsor.
I really wish I could describe what feels like this hugely important thing that is kind of invisible to us, because we have nothing to compare it to, or the time or resources to carve out a large enough space in which to be different and then compare the results. If we only could see (I can't, it's more like a hunch, something I can't put my finger on but also not shake off) how all these things add up, with a kind of bird's eye view...
I imagine it would look like a local optimum, right next to a HUGE optimum. Like thirsty people fighting over a stone to suck on, next to a lake with clear, fresh water, unbeknownst to them.
I just cannot fucking prove it and that hurts :/
I get you. Your image at the end is hauntingly vivid.
This is what government is for. Should be for: should be doing.
I don't mean at the micro-level of regulating website loading times: that would be ludicrous. I mean at the macro-level of guiding society away from harmful equilibria. I can't suggest policies which will accomplish all of these, and reasonable people can disagree about implementations. That's OK: so long as we are aligned on that purpose we can iterate on attempted solutions. With that said, here are some harmful equilibria to address, and at least a top-level approach to take, or goal to set:
- Carbon (and other pollution and waste) taxes which internalize costs that are currently born by everyone, in order to profit a few.
- Privacy protections which make business-models built around surveillance and micro-targeted advertising impossible.
- Corporate governance and financial market models which discourage short-term "line goes up" thinking.
- Tax structures and business regulations which encourage research and development instead of stock buy-backs, and increasing workers' wages instead of executive compensation.
I'd bet that at least a couple of those would improve website loading times, too.
One thing I noticed that went by the wayside during my lifetime was companies basically stopped paying to train workers. Would be good to implement tax policies that strongly encourage companies to go back to doing that.
Where's Mr Ron Howard when you ironically need him
Just wait till they get in the dishwasher game
> Its wasteful and sloppy ultimately
And it makes a ton of money!
I agree with all the complaints about the state of a lot of software today but users don’t care enough to start boycotting companies that make apps in Electron. Until they do shareholders won’t give a toss.
Users don’t know any better. Most people in the public have just accepted that their computers get slower over time as hardware degradation or something and then go buy another one.
If the average person understood how shit tier software is today, they would care.
But my point is this: they don’t.
I think people care when things beyond their control force them to needlessly spend thousands of dollars.
Nobody likes dropping a couple Gs on a new laptop because the software has become so utterly shitty that their 2 year old I7 and GTX 3090 with 32 gigs of ram can no longer run a web browser.
I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care.
> I think if the general public knew that their stuff getting super slow super fast was a product of software rather than hardware degradation, theyd definitely care.
But my point is this: they don’t.
They do care, there’s just no better available alternative.
Funny take. I generally have a punk attitude towards marketing. As a man, the fashion world (the most fickle consumer industry) doesn’t prey too strongly on my buying habits. But given all that, I was still hit with a fugue state when I had to replace my iPhone 5s—in 2020. Haha. I’m still on that replacement, an iPhone SE. But Oh Man was I struggling with the top of the line envy. Making up scenarios where I _needed_ these products.
With all that said, I think the corps are happy to have both. All the appearances of new New NEW and for anyone who’s paying attention, we will upgrade when necessary. But in between are a bunch of people who can scrape up 2k for a new phone every year. Like buying a Cadillac when you can’t afford a house.
Don't even get me started about how ridiculously big (phabletized) the standard is quickly becoming. Its like these people are all begging for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and have kangaroo pouches for pockets. Also the camera fixtures are beyond inelegant and annoying even on a solely practical basis. I literally have nothing good to say about most phones nowadays. How much cpmputing and camera power does the average person truly need and should it start at like $1500-2000 for the "pleasure"?
LOL. It was not size (I was happy to keep using the iPhone 5’s 4” screen).
Nope, it was the three camera lenses. Oooh. I liked me some photography.
There is no requirement to upgrade every year. While I agree with you, companies are dumb machines that respond very slowly to customers. Sure, they even started this by suggesting these quick release cycles in the first place, but consumers bought right in.
I might not have been super clear that I was referring to the production/marketing cycle, like, yes, I believe it in the personal context as well but my main focus is the actual cycle in which Apple designs/produces/markets "new" products (turnaround)
>Cut the infinite exponential growth bullshit
This a byproduct of a much larger issue that affects all faculties, not just the tech sector. This won't change unless we as a nation choose a different economic model.
Umm. The line between compound interest and simple interest is both larger and smaller than one would expect.
The thing that capitalists get wrong is to simply project the present into the future, forever.
Let's say you get 30% returns in 10 years, that is 2.65% interest. But we might be talking about a one time investment that only existed for those ten years. What happens before and after can diverge arbitrarily. Meanwhile a capitalist would just keep projecting 2.65% interest into all eternity, giving ridiculous numbers within 1000 years.
The thing about simple interest is that it gets consumed. No exponential growth necessary.
This is synonymous with the end of the world.
Isn't like the collective world economy essentially a Ponzi scheme or something?
Nobody ever got promoted for saying "hey, this is good enough, let's just leave it alone and coast." The incentives for changing things that work go far beyond just management.
What do you mean by “understand”? Do you think this would increase profits? Or at least keep them the same?
I just wish they would stop moving around the UI deck chairs. Seriously. In Ventura (or the previous release, who knows, I don't keep track, why should I, it's a waste, I honestly care zero), they completely reorganized how System Settings is laid out. Like why in tarnation is that even necessary? There absolutely NO WAY that some UI study or UX principles led to the redesign of this thing. It was just done on a whim (well, a corporate whim, some PM and their little team got a big boost to their egos to make some kind of impact).
Stop taking away my skills. I have to relearn everything all the time, for no damn reason.
And get off my lawn.
Settings was re-designed to align macOS to iOS, ipadOS and visionOS.
So that people who have bought an iPhone and buying a Mac for the first time can change their computer settings in the same way they are used to on their phone.
That’s a good point, yet one I find disappointing. I believe settings is one of the biggest pain points of iOS. It’s extraordinarily unintuitive, which can be seen comparing it to settings on Android. I find the Android settings a lot easier to navigate. This would have been a great time to rewrite the iOS settings rather than adopting its style elsewhere.
It’s as if knowing how to use Apple products efficiently has developed into requiring a very specific domain knowledge, and Apple continues to develop for these pseudo experts that know the quirks rather than improving the intuitiveness and usability for those less familiar.
This is interesting all the same but are you seriously arguing they should have designed iOS Settings in the likeness of MacOS Settings? Do you know if there's any like artist renderings or something that could help visually/graphically represent that? Just can't see it but I'm open to entertain it if there's something to demonstrate its validity...
*redesigned
Worst case scenario, it should basically always be customizable. This shit where they block of the defaults:write option until the next OS version if ever or there's a blowup in the media/scrutiny or they pull the bullshit SIP card when nobody fucking needs AppleTV or AppleNews or iMessage etc on their Mac, yeah. I wish MacOS would get to Microsoft levels of uniquity so various Justice Departments around the world could cut the cord on this horseshit.
Via antitrust or whatever they need to do
Have you received news of our lord and saviour, `defaults write`?
Please elaborate (but yes I'm familiar)
Almost every setting can be automated via `defaults write`, so there's barely never a need to even look at the system preferences/settings UI. [1] lists many of them.
[1]: https://macos-defaults.com
Is there a way to make sure you can automate shutdown of your Mac where its like non-negotiable and doesnt matter if its closed and theres no stupid menu that can screw it up? Like not sleep or hibernate but just shut down?
In Soviet Russia, lawn gets you off
> Because of the mythical man-month.
> But hey that answer is only a paragraph and not a provocative answer about society collapsing, men getting weaker or some other incoherent nonsense.
But The Mythical Man Month is about communication/knowledge transfer, just like the linked article and it’s video.
You also said a some regular stuff about teams and schedule pressure that weren’t novel at the time of The Mythical Man Month.
e: I understand not liking the style of blow’s doomsaying, or titling a blog post with a reference to a meme that gets some people salty. But those aren’t the thesis of either piece.
If the title bears no relation to the thesis, that's the author's fault, not the readers' for misinterpreting.
And this article isn't about communication and knowledge transfer, it's about the evils of abstraction. I'm not sold on the idea that layers of abstraction are always going to be problematic—most of civilization is built on layers upon layers of abstraction, with different people specializing in different layers. That makes things less simple than they were before the layers were added, sure, but it doesn't inherently make everything worse.
The GP is probably referring to the second system effect, that is there too.
The Mythical Man-Month has more than 1 theme.
> migrating a lot of older Objective-C code to multi-platform SwiftUI which explains why Music.app in particular has seen so many regressions
Sorry, but this is objectively not true, having been subscribed to Apple Music for years prior to SwiftUI. It was always extremely bad relative to Spotify and the first regressions started when Apple dropped the standard iTunes UI in favor of embedded webviews.
And to be clear, the issue wasn't "web tech is bad", it was that Apple Music design team has been rudderless and disorganized for years.
Also, the FAANG obsession with efficiency, layoffs, etc. will potentially make it much worse in the next decade. It's been evident with Google products for quite some time.
To be fair, I think Google's software looked just as bloated, half-baked, directionless and so on its fat and happy low-layoffs era. The firing spasm certainly doesn't seem to have brought any improvements, though ...
I thought Google doesn't do layoffs? It's even a Silicon Valley meme ("rest and vest").
I'm not sure to what extent that was really true before, but it definitely became false in 2023: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/20/tech/google-layoffs-emplo... . And it seems as if the cause was the sudden vibe shift to "kick the lazy bums" in the tech-chief locker room—apparently sparked by Musk's Twitter firings, of all things, as if that looked like a smart model to emulate.
True entire world has this failure mode - we pretend that infinite growth exists and expect large successful companies to do the same or better every year, ignoring the diminishing returns and exponential R&D costs involved with almost everything.
After 100 years, a 0.5% efficiency or emissions reduction gain on the internal combustion engine costs likely as much as the first 20-50 years of exponential gains made. And so Volkswagen cheats.
Moores law is strained so we do wild branch prediction to meet the expectations and eventually roll back entire processor generations with mitigations. But executives got their bonus already at that point
The enshittification is built into our world as a result.
This sounds like an excuse sloppy architecture.
Explaining why something is the way it is, isn't the same as "excusing" it.
Somewhat off topic, but whenever the "Good times create weak men" idiocy comes up I always think of this F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about WWI:
> "That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers."
> “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
> “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9044972-see-that-little-str...
What does this have to do with the "good times create weak men" stuff?
Fitzgerald's thesis in this passage is that the western powers' prosperity in the 1890s and 1910s - and, more broadly, the social capital built by their national identies across the entire 19th century - created a generation "tough" enough to endure their unspeakable mutual slaughter on the western front.
If he is correct, then it refutes the proposition that prosperous societies are "soft".
Maybe you should do some studying to improve your lateral thinking, because it is extremely obvious.
I didn't get it either, it might not be that obvious, or one might need extra context
rude.
That quote seems to support the exact opposite of your opinion, that you need a generation properly raised to tough it out, and the spoiled post-war generation is too soft.
Thanks, this is great.
Weird title (one of these "true but wrong" things humans keep doing when they reason by analogy), but the post itself meshes with things I've been saying for a few years in order to explain the otherwise inexplicably awful and continually worsening quality of software coming out of companies with effectively infinite resources.
I think there's an additional aspect, though: insufficient supply of "people who care" coupled with compensation levels attracting too many people who don't. That maps better to the weird title, I suppose.
> I think there's an additional aspect, though: insufficient supply of "people who care" coupled with compensation levels attracting too many people who don't. That maps better to the weird title, I suppose.
You can care as much as you want, but if the people responsible for making the final decisions and cutting your paycheck don't care, your ability to write good software in that place is limited.
I have 4 tickets in this 2 week sprint. I lose a couple of productive days for scrum ceremonies and meetings. The last 2 or 3 days must be spent scrambling for code reviews and QA sign off. With the time that’s left I can make the software as good as I want.
That's a terrible bastardization of agile. Agile and related practices aren't about delivering increased volume of work but just about making the team more responsive to changes. If you feel like you're always rushing to finish a sprint either your manager is pushing on the gas to squeeze past a deadline (a good sign of bad management) or you're in over your head and not performing at the level expected of you. In either case a manager should see this and work out a solution that lowers your workload.
Down your road lies early burnout.
"Agile," as advanced by management and coaches peddling Scrum and various "methodologies," is exactly like this in practice. It's micromanagement in disguise.
You can argue that's, "not true Agile," but then... what is? The process being forced upon developers the world over or the ideal version you have in mind?
I agree, as described, it generally leads folks to burnout. And anecdotally it seems most organizations are fine with that.
I have never seen someone approvingly say, ah yes that’s Agile—you’re doing it exactly right.
On the one hand, yes, at this point "that's not true Agile" is starting to sound like a no true Scotsman fallacy.
On the other hand, the way the term "agile" is used now really has no relation to anything in the agile manifesto.
And this is in part due to ignorance (people adopting agile trusting that their "scrum certified" trainers know what agile is instead of just ... reading the short manifesto), in part due to how (intentionally) vague agile is, and in part due to complacency of the people who _do_ know what agile is not pushing back more against the idiocy.
I don't think you can blame people who happen to have actually some clue as to what agile was supposed to be repeatedly complain that the crap which most organisations implement and call "agile" has nothing to do with agile.
I like terrible analogies so here is one:
It's akin to finding a paint bucket in the building supply store marked "red paint" and finding it filled with blue paint, and then when you go to the store to complain, they say: "but this _is_ red paint, you will find the same colour paint in these buckets in _every_ store". Then when you do a bit of research you realise that the only reason this happened is because people who really liked to paint walls blue heard about "the red paint craze" and started calling blue pain red to avoid having to change the colour of their walls.
Why should we stand for this utter nonsense?
> On the one hand, yes, at this point "that's not true Agile" is starting to sound like a no true Scotsman fallacy.
Always has been. There's nothing wrong with the manifesto as some food for thought. But the moment people started calling their development process "agile" we were all fucked. It became a brand.
The core con of agile is that there is something under the covers as long as we push beyond doing it wrong.
There is no there there.
The manifesto says: Along all the dimensions that exist in software development, here are four dimensions where the common practice in 2001 are wrong. Any other meaning is invented while interpreting scripture.
For what it's worth, the "Twelve Principles" document [0] is both more explicit and constraining. As you say, though, it is a framework for change (a goal to be incrementally approached), not a brand.
[0] https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
> Any other meaning is invented while interpreting scripture.
This is essentially what my sibling comment boils down to! Kudos for putting it more succinctly than I.
Because you just haven't seen a correct implementation of AGILE. If we look at the AGILE Manifesto then we know for sure that there is no way this would ever be allowed if applied perfectly. And humans excel at perfect implementations.
Begone with the naysayers that keep deriding our objectively pure implementation of AGILE.
Okay, okay, I can't anymore, its too much, I agree.
So how about we just fight fire with fire. I propose a new religion named JOUST.
I don't have the energy or time to invent more than the name. Use AI to create the system. Start amplifying the signal that JOUST is the new AGILE and soon, we will have a new word for micromanagement.
I have seen two distinct implementations of AGILE and neither has left me thinking that anything was gained.
I also have a deep resentment for the word sprint. Sprint means go at the fastest possible pace, yet there is no downtime in between sprints?
Bad analogies are great. Show me a cheetah that sprints 5 days a week for 9 hours a day with 2 days of "rest" in between.
When a group of people pick a manifesto and are empowered to work towards improving their own working conditions, it's great.
My comment has the flavour of a, "no true scotsman," situation but it's not necessarily, in my view, a matter of calling a spade a spade.
The problem is that the spirit of the manifesto is a socialist one which runs counter to how capital runs businesses. The manifesto says "we," meaning the developers doing the work, should prefer customer collaboration over negotiating contracts. However most developers in most companies do not have the power to enforce this preference. The executives, founders, and managers sign the contracts. The developers are hired to write the software. There is no negotiation: your team doesn't meet their deadlines people will start getting fired or the business will go under.
"Business people and developers must work together daily," they sure do. Every stand up, every morning, to tell the manager/lead what you did yesterday, what you got stuck on, what you're going to do today. "But that's not how it should be," well... again, what should it be? The manifesto isn't prescriptive about this. Agile-as-practiced is what we observe teams and companies doing out there. This is often how it's done.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools? What part of agile-as-practiced isn't about processes and tools? Capitalists love processes and tools ever since they brought their own clocks and bells into their factories and started docking people's wages when they didn't show up for work on time. Planning poker, retrospective meetings, kanban boards... all processes and tools.
No businesses I've heard about or worked at have enabled developers to self-organize. This, again, would be anathema to how capitalists expect to run businesses.
The other problem with the manifesto is that it's starting to show it's age. "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation," is a good way to ensure that your later maintainers have no idea how the software works anymore... and hasn't been true for decades: most of Linux and much OSS is developed by remote teams who've never met face to face. Writing is generally considered the best way to pass on information and it has been quite effective for a good portion of human civilization.
I don't think this has anything to do with capitalism.
We have carpenters under capitalism and the companies hiring them don't force them into stand-ups every morning with some guy who has never nailed two pieces of wood together who insists on following a rigid process of chopping up the work of framing a house into sprints, user stories and story points.
I actually don't work as a programmer anymore (instead as a security consultant) and suffer no micromanagement (in fact, almost no management at all). I think this is just a unique nonsense which has developed around the practice of programming.
Genuinely whether I am working on a project individually or as a team, myself and my teammates get complete freedom of how we go about doing our work as long as we uphold certain standards and produce certain deliverables. This definitely seems possible in the world of software development.
The certified coaches peddling Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) certainly don't advance micromanagement or anything like that. I have been in their training sessions.
> Agile and related practices aren't about delivering increased volume of work but just about making the team more responsive to changes.
"Making the team more responsive to changes" so they can start "delivering increased volume of (often poorly specified, decided on the last minute outside of quarterly planning ceremonies because it will make the engineering middle manager look good to the CTO) work" has been my experience with agile everywhere I've done it.
Why would any publicly traded business pick a development model that _decreases_ the volume of changes?
Being "responsive to changes" has absolutely no relation with "volume of work".
Agile is about being responsive to changes. And yeah, the bad specifications are included. Anybody that makes it about volume of work is dishonest (but I do agree that's the norm).
We should not let dishonest people bastardize our language to the point we can't communicate. And the most obvious way to fight back is to call them on their lies.
(And yeah, it's implicit but it's very clear that agile is supposed to decrease the volume of work. You can't decide to optimize for something else and not suffer there.)
> Being "responsive to changes" has absolutely no relation with "volume of work"
To you and me, yes, that's a true statement. To the business, it's not. Being "responsive to change" means we're constantly polishing the turds the CTO-adjacent crowd has laid, and we do no service to ourselves by pretending otherwise, or trying to reclaim the language of "agile".
Well, what you work on has also absolutely no relation to how much work you do. Or with how responsive you are for changes.
You seem to have an emotional issue linking those concepts. They are all different things. But yeah, lying about what you do is harmful too. The top management not wanting to solve real problems or making real products is about as bad as any other kind of management failure.
> You seem to have an emotional issue linking those concepts.
Hey, I wanted to thank you for this comment. I was really tilted yesterday about adjacent issues and was inadvertently bringing that here. Your comment made me take a step back, look at what I was posting, and stop posting while I was emotional.
Thank you.
In other words, Scrum as practiced.
If you're scrambling at the end of an iteration to complete quality control tasks in order to accept user stories then you need to shift those left. Split the user stories into smaller chunks (as long as they still deliver value), have multiple team members work together on a single story to complete all the tasks (swarming), and write the automated test scripts in parallel with coding or even before (TDD). People sometimes try to tell me that this approach is impractical or won't work, and yet when I led Scrum teams and forced them to do it that way it produced good results and the team members were happier.
I think for people that care the biggest obstacles are when a company makes it very clear that you’re just wasting your time by caring. I had a previous company where I worked my butt off on a product for a year and got a bad review. The next year I basically slacked off and didn’t care anymore and got a good review that year (my theory is I socialized and went to meetings more, which got me “seen” lol). After that I found a new job.
There are many dimensions of good. On a large project I have to assume someone else is doing good useful work in order to get my own work done. Thus if I'm not assigned some issue I assume someone was it will take care of it. I might write up a bug report, but that is as far as it goes: I don't prioritize them or track them. Things do fall through the cracks all the time. However in the end the software I'm writing is still good, it just that I'm sitting in my level and not jumping around.
I find it's the exact opposite in FAANG: hiring people who care too much, but in directions not aligned with delivering value.
If you hire the best in a narrow sense, you get people who find problems where others wouldn't. That's fine in theory but it becomes downright crippling if these people don't understand where their output falls in terms of the final value delivered to customers.
You end up with organizations where precious little ships, and it's usually a crappy product because every team was convinced their little nugget needed to be perfect, and eventually market forces forced them to shove all their half-polished nuggets into a ball of filth.
Normally managers are supposed to be a counter for that, but at engineering driven orgs they just get sucked into the games too.
It's incredible to me how often YouTube is broken on Safari. Like, broken to the point where clicking on a video just doesn't work. Two trillion dollar companies cannot make clicking work. Don't get me started on the constant UI redesigns. They're just rearranging the deck chairs endlessly now.
your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural
[flagged]
What?
I don't think this is in any way related to "good" or "bad" times, but rather something much simpler: software made by way too many people is invariably bad. Software made with the wrong incentives first (promotions, pleasing the board) is invariably bad. That's it, really, and it's completely orthogonal to "good" or "bad" times.
Is the Linux kernel bad? It was made by many people. How do we tell how many is too many?
Linus pretty much set the culture for Linux development, it is strongly guided by the taste of a handful maintainers. You could never take something from the two week sprint people and get it merged, it would be scrutinized in minute detail by maintainers that have an opinion on exactly how the whole is put together and understand every part under their watch.
So you could argue that Linux in reality is developed by only a handful. The orbiting thousands of developers is the force multiplier. Once in a while someone drenched in the culture slowly dissipates to the inner circle. That's how it survives. By way of a strong culture. The downside is that it can also be a bit unforgiving.
Linus style of project leadership is quite well known, but the guy has very good taste and is in it for the long run. That's the secret to making it all work. That, and the luck of being at the right place at the right time.
it had many contributors, but organized through very few reviewers, and in a very organized fashion. It's a good example of reasonably well executed software IMO - nobody pushing code to get promoted or pushing for growth hacks in the codebase.
I don't think there's a specific number that makes a software team suddenly "too big", but you can clearly see how different the dynamic is when you're in a team that's too big
Little monetary incentive, plus a hyper competent benevolent dictator.
On a flight back from overseas recently, I was impressed how the entire process was plagued by bugs the whole way through, from cosmetic to functional. Nothing to do with flight controls, as it should be, but little things like HTML tags printed on my boarding pass, self check-in kiosks failing for me and everyone around me, in-flight entertainment systems needing rebooting...
I figured none of these things stopped me from paying them, so they have no reason to fix them.
But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it.
I'd have been embarrassed, but since having a dev fix it would apparently be a net loss to the company, it would have been wrong to do.
In my line of work I happen to get insight into just how many applications most companies have. Just how many millions of lines of code are floating out there.
And you're right, most companies tier their application importance. "Does the business die if this doesn't work" gets the top tier. "Does it make us money" comes next. Then after that point the amount of oxygen left in the room starts dropping significantly.
And you think "Well, if I was working on that low tier project, I would want to do a good job". And that's the thing, if you start doing good work there, you're going to get yanked off that team and moved up to something more important. You end up with either a dead sea effect on unimportant projects, or so little time for them it cannot possibly be polished.
In Gulliver's travels the hero travels to Laputa, a city where everything is devised by mathematicians and engineers. The hero notices everyone is looking kind of off, which he understands to be because none of their clothing is fitting properly. Instead of measuring everything, they have devised a formula to deduce everything from only one measurement. The implications of this wondrous formula he could already have observed. And everything is like this, nothing really works properly.
Fast forward a few centuries, everything is being automated, and what happens...
>> But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it.
Or it was fixed, but not commited
The fix wasn't the right fix, or applied to the right place, because the bug report was bad
The fix worked on the tester's device
It worked, but was broken by another fix
It wasn't checked again after it was 'fixed'
etc
Doesn't your last line belie the rest of your comment? There may well have been similarly embarrassed people who worked on these things, but were either prevented from or simply incentivized not to fix them.
For sure--I mean, the system actually exists this way, and not for no reason.
I _wish_ the quality were better, but I can totally see why "good enough" is king, especially when times are good.
Speaking of airline bugs, something about the spelling of my first name confuses the heck out of Air Canada. For the last 10 years of so, they've been printing my boarding passes with my first name as "Dr. Alexan" instead of "Alexandr". Luckily, it has never caused a problem at the gate so far.
Operations is time-sensitive, and airlines are real-time operations with actual lives at stake.
Introducing bug fixes may ship additional bugs. That's a real risk.
The scale of the system needed to get you and your luggage flying overseas in an economically viable way says a lot about how amazing the current system is. But sure, complain about HTML tags being printed and assume you could do better.
I'm 100% certain if I were writing code to print boarding passes I could have done better.
I appreciate the scale of the system. If your argument is that such a large system cannot be more bug-free than it is, we can just agree to disagree.
But if you're saying it's not worth it financially to fix these bugs, then we can at least agree with that.
This is all looking at it from the wrong direction. Software only needs to be good enough to do its job. In the OP they're complaining about a recent iTunes release ... so what if its buggy? Apple are still raking in the cash every minute of the day.
There is more software being produced now, all the time, then there ever has been before. It just has to be good enough. There are javascript errors on the page? But does it mostly work? Then just forget about it. The whole thing will get rewritten anyway next year and then there will be new bugs to ignore. That JIRA backlog will never go away.
This may sound pessimistic but I'm just being pragmatic. Software has bugs, and now all around us there is a crap-ton of software all the time. It just has to be good enough. Or even 'barely good enough' will do in a lot of cases. This is how the world works because producing perfect software is ridiculously expensive.
I find it baffling that this is so hard to understand. TFA talks as if there is a secret conspiracy to produce bad software, or as if everyone else is an intellectual midget that cannot produce any work competently.
...Let's just take the iTunes examples again: the previous version already existed and was good enough to do its job. Why spend the effort on a new, worse version? The Apple would still be raking in the cash, even more of it since they wouldn't have spend some of it on this pointless endeavour.
By your dint of logic, we could have just stopped programming tomorrow altogether and most of the things would be just fine, and we could spend all this huge amount of human effort on something else (something presumably more important). That'd be quite pragmatic, wouldn't it? So why do we not?
Never ending competitive upgrade treadmill, aka innovation.
Even if you dont want to release an upgrade, the layer below that you rely on still will, and then you'll have to keep up.
It seems like a mistake to conflate an upgrade treadmill with innovation.
People innovating in the lower layers (e.g. Apple decides to move to ARM) creates an update treadmill for everyone in the upper layers
That doesn't make sense. If I'm on x64 Mac OS, why should Apple switching to ARM on their newer computers that other people are buying necessitate an update treadmill for me? Or anyone for that matter, even the people buying the new computers? Apple could just port the existing software over.
>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it
Docker is really useful though. It let's you run a completely different set of software than your os stack without the overhead of virtualisation. I find it very useful and I learned programming with basic and 6502 assembler so I have no problem understanding all the abstraction layers down to metal.
As for electron it's just a Web browser packaged as an app.
In general I agree that "good times create weak people (not just men)" But I very much doubt we can blame the current state of software quality on "good times".
Perhaps some of it can be blamed on the fact we didn't really have to optimise a lot of software for performance because new faster hardware would become available like clockwork.
But the main problem of today's software quality is not slowness, but as the author shows, crappy ui design and implementation. I have my own theory why that is.
Its "agile". Yes, there is good stuff in agile, but designing the UI for an app the user interacts with all the time should be properly designed from the start with a lit of forethought. Not split into 2 week long sprints and 3 day long features people are pushed to undervalue time required for.
If we do that, this is the result. If you're a startup running out of cash go for agile. Of you're making devops tools go for agile, but for the UI design? No way.
Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse.
Anecdotal experience/rant: UX designers seem to increase complexity (maybe to justify their position?) of apps, rather than simplifying. And often "common sense" loses in favor of an over engineered solution.
>Interestingly enough it seems that there are more and more UX designers than ever yet the UX of so many applications keeps getting worse.
Lets say you have a population of 1,000 people and 1 doctor.
Then lets say you increase the amount of doctors to 3, but by that time your population is 5,000. Yea, you have more doctors than ever, but you also have more problems than ever. And we also see in the medical community more people want more treatment for more things. More staff, less time.
It is really easy as the end user to say "Oh, I could have made this much more simple for my workflow". But that's the thing, it's your workflow, you have no idea if that's the average users workflow. You have no idea if the 3% of the customers that pay by far the most money have a different workflow.
Complexity typically increases and keeps increasing till market saturation occurs. It's very unlikely we're anywhere close in software saturation (hell this could involve near complete replacement of people in most jobs). Competition means even if you want a simple app, another 'simple' app but with more features is apt to out compete you.
It usually isn't possible to "properly" design a UI from the start. When it happens it's more luck than skill. Especially with vertical market software where proper UI design requires deep domain expertise that no designer has.
The better approach is to put out something crappy as fast as possible and then ask real users for feedback. Iterate on this every 2 weeks until it's good enough.
Only if the container and host agree on the hardware stack.
As for Electron, I don't need to install one browser alongside each app.
I'm not a fan of electron either..
I am. I went from vim to Atom, and then to VSCode, because it was Absolutely Fast Enough (I was using a 2014 rMBP in 2020! it was fine!). You can write slow, chunky crap in Electron, granted. But IntelliJ has been doing that in Java and Swing for years and nobody grinds their axe about that.
Electron isn't the problem here. And neither is JavaScript (well, TypeScript--JS itself isn't great). If anything is, a combination of competence and scheduling are the culprits.
Electron is a different problem: lowest common denominator crap. Apps that don't form a cohesive platform, because some product middle-manager wants to piss all over the users desktop to leave their own "branding" scent. The fact that most of them are also poorly engineered is orthogonal.
So maybe it's different from your use case, but I use the same applications on multiple platforms so I don't care about the underlying OS. I'm a browser/terminal/editor sort for the most part, so VSCode acts close-enough to native on Mac, Linux, and Windows, in terms of keyboard shortcuts and affordances (hitting enter to rename on MacOS, for example)--the look of it is completely transparent to me. Balena Etcher's another good example of that. Thing just works.
That's pretty much the definition of lowest common denominator, and as you say, the exact opposite of what I want - regardless of what platform I happen to be using.
You call it "crap"--I call it the thing that pays my bills, works enjoyably well, and doesn't bother me.
Swing applications are famous for a reason, and it isn't because they are an example of excelency.
It is not an accident that Swing only survives as toolkit for developer tooling, and Java is mostly relevant on the server.
Even on Android, the devices are more beefy than iDevices for a reason.
That Jon Blow video is one I always tell people to watch
That video and Casey Muratori's "The Thirty Million Line Problem" video
Similar theme, and really a call to action.
We, as an industry, need to fight entropy and chaos. Not through regulation or authoritarianism, just every one of us needs to take the responsibility and try to make things better
jon blow is a great example to bring up. he's extremely talented and focused on his craft, and has been churning for decades, unburdened by family, to produce his work, with very talented engineers contributing (including muratori). in the last twenty years, they have shipped two puzzle games.
i don't say that to suggest it's unimpressive, but rather to point out that adopting his methodology of avoiding anything resembling modern languages and tooling comes at a cost. the cost includes a huge hit to productivity. if everyone built games the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude fewer of games available. if everyone built software the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude less software available. i'm sure they would be fine with that outcome. the rest of the world probably would not.
I think your concept of productivity is faulty.
The point being made is that your increased speed to market comes at a cost
Yes there are many applications that probably just don't need to exist but you can make a living cranking out
Not everyone should do any one thing all the time. But we have to be careful not to always discard hard work in favor of speed and convenience.
Jon Blow and Casey Muratori are reminding people to take responsibility for what we're doing. Learn how things work and be ambitious.
Why?
Watch the video
Eh, Rare was putting out multiple games in a short timespan of larger size in programming teams fairly small in the 90s. The tools themselves don't seem specific to inducing incredibly large development times when the game developers before Blow managed to do it faster and better.
Your point still stands (there's research floating around proving it) but Blow isn't the best example.
"Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with.
And that’s sad."
2019, but it still checks out.
That Jon video was hard to finish. Guy complains about software complexity, uses Windows 10. If you want simplicity, go use Ken Thompson's 3-week v0 UNIX that had an editor, a compiler and some syscalls. What else do you need? Oh, you want drivers, networking and GUIs?! Too bad, because these have multiple orders more complexity! Also by his logic, you're only allowed things that you could recreate from scratch.
For balance, he does make a good point about the upper limit of complexity and how hard it is to transfer the knowledge required to the next person doing the job. Perhaps if we normalized documenting everything to the point where someone new could just pick it up by reading the docs as well as get the time from the company to actually do it, there might be more incentives to keep things simpler.
The man develops video games to be sold and played by other people. His primary target is Windows, so he develops on Windows.
So it's good enough - the mantra of software development that explains a lot of what he's talking about. He's not entitled to being able to "just put pixels on a screen" while also distributing his games to be ran on his users' computers. He could develop his games for MS-DOS, but he has chosen not to.
Look, I complain about software quality probably more than most, but it's good to remember that it's more of an emotional issue rather than an objective one. I did not find his arguments about programmer productivity convincing. As a whole, software is doing what it's supposed to and, besides, it could have always been worse.
>That video and Casey Muratori's "The Thirty Million Line Problem" video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk
Such a banger
I feel like this topic, last generation was better than now, has been going on forever.
For the software argument, you don't need to know how to write a compiler or how the language itself was built to code any more. And that's fine.
The block of knowledge required to do software dev has simply shifted. Instead of low level, it's mid to high level.
About the software being bad part, I wouldn't really say it's on the devs. But rather as things became more cog in the machine, deadlines and rush work became The norm. Even if it's bad, it's expected to finish something by the marketing departments launch.
See cyberpunk on first release, clearly not ready at all, despite everyone working overtime for over a year. Yet, it was still released. It's not like the game devs didn't care, but rather what are they gonna do about it? Their all real option was to soften the blow as much as they feasibly could.
Apple's slightly buggy music app and Twitter's slow load times are strategic prioritization. If they wanted to, they would write fast and/or extremely reliable software. These companies understand that minor imperfections won't deter users and allocate resources accordingly.
In contrast, there are certainly platforms where reliability directly affects revenue. They prioritize stability and speed, proving that near-perfection is possible when it's a priority. Finance, for example, has a fair amount of these.
This article simply highlights a common modern business strategy: understanding and leveraging user tolerance to prioritize resources effectively.
This article is not great. People ship buggy products all the tine. Yes even companies like Apple and Microsoft. Windows Vista at release was a complete disaster. You don't need bizarre, all-encompassing theories to explain it just because you don't know the actual reasons. That is a very bad intellectual trap to fall into.
Most cities are built on top of the ruins of old cities. Or nature eventually reclaims the territory, e.g. Chernobyl. I think the software crisis is a non-issue. The stack works well enough for most people and most software consumers don't care if the software has bugs as long as it does the job 90% of the time.
Most?
Is that true?
What is the total number of cities today in a world of 8+ billion?
No cities in Australia were built on ruined former cities .. cities such as Dublin and London appear to have been continuously cities since their founding.
It's an interesting claim, is it one that you can back with any data?
Most cities exist where they do for geographical reasons that have existed for longer than humans. Until the railroad (~200 years ago) you couldn't have a large city unless it had a good port as the only possible way to get enough food in to support a city was by boat. There are only limited places that support a great port so once humans start a city we can't abandon it. Today we could abandon NYC - the port itself would have to remain but everything else could move elsewhere (the port could not move elsewhere as most places don't have a way for ships to get in without massive ocean floor projects) - that won't happen because there is so much inertia of people already living there, but it could.
I don't know what the natives in Australia did. however I can report without looking that if they had the numbers to build cities they would be about where the current cities are.
There were massive cities up rivers too with I think no real seafaring component: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37973229
River ports exist. I did not mean to exclude them. Some places on a river are better than others.
London was (almost entirely[1]) burned to the ground in the great fire of 1666[2]. The new city was built on the smoldering wreckage of the old one.
[1] Pretty much the only things that survived were the tower of London and a few streets around The Cathedral of St Bartholomew the Great near Smithfield Market which most people even in London don't know about even though hundreds of people pass just one street away every day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great
[2] https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/museum/history-and-stories/th...
I recommend you look into it at your local library. You'll probably need to ask the librarian about archived city plans. The place I live had train tracks running through the middle of the city and now that area is a paved bike path with parks and recreation centers. Cities are more dynamic than most people realize.
Cities are dynamic in much the same manner as axe's that have handles and axe heads replaced .. while growing larger and spawing smaller axes about them.
The "Great Fire of London" took out a large chunk of the city which allowed for a clean slate redesign and rebuild of a district - it didn't wipe out the entire city, modern London is vast compared to the original Londinium Fort.
The original quote, as given, was that most cities in the world were built on the implied total ruin of prior cities - I'd argue that relatively few cities (not most) were built on the smoking ruins of near total destruction (74 cities at least in Japan fit the bill, along with roughly that number in Europe) with most having a more organic growth based on a long series of partial rebuilding of districts in rotation.
Thank you for your advice - I did once work on digitising a few hundred years worth of city records some 40 years ago.
Rome was the global superpower all the way until they weren't
Edit: However, I will concede that I think nuclear annihilation is more likely. So in that case you would be correct by accident
...and that's why we can't have nice things :(
No, seriously, there's a saying that if construction engineers built buildings the way software engineers do, thousands of people would die each day because of buildings collapsing without any reason. Even if you build on the ruins of an old city, you still have to dig a hole that's deep enough (securing archaeological remains if necessary), create a stable surface with concrete piles or similar, and then you build a new building. You don't just stack miscellaneous boxes one on top of each other like in this XKCD (https://xkcd.com/2347/) and hope that they don't fall down...
What your describing is how modern cities are made. Go back about 200 years and we did build that way and if an earthquake happened... well the results were not great. Some places in the world still build this way, and if and when the earthquake happens... ya.
I guess we're still in the earlier ages of software development.
The rebounding of casual toxic masculinity/macho-ism in Tech, as demonstrated in the title, makes me sad. As a stereotypical nerdy kid who got into computers in the 80s, I saw Tech as a refuge where who you were didn't matter nearly so much as what you could do.
To a large extent, I think the money to be made in Tech after 2009 has attracted kids to CS who in another time would have majored in business. The only saving grace is that the popularity of CS as a major seems to be drawing in talented women and minorities who haven't been exposed to programming.
agreed, it is so pathetic.
99% of these "macho" people are just normal dudes who are pumped to the gills with propaganda. They have a pathetic need to convince as many people as possible that:
1. They aren't pathetic
2. You are.
It has as much depth as talking to an edgy teenage boy.
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Three affirmations made from a borderline perspective, no arguments given.
Macho-ism is a psychopathetical ideology, it's the worst part of being human. It's the reason of wars and absurd conflicts, and everything bad that has come from it. You don't need theories to conclude about its toxicity.
The reasons for war are rarely absurd, and are about groups competing for limited resources. Saying it's anything to do with 'macho-ism' (which is certainly nothing like an ideology, if it is anything at all) is smug feminist nonsense.
I would love to hear a full analysis from your part on the question of "are the reasons of war absurd" because I am not convinced by your argument about "groups competing for limited resources" and honestly it felt like a clumsy generalization of some facts (which could be made-up).
Well, macho-ism is an abstraction constructed/used in order to communicate about some system of ideas or ideals related to "having pride in one masculinity". I am not interested in discussing whether or not this is a cause of war or not (but obviously it is a cause of conflict).
My previous comment was a parody of its parent (even if I tend to agree with what is said in it), the desired effect was to reveal how intensely absurd was the previously evoked " parent".
You asserted that the reasons for war were absurd, and you blamed 'macho-ism', which you didn't define.
So you go: why are the reasons for wars so absurd?
Was machoism the cause of Gulf War 2, or the Ukraine war, to give two recent examples?
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If you think the good times are bad, wait until you see what the bad times make!
Times have been bad for me all of the way and so now everyone I meet looks like they're living in some kind of delusion/trance/bubble. Hopefully bad times for these people will mean good times for me at last.
It's hard for me to imagine how times could get any worse. Maybe some Stalin-like mass purges of intellectuals...
It is statements like this that honestly question what kind of delusion bubble you live in...
I implore you to study a lot of history from all over the world. History you like, history you don't like. History of democracy, history of authoritarians. History of kings and of the elected.
And I'm saying this because while things may be bad for you, in general they are better for more people than ever. There is no bottom to worse, it can always get so much more worse than you can imagine, and that's even at the point where you believe it cannot possibly get worse.
It really does require understanding how things to go bad to make a world that gets better.
I worked in crypto. It seems that if you work in that industry and actually try to improve a project, the whole social apparatus turns against you. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of scam projects where the founders keep getting funding from government organizations and they just waste all the money and keep receiving more investment even though they objectively achieved nothing.
After leaving crypto, I saw opportunities dry up, people seemed to pull out of my projects for no reason, friends/colleagues I worked with closely for over 2 years stopped answering my texts, also for no reason. I also got fired for no reason after the boss had been praising my work for 6 months straight. Just a lot of weird stuff. Not sure if it's because cryptocurrency sector has stigma behind it or because of something more sinister.
Anyway, it's a mistake to think that things are good for everyone. There is a lot of nasty stuff going on behind the scenes. Many people's good fortune is built directly on the back of the suffering of others, often without them realizing.
>I worked in crypto.
Well, this could be part of the problem. The average person looks at this and associates it with a scam.
>After leaving crypto, I saw opportunities dry up, people seemed to pull out of my projects for no reason
I wouldn't say for no reason, SBF did a really good job of making anything even close to the coin world completely and totally toxic.
>Anyway, it's a mistake to think that things are good for everyone
I never said that exactly... I said on average things are getting better and just because you're having a bad day it is not a legitimate excuse to elect the next hitler and burn the world down. Making things worse is easy, making things better is extremely hard.
Intellectuals, eh? I'm in the clear then.
"You know how many bosses I have, Bob?
"How many?"
"Eight. I have eight bosses, Bob!"
I love the specific combination of petty complaints and melodramatic title. "The Roman Empire is falling! We don't do the little folds on the tunics in our marble statues as well as we used to."
It pisses me off. I have had worse problems.
Legacy Java Enterprise Edition projects are at the top of that list, and they keep coming back and haunt you years later.
The other problem is that C/C++ and Python have terrible build systems. I respect CMake, because it works, but the DSL and documentation is terrible. Using raw make is awful, because you need to generate dependencies.
Many companies these days appear to be struggling to produce software that is not glitchy and they cannot seem to find people who can write bug-free code (at least not to the same standard as before).
Many of the bugs we see today in software are related to glitches caused by some deep framework, library or engine issue which most developers cannot make sense of and tend to hack around instead of fixing the root issue. When I started my coding career, most bugs were pretty obvious and easy to reproduce; some feature either worked or it didn't work. Nowadays, a lot of the bugs manifest themselves as vulnerabilities, strange flickering, state not being saved correctly or rolling back, app slowing down to a crawl after prolonged use, or weird issues that seem to rarely happen and are difficult to reproduce.
I am dealing with this right now.
iOS has a feature called "Focus." Focus enables you to create different views of your home and lock screens and silence/allow calls and notifications.
iOS also has a basic automation framework called "Shortcuts" that lets you build workflows that trigger based on a variety of conditions.
two of these conditions is being able to trigger a shortcut when you start or end a workout on Apple Watch or when you start a drive.
These shortcuts fire maybe 30% of the time. When it doesn't work, it doesn't tell you anything about why it failed to trigger.
Every time this happens, I want to trade all of my Apple shit for Android and Windows kit. I almost did that today, even.
I would rather use software that doesn't have features than use software that does...but they don't work.
That's infuriating. But I'm saddened to tell you things are not much better in the world of Android.
I frequently use timers to make sure I don't overcook the spaghetti or beans ("Ok Google, set a timer for X minutes"), and it works about 80% of the time, only to betray you with direst consequence.
And it's not that it's just not hearing me; it'll register the instruction and show confirmation on the screen, but then no timer actually starts.
oh wow. Timers not going off is a big deal. I experience many issues with iOS, but timers not firing is not one of them.
I think it's the other way around. Strong man create hard times because of all the fighting between themselves about principles and honor and what not. Only after they eliminate eachother, weak man that remained can build good times on the cinders. But the good times inevitably spawn new breed of strong men. Which again ruin everything. Decades after World War two were so prosperous because so, so many brave, strong principled men killed each other in World Wars. So the weak men that were left were finally free to build the prosperity in relative peace. That adventage we had is gradually lost as new generations replenished the stock of strong man, so the world seems to be ripe for another war and devastation cycle.
I like strong men fighting because then I can have sex.
There is a inverse relationship between ease of developer experience writing a program and ease of user execution of that program on an arbitrary platform slightly different from the developers. This is taken to the extreme in two languages that otherwise are very similar in origin and use: Python and Perl.
Python is a great language to write things in. It's super popular and always getting new features. But it is one of the worst languages for people who aren't the developer to try to run what the developer wrote. It is just implicitly assumed these days that the system python install simply won't be able to install or run the dependencies the developer used. But it's not just dependency hell of a normal type. In python you need a dependency manager manager (conda/poetry/pyenv to a lesser extent) to set up the container in which you'll use your actual dependency manager in isolation (pip, pypi, etc) to try to set up the depencies needed for the python script(s) to run. An even within the multiple layers of management overhead python changes from version to version (even minor version sometimes) and a python script written 10 years ago won't actually run today and vice versa.
Perl is notoriously not a great language to write (and maintain) things in. It also no longer popular and doesn't get lots of new features. But it is one of the best languages for people who aren't developers to run what the developers wrote. The system perl on your distro will be able to install the dependencies without breaking anything and run the script, usually from disto repositories, but at worst from cpan which is universal. A perl script written today can be run on a system perl install from a decade ago and vice versa.
"Amazon can't make a screen with two checkboxes:
I mean, yeah, Amazon was never known for producing quality software. Yet, I insist, the task is SO trivial, it's so impossible to fail that it only demonstrates how bad people understand or control their tool.
Twitter newly rebuilt UI takes 7 * longer to load first tweet, giving you essentially the same stuff but much later and with much more effort:
I don't have numbers, but I've heard Gmail rewrite also made it much slower with no apparent new functions. It's still pretty drastic if you put GMail next to Fastmail, or Twitter next to Tweetdeck, both of which didn't get any full rewrites in the last decade, so you can see how fast even Web UI could be if we weren't constantly climbing up the abstraction ladder.
Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with."
Are there problems like this in FOSS? All I can remember is unfamous 12309 Linux bug which might affect system if the user uses to much IO operations like copyng 100 files from A to B while copying 100 files from B to A especially if A and B are different disk drives. Haven't experienced the bug since 10's though.
strong man read hacker website
look at my strong fingers that type the good things
hacker website creates weak men
weak men create valuable startups?
weak men create wobbly startups
Wobbly startups create nauseated men, half of whom go on to become strong men! (survivorship bias). The system works!
>Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it
If you can't figure out docker and how it simplifies things, you aren't ready to write shitty think-pieces. As if manually installing things across 40 people's workstations is simpler?
It is really not that hard and shows a lack of experience and resistance to adopting new techniques, which is BAD for a SWE.
If you can't figure out Docker, you're pathetic.
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Also hate the "Good times create weak men..." because it is implies an "unlike me" that I find very cringe.
I work for a large company, global leader with 100k+ employees. Originally I was hired at the business side to build internal applications. These were grey zone apps as I wasn't part of the IT and dev team and did not follow all the company guidelines.
I was free to use whatever I wanted to build apps. One of these makes over £150k annually, another one is has 700+ internal users.
My tech stack and process was the following: -Python-Flask backend -Object oriented plain vanilla JS frontend with Redux state management (yes, it works without React) -MySQL db -Docker -Good enough documentation to be able to hand it over at any point of time if necessary -Test cases for critical things -Deployed everything to an on-premise server with using WinSCP
I really enjoyed the whole process as I only had to focus on the actual business problem and very actively worked together with the stake holders. The results: bug free apps that I rarely have to touch; great satisfaction and feedback from both clients and internal users; short product to "market" time.
Recently I joined the company's dev team. Mate, it's hell. We have to use React for even an app that has a login page, upload page and report page. The db is Snowflake that makes everything freakin' slow. We have mindlessly have to follow the company guidelines to pass all the "cloud gates" before we can go live. We have to pass Snyk, Sonarqube, use Azure Dev Ops, dev-qa-prod environment, 80% test coverage, less than 3% code duplication (nobody cares if it screws up readability); use Jfrog and god knows what, there are 15 different criteria that we have to pass.
The result: extremely sluggish development; slow application; the whole thing can break at 10 times more places; and it does break; the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building; user satisfaction is awful; no time for running experiments or deeply explore the problem.
We add such a complexity to so tiny apps that I could build over 1-2 weekends that it suffocates the application itself.
I'm looking for the way out, I'm sure there are better places but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense. If it's a large app then let's follow a strict process but when it's almost like a toy project then let's keep it simple and only invest in sensible amount of energy.
I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day, I have never got close to that but I was so productive, adding multiple features on a single day and that made me so satisfied. And now it's all about the "gates".
> but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense.
Common sense doesn't get customers. This at the end of the day is what matters. Not code correctness. Not perfection in the functions. Not how fast the application boots up/loads/executes.
Will anybody pay you for it and ever use it is the selection function that really matters.
These big companies have the users. The big companies also have insane rules (mostly to protect themselves from the massive number of incompetents they've hired). Welcome to the trap of modern software.
Yes, I know. I've been listening to podcasts about how to setup a company and create a product for some time. I have an idea about creating a physical product with software (customizing a physical product, it involves using Blender). To test the product market fit I setup a fake webshop where the customers could describe in a textarea how they wanted to customize the product but when they clicked add to cart button, it threw an error. I logged all these clicks. I advertised it on FB, only at a limited region and I could get people add the product to their cart. The cost of getting one user clicking on add to cart button was way-way-way below then the expected profit margin so very likely I can make money out of it. So now I'm 1000% on it. If I'm lucky I can make at least as much as I make now and can leave my day job. I know it's not a full sw company but a sw enabled one and that would satisfy me. I want to go live with an MVP but later on want to make the customization process fully automated -> the users would do it, I'd just create the product and ship it. My goal is to make the UX so good that it would limit others to replicate it. Later on I can think about building a real sw company. Or not.
> the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building
It probably is to them. You might be forgetting that large companies also have large exposure to liability, and so are more risk averse. The processes might have been put in place to reduce risk of such exposures, like security holes that leak customer details. If such large companies were populated only with good developers then these processes might be a waste of time, but how likely is that?
“ I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day…”
Anyone got a link?
https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/
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A lot of old articles without date tag recently.
This read, for some reason, reminded me of Farnam Street's “Why Life Can’t Be Simpler”[0].
[0] https://fs.blog/why-life-cant-be-simpler/
yeah - the title is kinda clickbaity.
though it's a true saying.
the art of making software that works is truly, LOST.
yeah, paychecks are nice. but damn ... nothing works anymore.
all the big major tech companies with all their leetcode engineers can't make stuff that's simple and works.
the middle layer of tech companies is even worse. e.g at $job we can't even make search controls that work
on consumer apps - bugs everywhere. look at an app like hinge -- that can't sync your unread messages with a badge. such a simple problem.
>nothing works anymore.
Kids these days... Back in my day nothing f*ing worked and we liked it!
I'd like to load up a PC with Win 3.1 and some of the apps back then and let people today use it. Not only would you realize how much software sucked back then, but it required rebooting the entire PC to get the thing functioning again.
> the art of making software that works is truly, LOST.
I don't think it ever existed.
Apple does own about three-quarters of the digital music market — so you could argue that UI bugs are not good signal to base organisational failure.
I wonder if anyone has done a study of the relation of market share to software quality. It seems as though there is an inflection point of the market share measure above which software quality declines significantly because the fear of being outdone is diminished.
It's because "productivity" matters. Quality does not.
Then be a hard man and sack the decadent city.
A bit off-topic but watching the linked video and the videos inside it, it's worth noting how in 2019 Elon Musk was still considered some kind of good reference in the tech and engineering world. This has changed dramatically in the last 4 years. And by the way, we are not going back to the moon in the next 12 months, unfortunately.
That's why mental health in tech industry is so important. The immense pressure on the mind takes it's toll. What are good example of people who were "productive" for a long periods? All I can think are examples from science like Feynman,Einstein, but I think it's a different field and diffent pressures. Linus? nope.
> it's worth noting how in 2019 Elon Musk was still considered some kind of good reference in the tech and engineering world
Is that so? Elon has always been promising much, but rarely delivering.
Rarely delivering? That's just not in line with reality. Tesla has produced over 2 million vehicles, and has produced the best electric car since its inception over a decade ago. SpaceX has reusable rockets which is an insane feat of engineering.
Elon over-promises on deadlines, but he always delivers.
Where is the hyperloop?
Ongoing, it looks like:
> The Hyperloop concept has been promoted by Musk and SpaceX, and other companies or organizations have been encouraged to collaborate and develop the technology.[9] Hardt Hyperloop demonstrated a Hyperloop lane switch without moving components in the infrastructure in June 2019 at its test site in Delft, The Netherlands.[10] Technical University of Munich Hyperloop set the hyperloop speed record of 463 km/h (288 mph) in July 2019[11][12] at the pod design competition hosted by SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.[13] Virgin Hyperloop conducted the first human trial in November 2020 at its test site in Las Vegas, reaching a top speed of 172 km/h (107 mph).[14] Swisspod Technologies unveiled a 1:12 scale testing facility in a circular shape to simulate an "infinite" hyperloop trajectory in July 2021 on the EPFL campus at Lausanne, Switzerland.[15]
> In 2023 the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization released the first technical standard for hyperloop systems.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
It's coming eventually. Like I said, Elon is bad with deadlines. Sometimes it's hard to provide accurate time estimates for your human-machine interface, AI-powered electric car, and rockets.
hyperloop was only ever a sketch of an idea and a competition.
there are lots of valid criticisms of musk but thats just a cheap shot
Parent said "but he always delivers" and i disproved with counterexample.
"always delivers" is overstating it by far so fair enough then. I think he has delivered some very valuable things though
Unrelated, but the night mode on this page is quite devious
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If we’re critiquing the title, let me also link this excellent series: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Men is shorthand for men and women
Hi, in this case, the title is referencing a quote and internet meme and is just referring to men. However it's quite problematic here IMO as it presents a cyclical view of history and masculinity that is both simplistic and incorrect.
Firstly, it promotes toxic masculinity by implying that men are either "weak" or "strong," with the former being undesirable. This feeds into harmful stereotypes that equate strength with aggression, dominance, and lack of emotional expression while devaluing attributes like empathy, emotional intelligence, and vulnerability. It also suggests that war and conflict is a necessary component for the development of "acceptable" masculinity. This dichotomy of "weak" and "strong" men reinforces an outdated and harmful ideal of masculinity and promotes a culture that shames men, among other things, for expressing emotions.
You state your opinion as if it were a universal truth. It's fine if you believe that, but many (most?) still value traditional masculinity.
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Maybe 1000 years ago, when "man" really just meant person and there was a different word for males in particular. Nowadays, to refer to people as "man" it just sounds archaic and vaguely patriarchal, but people do it anyway because sounding slightly archaic can give your words more power.
Hard times create traumatized people with learned helplessness.
Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, ... keep thinking of names of profoundly accomplished people in areas like science, business, sports, art, etc. Then tally up how many of them had traumatic hardscrabble origins. Not many. Most grew up middle class or better and had the benefit of good education, solid family life, and a stable society.
This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much.
The points brought up in this talk are valid though, but I don't think the answer is "good times." I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." (Fixing it later usually involves enshittification.) There are other types of good times that favor more balanced sustainable business models, and those tend to encourage software with a bit more of a focus on quality.
I think there's some survivorship bias at work here too though. There was a lot of total crap software in the 80s and 90s that we don't remember. There were lots of DOS and Windows apps with horrible UI/UX that would crash your entire machine because operating systems were much less solid than they are today. Security almost didn't exist unless you were on a Unix-type OS or VMS, and even there it was pretty basic and coarse grained.
Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: it is much more bloated today. Some of that bloat is explainable by things like high-DPI displays and larger data sets, but much of it is a result of bad architecture and perverse incentives.
I've read an article about why there are less geniuses around and what "creates" geniuses. Usually it was high quality mentorship which helped the kids to get into deep knowledge faster. And from there they were able to build upon it.
and boredom, so the kids would venture into the field of interest on their own vs forced to do.
You could also approach this from the other direction: our focus on productivity, efficiency, monetization, etc. prevent people from pursuing things they are interested in and developing skills that don't directly translate into profit.
I had a lot of niche interests as a kid that apparently make me interesting as an adult. All of them are because I grew up in a small Wisconsin river town with parents who worked in the arts. Lots of time, minimal media exposure, and plenty of freedom to just… putter, learn and make. As my dad would say back then, ‘only boring people get bored, go find something to do’.
> I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later."
I need to re-read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to double check you haven't just grabbed an example from the last five minutes.
You know I never thought of Rome this way: grow at all costs, consolidate, enshittify.
I have a contrarian view on Rome: it was good that it collapsed, though it would have been better if more effort were made to save works of knowledge and maintain expertise. Even with the consequences though, the collapse of Rome made way for the eventual rise of enlightenment thinking and modern republican democracy. I doubt that would have happened under the Roman imperium.
This is what Rome's leadership looked like by the imperial period. It was pretty bleak.
https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalo...
Also there's a whole bad history meme about how Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria. The bulk of destruction was done by imperial Rome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_...
Roman statue avatar Xitter accounts can suck it. We have more freedom and prosperity today by many orders of magnitude, and we build greater marvels too: space stations, reusable rockets, 3nm integrated circuits. We've taught the sand to think for f's sake.
... which leads me to yet another view I sometimes feel is contrarian: Western civilization is not in a state of collapse.
Yep. It's a limited analogy. Other than Pharaonic Egypt and Confucian China (maybe also Mayans/Aztecs), empires back then didn't have a clear understanding like we do today about planning for sustainability. And even those two aforementioned ones couldn't do so without technological ossification and internal social repression, which led to their demise.
Today we know more about economic cycles, natural disaster preparedness, population planning, pollution, etc., even if our leaders don't always do it.
> Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though:
The Javascript ecosystem.
Maybe that's true, but the examples you picked are pretty bad.
* Isaac Newton lost his dad before he was born and his parents gave him up to live with relatives. He had a very rough childhood.
* Andre Carnegie's family went broke when he was a child, they had no money and had to restart their lives moving to the United States with basically nothing.
* Steve Jobs was adopted, though maybe not exactly poverty it still doesn't sound like a great way to grow up.
That's about 3/7 having rough childhoods and 4/7 having good or average.
The real issue is authentic versus simulated rough childhoods. Freemasons fucking up their kids to see how they behave and try to correct/program their behaviour based on the responses is more fucked than authentically fucked experience and the simulated experience doesn’t build true character. It’s only as good as the simulation and its parameters and behavioural engineering has a long way to go. Non-consensual behavioural engineering is worse than rape.
Its bloated because hardware isnt the bottleneck. IE good times.
Yes it is, especially at scale. This is most obvious in the cloud where zero interest rate era companies blow ludicrous amounts of money running comically inefficient code. The cloud bills at some of these companies are hilarious.
Even on the desktop hardware is a constraint if you are trying to do anything that pushes the boundaries of the medium, which is why endpoint-first AI is only possible thanks to hyper-optimized code like llama.cpp.
I hate hearing this but I know it's true because I've tried to build my career as a software engineer around minimalism, simplicity, maintainability and efficiency at scale but it has constantly felt like a struggle; that there is no market for that. You're totally right in pointing out that a lot of valuable software is comically inefficient. Sometimes it almost seems like only bad, ridiculously inefficient software is allowed to succeed financially in this system. Freaky. I've literally seen projects with horrible code be worth billions and witnessed their market cap drop over time as the code quality improved. I don't know WTF is going on in this industry but it's weird.
Even then llama.cpp requires special hardware (a gpu) to run at an acceptable product level of speed.
You’re conflating constraint with bottleneck. Of course its a constraint.
> This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much.
The meme is at least a few months older than the book, and most likely actually comes from a simplification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Usually the line is pretended to be a digest of Ibn Khldun thought, unfortunately this is quite inaccurate, as Ibn Khaldun's theories are wider and more sophisticated than that.
Now that I think of it Ibn Khaldun is precisely this example of an accomplished thinker that went through the hardest times possible in the Old World : he went through the Black Death in the 1340, his whole family died while travelling to reunite with him after many years of forced separation, he was imprisoned, deported, exiled many times...
most historic scientists lived far more brutal lives than all humans live since WW2 or so. Schwarzchild figured his radius while figthing WW1.
Instead of "middle class" i think their common trait was that they were educated , which if we go back centuries just means "literate".
To be honest i think the adage itself is not true, just popular BS.
There is no need for that sexism here.
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Good times may create weak men, but authentic experience is what develops real character growth and wisdom and NOT the kind of synthetic fraudulent experience that is all too often synthesised today. Synthetic experience is about as useful as tits on a bull.