4 ms·

He started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more

He started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more broken recently. He showed some incomprehensible bugs in Visual Studio. All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware protection, any program could cause a denial of service or take down the whole computer. These are 30 year old technologies that were clearly worse in many ways than modern equivalents. Has software improved recently? No, I would say it has gotten somewhat worse recently but if you look at where we are today versus say 1998, things are clearly better. It isn't really possible to know if we are in a major decline or a minor local minimum.

ncmncm 5y ago
Microsoft is not a legitimate standard of comparison. Their business model was (and to a degree still is) predicated on getting people used to everything having bugs, and not complaining or, more importantly, returning it for a refund, angrily. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and now everything else works almost as badly.
xmprt 5y ago
I think software will never feel like it's improved because as technology improves and changes, new features will be expected of software and so while some parts of software improve, other new parts will bring down the average quality. It reminds me of Shepard Tones which sound like they are infinitely increasing in pitch which is impossible because the human ear can only hear certain frequencies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
hattmall 5y ago
The BSOD is kind of actually the opposite in reality. The software is worse, the hardware is better, so we are running more software to containerize those bugs. Software is more buggy and bloated than in the past it's just that the failures are silent and we don't have to reboot the entire system we just reboot pieces.
- ido 5y ago
  win 9x was absolutely worse and a lot less stable than the NT lineage (that we're currently in). classic macos was absolutely worse and less stable than the NeXTSTEP lineage we're currently in. I used linux for the first time in 1998 with Red Hat 5.2 and it was an absolute pain to get working/install and a lot of hardware was unsupported. At least it didn't crash as much as windows 9x!

ncmncm 5y ago

Microsoft is not a legitimate standard of comparison. Their business model was (and to a degree still is) predicated on getting people used to everything having bugs, and not complaining or, more importantly, returning it for a refund, angrily. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and now everything else works almost as badly.

xmprt 5y ago

I think software will never feel like it's improved because as technology improves and changes, new features will be expected of software and so while some parts of software improve, other new parts will bring down the average quality. It reminds me of Shepard Tones which sound like they are infinitely increasing in pitch which is impossible because the human ear can only hear certain frequencies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)

hattmall 5y ago

The BSOD is kind of actually the opposite in reality. The software is worse, the hardware is better, so we are running more software to containerize those bugs. Software is more buggy and bloated than in the past it's just that the failures are silent and we don't have to reboot the entire system we just reboot pieces.

ido 5y ago
win 9x was absolutely worse and a lot less stable than the NT lineage (that we're currently in). classic macos was absolutely worse and less stable than the NeXTSTEP lineage we're currently in. I used linux for the first time in 1998 with Red Hat 5.2 and it was an absolute pain to get working/install and a lot of hardware was unsupported. At least it didn't crash as much as windows 9x!