Then I tried to watch a TikTok that a friend sent me, but the website took forever to load. When it finished loading, the player didn't work.
What is happening? Is software quality in decline?
Even software I pay for seems to try to screw me at every turn. "You paid for me? Have some ads! I'll scan everything you do and sell it off to the highest bidder! No you can't copy and send this image to a friend, but here's a link to try and lure them into the walled garden so I can data rape them too. Stay in my eco system it's great. You love it here! Click click click keeping clicking. Moar data to sell! Give moar! Data breach! I'm soz (but no compensation for you."
Oh and when you live off grid with little power you learn to hate electron apps. They are such power wasters. Three things cause my inverter to spin up its cooling fans: games, windows updates and electron apps. (And of course if you have "AC" plugged in most apps seem to think its a damn free for all for power. So its more power efficient to charge powered down and only run using battery if possible).
No. Just, No.
For example, the most recent update to iBooks from Apple glitches if you rotate the screen, and stays that way even if you rotate it back. iBooks is an app that recently got a tiny facelift, yet no one tested what happens if you flip the phone.
I agree that we use more software now, so we should experience more buggy software, but if that was the case, we should have experienced the same proportion of buggy software all our life. I still think easy patching facilitated bad quality practices, although those bad practices probably make commercial sense.
That was fast, which is the bright side of network patches.
[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/238529/the-sum-of-...
Which brings up the question: what is negative software quality? Can we define that?
It's absurd that a program should be so much slower on machines that are literally about 1000x faster.
And not network-related but still annoying is Mac OS' habit of always spinning up connected harddrives each time a "save file" dialog opens, which causes that dialog to be completely unresponsive until all drives are ready. Save a file and the most expensive Mac can be bottlenecked by a single external HDD. It's just so unnecessary.
That's basically the end of this thread.
As in, why isn't it better? (sound of cash machines)
This results in poor UX, apps spying you constantly, useless features and easy to fix bugfixes that aren't fixed in years.
As a software developer I'm disappointed in this approach. If I can I try my best to produce the best experience for the end user, but in the end I can only get satisfaction in open source...
But open source is sometimes hell too!
Just recently I found super popular open source library that earns $200k each years from donations, but the its Github is filled with issues and PRs. Author doesn't care, the money flows anyway. It hurts to see most major issues are already fixed by PRs, but the author doesn't even bother to merge & release.
Sad.
I think the situation might be different if the expectation for software wasn't that it cost nothing.
One is the “things aint built like they used to be” bias — buildings from the past that are physically well built are the ones that don’t get torn down, so we associate the past with the sturdy stone buildings instead of the clapboard houses.
The other is that you are right. We keep pushing rendering engines originally designed to render hypertext into a de facto operating system, so even basic software like a real estate site or video player has to deal with a bunch of accidental complexity that the equivalent desktop software from 1999 didn’t have to. It’s worth noting that both your examples are browser-based apps, not desktop or systems software.
Discord and MS Teams still take 30 seconds to open.
Numbers all become meaningless around 2029 and CPUs are now sold as "as powerful as a 7 GHz CPU". No attempt is made to specify anything else about the hypothetical 7 GHz CPU.
Twenty years ago, applications crashed all the time and there was no thought given to data recovery. For example, whilst writing this post, I accidentally clicked a link, then pressed back and Chrome hadn't lost my post. Back in the day, a mistimed backspace would irretrievably destroy your input. Video games frequently wouldn't work without messing with driver settings - how do I know if want to use glide or DX?
Playing a video involved messing around with codecs and if you were unlucky, the video was actually just a virus that would completely own your computer.
There is one major exception, which is websites. After the age of popups, but before the age of privacy warnings, there was this short window where you could just open a web page and it didn't have a whole bunch of crap you had to dismiss before you could access the content.
There's SO MUCH incredible software out these days...better than anything thats come before it...software is getting better - media harvesting is getting worse. So...support good companies, and make a point of not supporting the ones which do this. It comes at a cost - but - that's life.
for creators, particularly in music - we've never had it better...
PAID -Ableton blows my mind - every time i touch it. -So does FL studio
FREE -Surge XT - most incredible free software synthesizer going -Vital - a free version of Serum which sounds incredible. -Ardour - a free protools stand in. -Air Windows - tonnes of audio processing plugins -Variety of Sound - beautiful UIs, awesome sound. -Blender...holy shit...
i could go on..
Free, if you don't want the clever "neural engine" stuff or >4k timelines.
Oh, you do want that? That'll be 300 quid then, and it's yours for life. They have never even charged for the updates, either.
Of course, they make their money on cameras and control surfaces.
OBS Screen Recorder, Obsidian Mind Mapping Software, Mock Mechanic (free engineering sandbox), Ranstads Circuit Modelling JS site, Inkscape - getting better and better
The insane rendering time one is weird, but it only seems to show up in the Windows version. Apparently it's something to do with having one dodgy frame in the clip. I suspect it's something to do with sources encoded in h.264, but I'd expect that to affect the Mac port as well. Linux doesn't seem to be affected.
You can try doing "render in place" for the affected clip, which seems to help.
Re: render in place, I'll try your approach next time I run into it. Thanks.
Is that when using a plugin window or using the Ableton UI itself?
I can only recall plugins crashing for me... Always worth checking for updates with the vendors.
So overall I don't think it's getting worse but it's always been bad on mobile for whatever reason.
So over time, you aren’t just subject to bugs in feature A. You’re subject to bugs in feature A and library B and framework C and injected monitoring D and so on for the same user action.
So often have friends and family got lost wondering what to do. Oh you got to click on it? The visual clues are all gone. "Flat"... right.
Too many things are rushed out the door. Too much focus has been placed on "features" "features" and more "features" and no polish. Every release there are new features and yet the old 1s still have lots of bugs :(
ChatGPT, literally the biggest thing of the year, still has an incredibly amateurish website. Their auth UX is broken. They do not offer exporting conversations. You just see an infinite scroll list of previous conversations. It's a complete mess!
Yes, indeed, almost no one cares about UI/UX anymore at all, let alone polishing it towards perfection.
How did this happen? If yor product is "good enough", no one will care about the UI/UX. It's not an important distinguisher. Everyone keeps complaining about reddit, but everyone keeps using it. Same for ChatGPT.
No, you just have a skewed memory of some time when software was "good". Remember Windows ME?
Example: in C++, writing switch(..) on an enum would automatically default create all switch cases. Then later versions, it only occasionally did it, now it doesn't do it at all.
Another example: When my application finishes and VS is activated, sometimes the cursor is in one window, but typing happens in another.
Another example: In Windows 11, when resizing a window, the artifacts seem to have gotton worse. Sometimes even the whole window is flickering.
Visual Studio -> Jetbrains.
Windows 11 -> Linux (or Mac)
While VS and Windows have gotten worse in recent years, other software like Jetbrains IDEs and Linux UX have gotten better.
I guess it's a tradeoff.. how much can a software degrade until you're willing to learn and deal with another set of problems. Unfortunalty, you kind of get used to UX quirks.
I have to say though, all in all Win 11 is not as bad as people make it out to be. After turning off a few things, it stops getting in the way.
I'm definitly going to have another look at Jetbrains though.
From what I've scrolled through so far, most examples people give of software that got worse is by Microsoft, though I wouldn't say it's limited to them. There seems to be a desperation for profit in commercial software right now like nothing I've seen in the past. There's usually alternatives worth a look though!
I grew up on Windows and only around XP did it begin to get okay. Before then it was mostly garbage, and after then it was Vista! I have my issues with modern MacOS, but it's generally pretty amazing. I feel like asking the same of these Jonathan Blow acolytes -- When exactly was this golden age? Are you sure it's not nostalgia?
If your poison is Linux, do you remember what the Linux desktop looked like in the early 2000s? On the server, it's ridiculously more resilient and polished.
FWIW I have tremendous respect for Jonathan Blow as a software engineer, but I think this has always been mostly a self aggrandizing pitch, from a craftsperson to people who like the idea of crafted things, that is -- if all the software in the world is getting worse, then there must be some priesthood of the worthy. When, in fact, the "bad" software Jonathan Blow sees is software produced simply under different constraints (expectation is software costs nothing, it must run everywhere/on the web, it's part of a distributed system, compatibility with earlier crappy software really matters, it's made by people who simply care less about the it being a perfect experience, because its not their game). Of course, some new software is actually bad, but I'm not certain software is actually getting worse.
I hate when a mostly static website is rendered completely client side, for example. Most of the time, I just want to read the text, maybe see some (non-marketing) images, and that's it. I don't want hundreds of kilobytes of JS executed on my machine just for that.
That makes software harder. Just wait until you can't buy a new computer just like that.
Stick to vanilla Java/C+/HTML(5)/JSON/OpenGL/AL and make something great and you'll be fine.
Note + is NOT a typo: it means C++ compiler with mostly C syntax. I only use string, stream and namespaces. Classes very rarely.
Don't download things that are >1GB.
How do you figure that? Seems to me that things are still rapidly changing. Starlink, fusion, JWST, computer hardware, 3D printing etc...loads still happening.
Acceleration stopped 1968.
CPU improvements stalled around 2012.
GPU around 1030 so in 2017.
Energy is the master resource.
It is double actually. Also there are CPUs with 64 cores now. Also in 2012 there were CPUs with more than 4 cores.
that's all I can notice
What you can notice is not real information when speed, cores and energy use can be quantified.
BTW, for modern multitasking computers, the main jump in performance comes from going from a single processor to dual processor. Than Amdahl's law neglects the difference.
> What you can notice is not real information when speed, cores and energy use can be quantified.
Single-core performance is totally the same, the number of cores does not change anything visible and energy use seems like the only outcome of 10 years spent from 2012.
This is nonsense
Than Amdahl's law neglects the difference.
Then you don't understand "Amdahl's law". It is very basic and only about parts of software that aren't multithreaded becoming a bottleneck. This sounds like desperate pessimism.
Single-core performance is totally the same,
This is not true either and you could look at benchmarks to see it.
the number of cores does not change anything visible
Disable hyperthreading and all your cores in the bios, then run multithreaded software and say the same thing.
Core 2 duo Quad from 2007+ used to have 2 L2 cashes (not 4) and no L3 and task manager of Windows refused to see more than 2 cores, but for some rare tasks Quad was perfect such as playing GTA4. That is just my memories, feel free to correct me if you see me mistaken.
> Then you don't understand "Amdahl's law". It is very basic and only about parts of software that aren't multithreaded becoming a bottleneck.
Everything except of browser is not multithreaded in 2023, for example a garbage collecting of interpreted languages.
> This is not true either and you could look at benchmarks to see it.
I have a heavy single-threaded application which I need to run 24/7 and I still use Pentium 4 because no modern computer can make it 2x faster.
> Disable hyperthreading and all your cores in the bios, then run multithreaded software and say the same thing.
I mean starting from 2 cores the number of cores does not add anything visible.
This is software has nothing to do with your claims of hardware not advancing or four cores being 'unstable'. I don't know what it has to do with anything.
Everything except of browser is not multithreaded in 2023
This is a bizarre claim because it's so easy to disprove. Games, content creation video encoding and decoding and of course, your whole OS which is running multiple programs.
This also has nothing to do with amdahl's law, which is about how non-multithreaded parts of multithreaded software scales.
for example a garbage collecting of interpreted languages.
Who cares, an interpreted language is not meant to be fast in the first place. Even so you can still run multiple threads and multiple processes.
This is also software and has nothing to do with your claim that CPUs haven't changed since 2012.
I mean starting from 2 cores the number of cores does not add anything visible.
They do to everyone buying CPUs with more than 2 cores, which is basically everyone, since even phones and $35 rasberry pi boards have four or more cores.
Pretty much everything you said was not only wrong, it didn't even have anything to do with your point.
What is the most important feature of post-2012 CPU and except of energy consuming?
They are faster per clock cycle, run at higher frequencies, have more cores, more memory bandwidth, more pcie bandwidth, wider SIMD lanes, deeper out of order buffers, much more cache and more execution units.
This is called extensive progress, no intensive developing since 2012 as it was mentioned before I have joined discussion. You are completely wrong about frequency (no increase since Haswell's 4Ghz) and somewhat boring about other points so I will not answer here any more.
This is a word salad that means nothing. Where did you even get these ideas?
You are completely wrong about frequency (no increase since Haswell's 4Ghz)
Why would you say something that is so obviously wrong and easy to disprove? Most current AMD cpus have base clocks that are higher than 4ghz, let alone their boost clocks.
https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-7950x-cpu-5-85-ghz-peak-5-1...
I also believe the older stuff is better built in terms of longevity if you cool them properly.
I also know the new ones have more crap in them that will allow Intel/Microsoft to block things when they need money.
This thing enables me to have my complete production environment on my machine and develop faster. Apart from that programs in general run very fast. I don't want to go back to 2012.
Web in general seems to be getting worse yes. Partly due to dark pattern-y BS but also because it's a hard problem. There are just so many combinations of configurations that it's hard to cover it all. See also those fingerprinting sites showing you're unique (your configuration)...that's effectively a measure of that diversity.
I don't mind the latter. There is certainly a movement towards intentional user hostile designs though which is annoying
In that vein and as a counterpoint: I remember thinking software like VLC and irfanview were great back in the day. Now, I find them both to be incredibly frustrating. I wonder if the bar for quality software has actually gone up.
That being said, I never remember basic websites of the 90s being as buggy as the ones I run into on a regular basis today, so who knows.
This inscrutability of modern software is one of my biggest pet peeves with it. There was a time when the resource-limitations of computers forced software to be much simpler - and the end result was that when things went wrong, someone with sufficient time and motivation could sift through the rubble, figure out what the problem is, and often lash up some kind of workaround. That's getting harder and harder to do these days.
Likewise, in the open-source world, the breadth of dependencies is getting out of hand - I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to build something and had to go on half a dozen side-quests to track down a particular version of a particular build tool because the version in my distro is either too new or too old.
A lot of software today is built to drive a specific user behavior to generate revenue instead of being designed from the start to provide customer value.
User-hostile behavior, dark patterns, etc. are all a symptom of this. Additionally time-to-market and marketing bullet points are often more important than user experience of bug-free software because many companies have found they can make the same revenue without having to focus on the customer experience.
Classic software was not as big-free as people like to think. There was lots of BAD software. The difference was that with higher prices and the inability to push updates (aside from mailing floppies) meant that the incentive was to produce software that had fewer bugs.
Blame the enormous amount of churn in the web tool world, the chase after the latest fads, the fact that many 'web programmers' entered this field not so much because they like the intellectual challenge of solving puzzles but because it pays well, the fact that project targets keep on moving or whatever.
Commercial software is getting 'worse' in that the distinction between customer and product is disappearing. A product is that what is made by a company in order to sell it to a customer so the company gets to make money. A customer is he who buys a product from a company because he deems it fit for some purpose.
That was then but now things have changed. Final sales are making way for rental agreements, products are turning into advertising and data mining applications to be used by companies to herd and milk their customers. Customers are thus productised and sold to other companies who target them with directed advertising based on what was harvested earlier.
Free software is still mostly freed from this plague - although even there it sometimes shows up, e.g. the Shopping lens [1] which appeared in Ubuntu 12.04 and only recently disappeared was an unwelcome reminder of this phenomenon - so there is a way out.
1) If you haven't actually lived through the arc you can't really spot this so you invite "okay boomer" sniping if you point it out.
2) Knowledge does not update the genome, therefore knowledge transmission is A Hard Problem, therefore because "developing software" is not a small and formal discipline the lessons learned by experience are not reliably/effectively/efficiently/at-all transmitted to the newer "generation" of "developers". This gives the appearance of "not learning from mistakes" or "things degrading" but the reality is simply that everyone is always reinventing things they don't understand as a result.
3) There are too many people engaging in the act of producing software who shouldn't actually be doing it. This is true of all fields where demand outstrips supply. LLMs are going to solve this problem in a most unfortunate manner.
4) The reality that cannot be discussed is that "stupid" is a much larger problem than anyone realizes, it extends well into areas that people normally think of as "requiring high intelligence", and it exacerbates all of the above.
5) We incentivize and, for reasons already given, actually justify behaviors that also tend to produce this. Ex: I assure you that somewhere out there is a product manager with a drug habit desperate to find a way to turn hammers into smart devices with a subscription service, NOT because this will help people who use hammers, but because this will increase profits for a company that produces hammers. This is an objectively bad and harmful practice that we encourage daily.
Soooooo, again, yep.
For most software all of that has changed and it comes with a cost.
I literally had to google how to restart my phone the other day.
With this one as with many others I think it's because a lot are worked on by multiple teams and a lot of bugs get stuck in a kind of "no man's land" between teams where nobody is really responsible.
I especially find it frustrating how software gets more sluggish while at the same time we're making 500Hz screens, VR etc which should actually encourage the opposite.
It is just that the goal the developers had is not what you assume (to let you view video as easily as possible) but instead onboard you as an active user of the app.
If you try and use Facebook without being logged in you will have a similar experience.
For example, I have a BlackVue camera. App used to work great.
Now I get a prompt to subscribe to their paid system. Why? I Paid for a webcam, and knew that the online service was paid, but then it was my choice.
Now they are coercing me.
Basically our current capitalism system incentivises not "value creation" as an utopian version of capitalism would incentivise, but actually "rent seeking" aka "build a moat, capture users". Everyone is after guaranteed recurring revenue, and it is done by shackling you to the service being provided, check "right to repair" issues, check compatibility in software ecosystems.
Someone builds a very good product, people migrate to it, they pay you money, maybe even pay you to keep using it (subscription), but how to you guarantee that they are not switching to something else? Add as much lock in as possible, or make it free so you can sell user data/put adds. All of these are not connected to the quality or "value" you are providing to customers, but rather into ways of keeping your moat / stop competition from rising.
tragedy of the commons (and similiar issues) means that we can never have the utopian capitalist/free market world. Regulation is always needed to avoid such issues, but at the same time regulation can also backfire and instead create these moats/rent. The utopian Capitalist world, just like the utopian Communism cannot exist. And the end of the day, there can never be purity, and systems need continuous engineering/maintenance effort.
In your example, TikTok want you to use the app, website is not a priority, they can't gather as much info there, it just exists so that someone using the app could send a video to someone without it. Also, it still needs a ton of bloat to still get as much info from you as they can. So, with less resources and with still wanting to spy on you as much as they can, it's normal that the video player might not work in all browser/OS/device combinations.
Same shit across every product, now add things like speed of delivery of new features or new ways to spy being more important that performance/quality, and you get trash software.
I think that answers your question.
Alarm which can track someone seems like more advanced kind of alarm software from some points of view.
When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself. This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging.
With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years.
As for programming tools, they're more stable, robust, and widely available than ever. When was the last time you had to pay for a compiler, interpreter or language runtime? When was the last time GCC or LLVM crashed? Today one can write code in C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Rust, and a plethora of other languages... all for free, even on Windows! This is a huge improvement from the bad old days when your choices were to either pay for Borland or pay for Visual Studio. And as for web programming, do you really pine for the days when your only option for a backend language was a collection of perl scripts in `cgi-bin`?
The one regression, in my opinion, is with communication software. We used to have open (or "open-enough" i.e. reverse engineered) protocols that enabled multi-protocol, multi-platform clients such as Pidgin. That world is gone. Our communications are now siloed into proprietary, hostile software stacks, such as Slack, Google Meet and Teams. And our personal communications are siloed between Discord, WhatsApp, and the multifarious other messenger apps that we have to install in order to communicate with that one person who refuses to use anything else.
But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.
But now we are having USB-c.
Never. But in my home server I have 4, sometimes 5 RAID controllers. Some combinations of RAID/AHCI/IDE modes won't work due to lack of resources. I presume it's about I/O addresses - the boot message is not really informative compared to Device Manager. I regret not taking a picture of the error message. The system won't even pass the POST when this happens.
> I remember when "Plug and Play" was derisively nicknamed "Plug and Pray". Today, it all just works.
No, it doesn't! I just plugged in an old webcam and there's no driver. It's the exact same "Pray"... well, not really. I don't pray. These days I default to the "It's not going to work" mindset.
> When I'm assembling a computer, I don't have to set jumpers.
How is that a good thing? Overclock something, system won't boot, you have to reset the CMOS and loose all settings, including the boot order.
> I don't have to fiddle with making sure the boot drive is at the end of the IDE cable rather than the middle.
No, you could have used the jumpers, but I think you hated them too much to let them help you. I wish I had the jumpers now. Every time I insert or remove a SATA HDD from the rack I have to redo the boot order.
> I can just snap all the pieces together like Lego, hit the power button, and be assured that I'll get a bootable system (assuming, of course, that I haven't been a dolt and forgotten to plug the video card power cable in).
And then you notice that the system won't recognize the CPU without a BIOS/UEFI update, which you can't do because it won't boot unless it recognises the CPU. Then the OS is installed with IDE drivers and you can't switch to AHCI without major OS surgery.
> When was the last time you had an application blue-screen/bugcheck/kernel panic your machine? Yes, Windows still blue-screens from time to time, but over the past decade, I've found that 100% of my blue-screens have been caused by faulty drivers, rather than application code or bugs in the OS itself.
These days there's no blue screen or error. Apps just won't start (click the icon and it does nothing), opened apps suddenly close without any error (just dissappear from the screen), system suddenly reboots, or won't wake up from sleep, or an update makes the system unbootable or stuck in a boot cycle.
> This wasn't always the case. I remember, on Windows 98, there was one particular game that my brother had (I think it was Reader Rabbit), which would repeatedly and reliably blue-screen the machine when we got to a certain level. I haven't seen any errors like that in more than decade. And even the driver blue-screens are getting better. I remember not too long ago, my Windows PC's monitor blinked off, then came back. When I looked in Event Viewer, I saw that the GPU driver had crashed and had been automatically restarted. This is something that still causes kernel panics on Linux and MacOS, but Windows just shrugs it off and keeps on chugging.
True. This part is better.
> With regards to Linux, when was the last time you had to mess with xorg.conf? Wifi drivers? WPA supplicant? I remember when I had to download the Windows drivers for my wireless card, extract the binary blobs, compile NDISWrapper, and then pray that I'd set everything up correctly, before unplugging the Ethernet cable to test whether my wifi was working. Now? I browse Hacker News while Linux is installing, because wifi drivers have been part of the kernel for years.
I did most of the enumerated items this week.
> But other than comms, has software improved? I have a hard time arguing otherwise.
It did improve a little in stability, at a very very high cost of user's money, time and privacy: waiting for stuff to open, commands to get processed, buying ever faster and more expensive hardware to do basically the exact same things as 20 years ago, only slower, and not because of the 56K modem.
It's because of people always wanting the latest newest stuff that good old software gets abandoned. See: IRC, FTP, Opera Presto, websites without JS, single-user OS, also hardware: ethernet on laptops, headphone jacks on phones.
As far as the system not recognizing newer processors without a BIOS update, that was also true in the '90s. It's just that, back then, things changed so much, you'd just end up tossing the entire motherboard when it came time to install a new CPU, and you'd "upgrade" the BIOS that way.