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> This is is actually a terrible trap, as product usage tells you next to nothing about which features are useful. I suspect it' a big part of why a lot of soft

by ajross 4y ago

> This is is actually a terrible trap, as product usage tells you next to nothing about which features are useful. I suspect it' a big part of why a lot of software has turned to shit last decade or so. This seems exactly backwards to me. No one who has ever managed a deployed product with good failure telemetry would say that it tells you "next to nothing". Telemetry detects failures that mere testing simply never can and never will. And no one who lived through earlier ages of consumer software would ever say that it's "turned to shit". Software is getting better. It's getting better steadily and inexorably, and it's been doing that for half a century. It may not be doing what you want, but it's doing it with higher quality than people in the 90's or 00's would have ever dreamed. When was the last time[1] you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history! And certainly robust telemetry practice is one of the big drivers of this quality revolution we've seen. [1] Heh, cue the peanut gallery of everyone wanting to post crash reports. That's on me for poor framing, I guess. But seriously, everyone: Both anecdotally and via actual studies, consumer-visible software is getting much better.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history! Huh. I've used software since the mid 1990s, and I can't recall using software that crashed daily, let alone frequently. Which is honestly a bit of a miracle, since a lot of software back then was shipped without the ability to patch it at all.
pseudalopex 4y ago
> Telemetry detects failures that mere testing simply never can and never will. Product usage and failure reports are different. It wasn't called telemetry when apps just asked to send failure reports. > When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? An hour ago or so.
falcolas 4y ago
> When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? Yesterday. The kindle app. It has a habit of soft locking on a book's cover. TikTok's failure mode tends to be more of a "refuses to play a video" kind. Especially if you're scrolling through videos and one does not exist. It doesn't like that. Instagram soft reboots pretty often (you can tell because you're back to the home feed, as opposed to where you left off), especially after being suspended. I have to reboot my Mac weekly, both for updates and to keep it from misbehaving oddly. It's one thing our development culture actually fosters these days - let it fail and restart in a known state; as opposed to doing what you can to keep the software alive through non-fatal errors.
Macha 4y ago
MacOS, an hour ago. Before that, Fastmail on Android, this morning. Slack on iOS gets stuck a few times a week.
dogleash 4y ago
When was the last time[1] you saw a major consumer application [] crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history! The apps I use are now riddled with hang bugs rather than crash bugs. Huzza.
- 0x457 4y ago
  Firefox. I googled "robots.txt forbid all robots", there was a blog post from Google. Opening that page would crash my entire browser. Applications not often, but video games hard crash all the time.
sbierwagen 4y ago
>crash hard and fail on you? Google search on Chrome on my home computer has a habit of just returning a white page after about a day of computer uptime. I have to switch to a different profile to get it to show anything. Magento CMS will silently hang if you try to perform any query on a tab that's logged out. Default login cookie expiration time is one hour. iOS keyboard has started suggesting german words in autocorrect. A third of the words I get on swipe input are now worthless. German is not in the languages list on that device. I read a suggestion to uncheck "German" in the dictionaries list. It was indeed checked (Why?? Because I frequently type in my German last name?) but unchecking it did nothing. Discord app on iOS has a hard crash bug on the emote picker if you type a query that has no results, backspace it, then try to pick one of the new results. I actually tried reporting that one and they told me to fuck off. (Which is the default response of every customer service team to any bug report, of course, since 99% of bug reports will be from civilians who have no idea how to report a bug)
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  Oh another iOS keyboard annoyance: if you do a swipe input and the keyboard guesses that you were trying to type a keyboard, it will set the caps lock, and then remember that setting if you backspace it! Do a keyboard swipe, get "SOS", backspace it, try to swipe "the", get "The" instead, even if it's in the middle of a sentence, which the iOS keyboard is otherwise really good at.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by ajross 4y ago

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history! Huh. I've used software since the mid 1990s, and I can't recall using software that crashed daily, let alone frequently. Which is honestly a bit of a miracle, since a lot of software back then was shipped without the ability to patch it at all.

pseudalopex 4y ago

> Telemetry detects failures that mere testing simply never can and never will. Product usage and failure reports are different. It wasn't called telemetry when apps just asked to send failure reports. > When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? An hour ago or so.

falcolas 4y ago

> When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? Yesterday. The kindle app. It has a habit of soft locking on a book's cover. TikTok's failure mode tends to be more of a "refuses to play a video" kind. Especially if you're scrolling through videos and one does not exist. It doesn't like that. Instagram soft reboots pretty often (you can tell because you're back to the home feed, as opposed to where you left off), especially after being suspended. I have to reboot my Mac weekly, both for updates and to keep it from misbehaving oddly. It's one thing our development culture actually fosters these days - let it fail and restart in a known state; as opposed to doing what you can to keep the software alive through non-fatal errors.

Macha 4y ago

MacOS, an hour ago. Before that, Fastmail on Android, this morning. Slack on iOS gets stuck a few times a week.

dogleash 4y ago

When was the last time[1] you saw a major consumer application [] crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history! The apps I use are now riddled with hang bugs rather than crash bugs. Huzza.

0x457 4y ago
Firefox. I googled "robots.txt forbid all robots", there was a blog post from Google. Opening that page would crash my entire browser. Applications not often, but video games hard crash all the time.

sbierwagen 4y ago

>crash hard and fail on you? Google search on Chrome on my home computer has a habit of just returning a white page after about a day of computer uptime. I have to switch to a different profile to get it to show anything. Magento CMS will silently hang if you try to perform any query on a tab that's logged out. Default login cookie expiration time is one hour. iOS keyboard has started suggesting german words in autocorrect. A third of the words I get on swipe input are now worthless. German is not in the languages list on that device. I read a suggestion to uncheck "German" in the dictionaries list. It was indeed checked (Why?? Because I frequently type in my German last name?) but unchecking it did nothing. Discord app on iOS has a hard crash bug on the emote picker if you type a query that has no results, backspace it, then try to pick one of the new results. I actually tried reporting that one and they told me to fuck off. (Which is the default response of every customer service team to any bug report, of course, since 99% of bug reports will be from civilians who have no idea how to report a bug)

sbierwagen 4y ago
Oh another iOS keyboard annoyance: if you do a swipe input and the keyboard guesses that you were trying to type a keyboard, it will set the caps lock, and then remember that setting if you backspace it! Do a keyboard swipe, get "SOS", backspace it, try to swipe "the", get "The" instead, even if it's in the middle of a sentence, which the iOS keyboard is otherwise really good at.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]