So what exactly is happening to the software industry?
Why are we getting buggier than ever releases of major Operating Systems?
For some reasons I can’t stop thinking about “AI”.
For some reasons I can’t stop thinking about “AI”.
Today I ran out of ram, the "teams" desktop app was taking 2 gigs just standing there doing nothing, you can run four whole windows Xp on the same amount of ram, comfortably. My inactive chatgpt chrome tab alone was taking 900mb
And the web is the most advanced and open OS in the world. That all those features can be packaged into a 100MB binary is magic
By being a poorly-behaved process until you are caught red-handed.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...
Chrome has gone through almost two rewrites of their core rendering stack since then. It's impressive work.
Although this itself is outdated, I remember enjoying "Life of a Pixel"[0] back when it came out.
This predates AI, eg recall Windows was gnarly before the third Service Pack, etc.
Personally I blame outsourcing and its cousin offshoring. Not because Indians can't code or any such racist nonsense, but because relentless pressure to be the lowest bidder, no universal measurable standard of what quality actually means, and, above all, no practical way to exercise meaningful managerial control over a team you don't control or are ten timezones away makes quality impossible.
I suspect that in the Wide World of Software, away from the 10x people here on HN who write SQLite clones for fun and send Fabrice PRs to fix his bugs, vibe coded software might actually be approaching the quality of what they get from their vendors today. That doesn't make it good, but it's at least equally meh. It's the Visual Basic era of 1994 all over again. We'd better get used to it, fast.
Hard though from the idea initially too.
The main stack is reasonably web, as broad as that is