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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

If you want bulletproof software with guarantees (like the medical industry or aerospace or traffic light systems or banks) you'll get extremely conservative, boring old tech with no flashy new features all the time.

If the cost for breakage is too high they just won't make any changes unless absolutely necessary. But the market has spoken and people prefer flashy new features and updates instead of boring railroad control-like software that is works the same way for decades.

You can't have it both ways. If your data is important don't just store it on a single device. These photos were just stored on a single device that could break for any reason any day anyway.

Unless Adobe can be shown to have been criminally negligent or intentionally malicious I don't think there's a case here but ianal.

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If keeping my professional data safe from deletion means that I will as a result get more boring tech I think I'd make that choice most times in the course of my work. What I'm finding annoying in recent times is how I'm not able to actually make that choice as often as I'd like.

Also agree with your point about making backups if anything is significantly important, though I've also found a lot of products in recent times are deliberately making it harder to create backups (Slack comes to mind here)

> If you want bulletproof software with guarantees (like the medical industry or aerospace or traffic light systems or banks) you'll get extremely conservative, boring old tech with no flashy new features all the time.

If users could actually evaluate the guarantees and have reasonable assurance that they would be upheld, I suspect this is exactly the direction the industry would take.

However, because it's unreasonably expensive to verify that those guarantees hold (relative to the value the software offers), end-users have no reason to prefer products that offer them to products which merely claim to be secure.

You can verify it based on the legal warranty contract that you sign. The reason this is not offered is that consumers/prosumers would not be able to pay for it.

Turning a process/culture that works 99% of the time into 99.99% is often surprisingly expensive. For example currently as a company you may have some slightly less attentive engineers or less strict code review process for convenience and speed, or you may pursue lots of projects with tight deadlines etc. which can lead to a situation like this with non negligible chance, but usually won't. Most of the software you use doesn't routinely delete user data, it's an accident. To avoid it you need to hire higher quality engineers or more of them to give them breathing room and less workload, and have to give up on some new features and innovation, which is really not so easy in a competitive market.

But the market has spoken

It has? When was the market given a choice?

I, for one, would be absolutely fine with having fewer shiny new features but also not having software I rely on break all the time. The current culture of just shoving everything out, whatever condition it's in and regardless of the consequences of any potential failure, and saying you'll patch any problems later is toxic and quietly causing enormous damage to our society.

The culture of saying you can sell some hardware product with embedded software, or some software product that is hosted online or based on a subscription model, and then effectively force users who have already committed to that product to accept arbitrary changes whether they want them or not, is also toxic.

We don't know how to reliably write 100% bug-free software, but we do know how to write better software than much of what is produced today. Getting a significant increase in quality isn't even that expensive, since the long-term savings from reduced maintenance and increased productivity help to offset or even outweigh any additional costs during initial development. However, it does require hiring people with actual skill and knowledge to write the software instead of just assembling a cheap team of code monkeys. It also requires your leadership team to actually care about quality and plan to achieve it and provide resources accordingly.

IMNSHO, our industry would benefit from having more developers and leaders with these skills and mindsets, but until there is some form of pressure (and again, I couldn't disagree more that the status quo is a result of genuine customer preference) the economic drivers aren't pushing towards training up new software developers to be better and having leaders plan for good quality products in many cases. After all, why waste time and money doing something right if you can do it wrong but cheaper and still charge almost the same for it anyway? I think we're well overdue for genuine competition in the market and/or regulatory intervention to drive standards up.

Everybody is ignorant, but smart, attentive people are expensive and are not rewarded. Managers get up the ladder by scheming and appearances and alliances, devs are rewarded for padding their CVs, project managers rewarded for introducing new stuff with a short term focus etc. In many cases people just either don't know better, or don't have the time and patience to provide different incentives. This includes the customer who also doesn't understand tech, doesn't see the value in robustness.

And again for an Adobe creative product all this is still fine. Not losing your data is a solved problem and it's called a backup.

I very very much doubt that a person who doesn't bother to back up their professional data (keeps it all on a single device that may break any day) will have the brains and mental models to understand an argument involving software quality and that they should pay premium for something so intangible and abstract as opposed to visible things like features and a modern look and feel/polish.

In some analogous cases with ignorant customers the state steps in and creates consumer protection regulation, but its usually only for really dangerous stuff that can kill you or make you sick, like food safety, not just delete your wedding pics.

And again for an Adobe creative product all this is still fine. Not losing your data is a solved problem and it's called a backup.

On this point, I just can't agree. Regardless of whether or not users have effective back-ups -- and we all know that for various reasons, sometimes they don't, even if they believed they did -- it simply isn't acceptable for someone to push out a software patch that destroys data incorrectly.

I don't think it's a trivial thing if someone loses data of great personal value, whether it's wedding photos, or a video of your child's first play at school, or precious footage of a friend or relative who is no longer with you, or just a personal project you've put a lot of work into. These things matter to people, and even if they didn't arrange for effective back-ups, it's not their fault that the data was destroyed in this case, it's 100% on Adobe for screwing up.

I don't know where in the world you are, so maybe that is the case for you. At least here in the UK, and in Europe more widely, consumer protection laws tend to be quite strong and quite well regarded by the public, and they certainly aren't limited to life-or-death kinds of issues (though of course we have specialised safety regulations in those kinds of areas too).

> Unless Adobe can be shown to have been criminally negligent

Not having multiple site backups isn't criminally negligent when running a paid cloud service?

They didn't lose the cloud data.

nope, not in the slightest... anywhere on earth as far as i know

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