3 ms·

I'm not sure software is getting worse. It does more, and there is more. A lot of complaints on HN are about businesses they don't like, or technology they th

I'm not sure software is getting worse. It does more, and there is more. A lot of complaints on HN are about businesses they don't like, or technology they thought should never have been invented. It's unfortunate that tracking you across the web is hugely profitable, but the reason that business works isn't due to software malfunction. The software is working great. Certainly, there is a lot of software out there with poor polish. My pet peeve is that devices like multimeters that used to have segmented VFDs, so had a certain design aesthetic by default. Clean, straightforward, readable. Now those have moved to low resolution LCDs, so you notice that the font they picked is terrible, and the font rendering engine they picked is even worse. It just looks bad, in exchange for more flexibility and features. But, none of this is indicative that the software itself is getting worse. In the 80s, trivial software bugs were literally killing people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 In terms of radiation therapy machines, the underlying business hasn't changed much; people with tumors want them to be killed, and the difference between now and 40 years ago is that the machine doesn't kill them because of integer overflows. (One interesting note about the Therac-25 is that it reused software for previous models that had hardware interlocks that masked the software defects. They didn't have any telemetry on when the hardware interlocks triggered, so they didn't know that the hardware interlocks were masking bugs in the software when it came time to remove them. If they had the data, they might have kept the hardware interlocks, or fixed the bugs before 6 people died. So maybe lack of telemetry is a greater ethics issue than including it!)

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Software is still killing people despite telemetry. Look at Tesla's autopilot.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I don't know if that's an interesting data point. Humans are terrible at driving cars. AIs are terrible at driving cars. I'm not sure that Tesla is obviously doing a sub-par job here, as it's a challenging problem space. The main effect of the telemetry in self-driving cars is that we can all Monday morning quarterback the exact defect that caused a particular crash. With human drivers, we don't have as much data to get to the root cause. If someone falls asleep at the wheel and drives into a truck, was it their medication? Their sleep schedule? An emotional conversation they just had? The music that the radio station chose to play? A combination of all of those factors? What actions do we take to prevent it from happening again?
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > I don't know if that's an interesting data point. And people are terrible at putting in the wrong coordinates or dosages in medicinal machines. It's as interesting a data point as the Therac. > The main effect of the telemetry in self-driving cars is that we can all Monday morning quarterback the exact defect that caused a particular crash. Unnecessary, and has been unnecessary for almost as long as we've had cars. Investigators (the NTSB) are fantastic at looking at wrecks and determining the underlying cause, even in the absence of the black and red boxes. There's no need for always-on-always-phoning-home telemetry. And this is where I get annoyed - there's no value in companies having that data when their most public use of it is to get popular opinion on their side in a fatal wreck. Seriously, fuck Elon Musk for that horseshit.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Software is still killing people despite telemetry. Look at Tesla's autopilot.

jrockway 4y ago
I don't know if that's an interesting data point. Humans are terrible at driving cars. AIs are terrible at driving cars. I'm not sure that Tesla is obviously doing a sub-par job here, as it's a challenging problem space. The main effect of the telemetry in self-driving cars is that we can all Monday morning quarterback the exact defect that caused a particular crash. With human drivers, we don't have as much data to get to the root cause. If someone falls asleep at the wheel and drives into a truck, was it their medication? Their sleep schedule? An emotional conversation they just had? The music that the radio station chose to play? A combination of all of those factors? What actions do we take to prevent it from happening again?
- falcolas 4y ago
  > I don't know if that's an interesting data point. And people are terrible at putting in the wrong coordinates or dosages in medicinal machines. It's as interesting a data point as the Therac. > The main effect of the telemetry in self-driving cars is that we can all Monday morning quarterback the exact defect that caused a particular crash. Unnecessary, and has been unnecessary for almost as long as we've had cars. Investigators (the NTSB) are fantastic at looking at wrecks and determining the underlying cause, even in the absence of the black and red boxes. There's no need for always-on-always-phoning-home telemetry. And this is where I get annoyed - there's no value in companies having that data when their most public use of it is to get popular opinion on their side in a fatal wreck. Seriously, fuck Elon Musk for that horseshit.