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Doesn’t reality suck the same ? My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. My

• happytoexplain 6y ago
  I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these annoyances, so it feels like we should be able to wrangle it better after so many decades. It's entirely our own creation, and we decide every iota of it, and yet it bites us (justifiably or not - turns out thousands of people each creating different layers of a gigantic state machine is hard to perfectly coordinate, but we may have been able to do better by now if we had been more thoughtful and patient throughout).
  • ihadfun 6y ago
    We probably could make gas stink less just like we could fix that bug. The ROI just isn’t there.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Gas stinking is a feature, not a bug. It's a safety measure. Particularly when we're talking gas (and not gasoline), which is naturally odorless and made to stink on purpose.
  • Out_of_Characte 6y ago
    Reality creeps in from us creating tech-utopia trough "legacy" systems where the internet, cryptography, multi-core architecture and full program isolation didn't exist yet. Software has a nasty habit of iterating on yesterday's ideas instead of rewriting for tomorrow. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it seems to be the path of least resistance thusfar.
    • dublin 6y ago
      I disagree - by and large, we don't need to "rewrite for tomorrow". Almost every significant problem in Computer Science and Software Engineering was solved (well) decades ago, often in the 1960s. Security is a bigger issue now, but it was largely solved years ago. The problem is that we do engage in so much "rewriting", instead of leveraging known good, quality code (or at least fully-fleshed out algos, etc.) in our "new, modern, elegant, and trendy" software edifices of crap. To me, this may be the one really good thing to come of the cloud (as opposed to the re-mainframe-ication of IT): the "OS" of the 21st century, allowing plumbing together proven scalable and reliable cloud/network services to build better software. (Again, not a new idea, this was behind the "Unix Philosophy" of pipes, filters, and making each program do one thing well. Eventually, it will be in fashion to realize this really is a better way...) We need smaller, better software, not the latest trendy languages, insanely complex platforms that no one understands, and toolchains of staggering complexity that produce crap code so bloated that it requires computers thousands of times faster than the Crays of the 1990s just to do ordinary desktop stuff. (Seriously, folks, the Raspberry Pi 4 on the next table is a rough match for the Cray we had in Houston when I worked for Chevron in the early 90s! Think about that, and then think about how little data you really need to deal with to do the job, vs what you're actually shuffling around.)
  • hrktb 6y ago
    I hear you, but feel like we are biased by what we accepted as normal in our formative years, and that filter doesn’t apply on what we are discovering now that we’re grown up professionals. For instance books have been with us for centuries, and honestly most of them suck. Paper pages are thin and sometimes cut your finger (how many times did you get cut by an ebook ?), most are weak to liquids yet our world is filled with liquids everywhere, sometimes coming down from the sky. Updates are painful and costly and non scalable. Font sizes can’t be changed, you have to use an external device to deal with it. Not saying there are perfect alternatives or that the tradeoffs don’t make sense. Just that we learned very early that books have these limitations and we’ll need to live with them to be a member of society. And we can agree all of these aspects could be and sometimes are fixed, but most people are just ok with books ‘sucking’ in those ways.
    • adamsea 6y ago
      We’ve also had centuries to improve the technology of books and I think that makes a difference. Although the weaknesses you cite seem like problems in search of a solution. No one ever expected books to have variable font size ... why would they? Lastly let’s recall the book five hundred years ago is dramatically different from the book of today. For example your point about liquids is now in many ways resolved by the cheapness and ubiquity of books. 500 years ago, not so much.
      • TwelveNights 6y ago
        While nobody expected books to have variable font sizes, the fact that ebooks do allow it to be adjusted means that people with deteriorating vision may still read them.
        • jschwartzi 6y ago
          A magnifying glass was the original solution to this problem. They never run out of battery.
          • 6y ago
  • acituan 6y ago
    > I think the difference is that the entire software/hardware stack is a world created entirely by humans, untouched by "reality" for the purposes of all these annoyances, so it feels like we should be able to wrangle it better after so many decades. Humans, as the makers of these systems, are part of that reality, which was not created by us. The reality is that we are great apes writing precise machine instructions with our general intelligence that was not purpose built for being that precise but selected for survival. Our cognitive machinery cannot exhaustively predict all the possibilities of failure of what we write, if we are working in teams, we have transfer most of our technical ideas still through natural language, in a combinatorially increasing manner as the team size increases etc. None of this is user hostile, it is just human fallibilities and limitations in play. And since we can't alter our cognitive capacity drastically, we can only make more machines against these (e.g. unittests) with their own limitations. I think the scale of what we have been achieving despite these limitations are just fantastic. If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc.
    • titzer 6y ago
      > If anything users are becoming too egocentric, expecting the world to conform to their comfort, with a dash of construal level fallacy, underestimating from a mile away how easy it would be to write bug free programs with perfect designs in a real world, by real people, with real budgets etc. Selection bias. You only hear from users who want new features. You rarely hear from users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.
      • acituan 6y ago
        I was talking about the “users who don't want new features and just want software to stop being buggy and acting like a goddamn haunted house.” so the selection bias is yours. Most bugs are just annoying, consequences are not catastrophic if your favorite tuner app forgets your settings, your word processor messes up the formatting, your pdf reader crashes. You can recover with some frustration and wasted time. The perception of these being catastrophic failures shows the sense of entitlement users have because they are used to a certain smoothness in their experience and expect everything to go their way. This doesn’t match the underlying realities of the task; it is very easy to construe a sense of a working program in one’s mind but it is exponentially difficult to make the implementation actually bug free, usable and functional the way user wants.
  • Negitivefrags 6y ago
    You reminded me of this quote. “Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”
• _qulr 6y ago
  This is a straw man argument. Cars vary widely in their product quality. Houses vary widely in their product quality. Some things in life are inevitable facts of nature, but product quality is not. Quality is to a large extent determined by the time and care taken by the manufacturer.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Sure there are things that don’t work, but it’s not nearly comparable. In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer, my closet Just Works, books Just Work (with an ink smudge maybe every 50-100 reading hours) etc. I can expect each of those things to last decades. Looking at the goods I’ve bought on Amazon recently, digital electronics/software as a category doesn’t hold a candle to everything else I buy in terms of reliability.
  • julianlam 6y ago
    > In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer I think blaming software for this is a little naive. Take a look at consumer reports for any modern fridge, stovetop/oven, washer/dryer, etc, and you will see complaints about fridge motors dying, touch panels going on the fritz, etc. -- none of which involve anything more than low level firmware. If you want to put a tinfoil hat on, you can consider that it may be planned obsolescence, but to put the blame squarely on software, I would disagree with.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > If you want to put a tinfoil hat on, you can consider that it may be planned obsolescence, but to put the blame squarely on software, I would disagree with. You don't need tin foil hat when facing the truth :). Also, while things you mentioned aren't software-related, they're modern tech-related. Like, last 20 years. Fridge motors dry out because they're being made cheaper, with not enough lubricant put into them and no option of opening them up and pouring in the grease. Touch panels are going on the fritz because touch panels suck (that's often very much software), and they shouldn't be put on appliances in the first place. But it's cheaper, so they are. Worth noting that there wasn't some big price reduction happening from solid appliances 20 years ago to crappy ones today. Price remained roughly fixed, but appliances started to suck more and more.
      • selestify 6y ago
        Right, but the move towards cheaper and lower-quality is more the fault of the current economic system and its incentives than it is the fault of software.
• rayiner 6y ago
  There is a difference between design trade offs and flawed design of deviations from the design. Your car does what it’s supposed to do, within the predictable limits imposed by the fact that it’s a gas-powered car. Since MacOS 10.15.4 or .5, my 16” MacBook Pro crashes waking up from sleep due to some glitch in waking up the GPU. Of course, people perceive that software sucks because it’s more complicated than people perceive. I forget what book said it, but an operating system has more separate components than an aircraft carrier and they’re more tightly coupled. (I’m not sure that’s true, but it conveys the idea.)
• justinmeiners 6y ago
  Houses, cars, etc are far more reliable and well designed than software. Think about all the extreme conditions cars continue to function in. How many people don't even follow basic maintenance schedules? Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control. It's extremely easy to understand and act to improve or maintain it. When large software systems (like the IRS login) have problems, you are totally helpless.
  • hrktb 6y ago
    > Houses, cars, etc are far more reliable and well designed than software Buy software the price of a house and you’ll be right to expect the same build level. Then even at the price of your house you’ll have fun with mold growing inside the walls issues, soil that degrades in unexpected ways after heavy rain hits the hill you’re built on; rooms were fresh and bright enough on a hot summer day when you visited, but you realize overall orientation makes way darker and gloomy in winter that you expected. And you’ll pay for that house for your next 20 years. Cars are the same at a lower level, and you see small issues creep up as you lower your budget (or go buy a fancy vintage italian car and you’re in for the wild ride). > Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control. In the good old days people had timers on their desk to remember to restart programs before they crash. Also saving stuff, making backups etc. Of course online services are a different beast, but it’s more akin to fighting bureaucracy, which I see as a our society’s software in a way, with the shitty forms with not enough space for your name and other niceties.
• ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
  I live in an old house, and routinely discover ugly hacks that were done by the previous owner, presumably due to laziness, cost or just lack of skill. For example, they buried tons of stuff (toys, furniture, water heater etc) in the backyard and built a terrace on top of the pile to cover it up, apparently because they were too lazy to take it to the dump. The terrace decayed, so I had to tear it down, but in doing so I had to clean up their mess so I could actually use the garden. I'm not annoyed at the planks for decaying, as that is to be expected, just like you are expected to e.g. keep up with third party dependencies that you have chosen to include. Discovering a mess like the one I found in my garden, however, evoked the same feelings in me as when I look at a badly written code base and just wonder how anyone could ship something of such low quality to paying customers. I guess my point is that there is a difference between things sucking because of the laws of nature, and things sucking because of incompetence, laziness or indifference.
  • swirepe 6y ago
    To be fair, the previous person didn't know you were going to try to plant vegetables in their landfill.
    • tetris11 6y ago
      But those same owners failed to mention the landfill during the handover
      • titzer 6y ago
        Not to mention, it was almost certainly illegal.
        • kordlessagain 6y ago
          Out of sight, out of mind!
    • scrapgardener 6y ago
      to be fair ulrikrasmussen didn't know the previous owner was trying to plant scrap trees
• SilasX 6y ago
  >My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. That's not a good example, nor is it parallel to the dynamic the article describes. Your car stinks a lot less than cars did 10/30/50 years ago (emits less in the way of pollutants or CO2 per mile driven), is less likely to kill you in a crash involving the same size cars/velocities (despite weighing less!), needs less maintenance, lasts longer, and can notify you of potential collisions and sometimes avoid them. It's probably only worse in terms of education needed to perform maintenance or nominal sticker price.
  • machello13 6y ago
    But devices have also gotten smaller, lighter and more efficient, and software can also do much more today than it could a long time ago. I think the analogy is fine.
    • SilasX 6y ago
      When the analogy was built off of saying that saying that cars are bad my metric X, when the claim was that software has gotten worse by metric X, and cars have actually gotten better my metric X, no, it's not a good analogy. And yes, there are some ways in which hardware has improved. But the claim is that, judged by what you're using it for, most UX-apparent aspects have gotten worse. Is there a clear way this is wrong? If you look at most UX-apparent metrics, it hasn't. Latency from keystroke to character render has gotten worse. App start time has gotten worse. Lots of other latencies have gotten worse. None of the nightmares described in the article were typical of software UX. These would be arguably fine if the additional features you get were a necessary cost, but they're not. I'm also not sure that devices have gotten more efficient in all respects. Each version of iOS gets more energy-intensive, for example.
      • machello13 6y ago
        > Latency from keystroke to character render has gotten worse. App start time has gotten worse. Lots of other latencies have gotten worse. Do you have sources for this? I mean, I'm not sure there aren't rose-tinted glasses here. > These would be arguably fine if the additional features you get were a necessary cost, but they're not. > Each version of iOS gets more energy-intensive, for example. I would argue that multitasking, camera postprocessing, widgets, background app refresh, and others are all features worthy of more resource usage. Many of those are things you can choose not to use if you want to save power.
• KajMagnus 6y ago
  > Doesn’t reality suck the same? To me, software is as if when I open a book to read it, then, the book suddenly snaps itself shut, hurting my fingers. Thereafter, the book gets wings, tries to fly away, but bumps into my coffee mug on my desk, so coffee spills on the floor. Then the book does fly out through the closed window — smashing the glass into pieces — and gets larger and larger wings, flying higher and higher until it disappears into the blue sky. It's as if software was alive, and does random things I don't always agree with. But actually — the bees building nests on the balcony: That feels pretty close to misbehaving software. Or the cat, bringing in a snake from outdoors. Or a squirrel shewing through a power cable, shutting down a city.
• thewebcount 6y ago
  > Doesn’t reality suck the same ? No. A hardware product like a car has predictable wear and tear governed mainly by the laws of physics. The fact that I can no longer use my smart speaker because the manufacturer decided to stop supporting it, went out of business, or got bought is not at all the same. My car will still work through all of those things in the exact same way. It also doesn't throw up random dialogs (or whatever a physical equivalent would be) that stop the product from working until I interact with it. Not the same at all.
  • emteycz 6y ago
    > It also doesn't throw up random dialogs (or whatever a physical equivalent would be) that stop the product from working until I interact with it. I see you never had a (EU) Ford.
  • johnbrodie 6y ago
    A car has tons of parts that, sure are "governed by physics", but in effect just randomly fail. I can theoretically understand that my there's a clunk in the frontend of my car because I've exceeded the MTTF of a suspension bushing. To almost everyone though, it's essentially just a random event based on nothing they've perceived.
  • kthejoker2 6y ago
    John Deere has entered the chat. Also, car companies have been tinkering with "electronic repossession" - remote kill switches due to nonpayment. So ... get ready for other things to suck as we attach technology to them.
    • fsflover 6y ago
      > John Deere has entered the chat. Thank you for bringing this point. The actual problem is not the software itself, but its proprietary nature and infinite hunt for profit without any limits. Consider free software instead and you will see that it is improving year by year, despite very slowly (which is logical, in the absence of infinite resources). My Linux machine never forces me to reboot, shows any ads or suddenly changes its interface.
• mikewarot 6y ago
  When is the last time leaving your keys in the car caused your house to suddenly slide 10 foot southwest? When is the last time you flipped a light switch, and suddenly your pool disappeared? Have you ever had French doors appear in your dining room because of a "Windows Update" on Wednesday morning? Have you ever had to wait for half an hour for your house to boot later on that same Wednesday? When is the last time you closed a door, and were killed by a hailstorm of bowling balls? At least with a light switch, you know it's very unlikely to cause structural issues, or plumbing issues, or drain your bank account. Computers are singularly horrible in the ways things can fail.
  • scubbo 6y ago
    I agree with your underlying point, but it's also important to point out that computers are also singularly wonderful in that it's usually much faster and easier to reverse failures, and then to diagnose and debug in a non-impactful manner. To take your second example - if I could then flip the light switch back, and the pool reappeared, then I'd be miffed but not particularly annoyed (assuming I was able to fix that obvious-bug either myself or with an update in a timely fashion). If the pool stayed gone, then yeah, I'd be pissed. Of course, that whole argument goes out the window when the tech in question isn't controlled by you. Which is often the case.
    • salawat 6y ago
      Tell that to the 346 people who perished because of negligent and (in my opinion, malicious in terms of regulatory deception) undocumented, uncommunicated programming of the speed trim system of the 737 MAX. Or the folks who perished because of badly programmed software interlocks on the THERAC-25 radiotherapy machine. Just knowing or figuring out to flip that switch may be an insurmountable barrier depending on the circumstances when a failure state occurs. Especially when the implementation is intentionally hidden so as to facilitate continued market value extraction opportunities from the happy accident of information asymmetry.
      • antipaul 6y ago
• vaccinator 6y ago
  software doesn't decay, it just sucks even if you preserve it
• WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
  Not the same, we expect the problems you mention. There are just some laws of nature that we get used to dealing with. Tech has the tendency to produce random problems. The one we have all dealt with is, everything was working fine and then suddenly stopped. You call tech support and after an hour of troubleshooting it with them we get, the, "We've never seen this before. It must be caused by one of your other SUCKEE tech toys." Ahhhhhhhhhh...
  • hrktb 6y ago
    I think in 20~50 years those random software issues will be what we knew for our all life, basically what reality is, and we’ll just give warm patronizing looks to kids complaining stuff doesn’t work.