15 ms·

Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019)

104 points by beefman 4y ago

adamrezich 4y ago
there's a few religious/historical assertions in there (this piece, not the talk itself, which I recommend without reservation) that are pretty contentious for various thorny reasons but are kind of just presented off-handedly as fact.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  With no references, not even hyperlinks to most of the Wikipedia articles that are mentioned in the text..
  - ccooffee 4y ago
    Agreed. The gist seems...rambling and unfocused. Other than "collapse" being very zeitgeist-y, I'm not sure what people are finding in this gist.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      I think people are reading the title of the submission and assuming it's a link to the actual talk (which has been around for awhile and people like it), instead of a gist written by someone else entirely, and upvoting accordingly
- joe-collins 4y ago
  Jonathan Blow made a couple of neat video games. He also tweeted this while wrapping up development on The Witness. https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/690327260109283328 https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.c... Whatever the actual contents of the bottle, its intended interpretation is obvious, and it features in the secret ending video to that game. He's a clever designer, but I'm not going to accuse him of being a well-grounded individual.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    this "article" was not written by Jonathan Blow. the "pee jug" is a prop in the FMV secret ending of The Witness like you said. the tweet with the "pee jug" photo seems to have been made kind of off-handedly as a joke, given that nobody would know about the FMV secret ending of the game at release. (the joke being that he really did pee in a jug during development of the game.) none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people.
    - pxc 4y ago
      > none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people. You mean the part where he briefly paraphrases Wikipedia on the consensus view of modern scholarship on the historicity of the Exodus narrative, namely that there isn't much? It's not even like he brings it up to make some point about Judaism, just outgrowing his own religious upbringing which also involved the Exodus narrative. I get that dismissing the Exodus narrative as historically false can fit into a wider project to deny the persecution of Jews more generally, and that the denial of religious foundation myths can sometimes be tied into genocidal or colonialist projects of other kinds. But that is so obviously not what is going on in the OP, and the general expectation should never be that anyone else takes one's religion's narratives as fact, or even anything close to it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
labrador 4y ago
Anders Hejlsberg explains in the link below that for decades much of computer science was concerned with strict typing as a tool to ensure program correctness. As the consequences of incorrect code have declined - you're unlikely to crash the browser much less the machine with bad JavaScript - the opportunities to explore flexible and more expressive typing have increased. I know younger programmers who don't even bother to check for errors. This is shocking to me as an older programmer. I wonder if this is a factor for the decline in software quality Jonathan Blow talks about in his video. If so, we need to find a way to encourage programmers not to be lazy about errors. The Blue Screen of Death used to be all the encouragement I needed. Typescript - Type System explained from Anders Hejlsberg - creator of Typescript https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvV3GIDeLfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvV3GIDeLfo
- voxl 4y ago
  No one has stopped studying strict types, they are alive and well
  - labrador 4y ago
    No one said that. Obviously software that can bring down the entire machine is still being written, but by highly skilled specialists. Meanwhile we've grown an army of coding bootcamp programmers churning out all the software that is eating the world (™ Marc Andreessen)
    - nightski 4y ago
      That's because the value of them churning out that software, however bad, so far has been greater than the alternative (none of it existing). I'd imagine this will hit a breaking point however (maybe it already is) due to hardware not advancing as rapidly. But who knows, maybe we are on the verge of another breakthrough and don't even know it. But once we hit the wall, things will shift.
- hayley-patton 4y ago
  > I wonder if this is a factor for the decline in software quality Jonathan Blow talks about in his video. Wouldn't hold my breath; I recall a tangent on programmers being "afraid of pointers". Depending on your favourite not-C-pointer way of managing memory, that's saying that use-after-free bugs are a sign of bad programmers, or shunning substructural/region/etc types for verifying that explicit memory management is correct.
stephc_int13 4y ago
His style in unconventional to say the least, and you can straw man his talks in hundreds different ways, nitpicking the numerous weaknesses. But, in my opinion, that would be missing the point. The point is not on being rock-solid, I find this type of risky rants refreshing and thought provoking, and there are many good/interesting things there.
lkrubner 4y ago
Part of me wants to write a point by point rebuttal of this, but I’m not sure it would be useful. There are many, many assumptions in this work that would have to be teased apart before the good ideas here could be discussed on their own. I’ll limit myself to a comment about his comment regarding the end of the Soviet Union, quoting from a long essay I wrote last year, comparing the crisis in the Soviet Union to the global crisis: ———— If you think two things are completely separate, and yet they change at the same time and in the same way, then you need stop and ask yourself why were you so confident that they were completely separate? https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-struggle-to-save-the-soviet-economy https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-struggle-to-save-the-so...
- Litost 4y ago
  As someone with more than a passing interest in Societal Collapse, but without time to watch the video right now, how does Blow's talk stack up against say The Great Simplification series by Nate Hagens [1], Joseph Tainter [2] or any of the many authors contributing to this field as referenced in this Nodes of Persisting Complexity paper [3]? [1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episodes https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episodes [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sbEDS84AAAAJ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sbEDS84AAAAJ [3] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm
- akkartik 4y ago
  What's the answer? The post tapered off with a long quote, unless I'm missing something by having js turned off..
yomkippur 4y ago
- krapp 4y ago
  We already live in a surveillance hellhole so I welcome open season on billionaires. Also, if you make a habit of hostile edits like that you're going to be banned.
westoncb 4y ago
Controversial—I know—(and I'm happy to hear counterarguments) but I think there's a much simpler way of accounting for the present state of software quality. It amounts to 'tolerance'. Commercial software is optimized with respect to a set of business goals, and one dimension of the space that process operates on is software quality. Beyond a certain threshold, increasing quality has diminishing utility. (I.e. there's effectively a tolerance for quality; it can be imperfect and not change the operation of the machine—i.e. business—which it's a component of.) The present state of software is precisely in the neighborhood of where that added utility begins rapidly diminishing. (This assumes that the business in question is competent, which we can approximate by observing that they survive. Outside the possibility of that being incorrect, this implies that the level of software quality hovers right around where it it's good enough that improving it more wouldn't significantly impact customer purchasing decisions. Of course this is not an ideal state of affairs—but how could you expect otherwise? —and interpreting it as a sign of societal collapse... seems a bit absurd to me.)
- swivelmaster 4y ago
  I would argue that the decline in software quality is related to the rise of SaaS coupled with Product Manager-driven development. If a product is generating consistent revenue, resources are devoted to expanding that revenue. It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data, so organizations are generally not incentivized to reward that kind of activity.
  - westoncb 4y ago
    > It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data Why would analytics be any less capable of conveying how these attributes of a software product affect customer purchasing decisions? If the metrics relate to e.g. retention, new users etc., these are independent of which aspects of the software cause them. A correlation is a correlation. Unless there is some reason to think product managers would be especially unaware of quality as a variable to observe.
  - 4y ago
rebelos 4y ago
> People will complain all day long about the total incompetence or even criminal nature of every human government in recorded history, but when it comes to the prospect of an entity with hypothetically superior intelligence taking over, they want to prevent it! This reductive drivel at the very end of the post nullified any credibility the author may have had.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The apparent claim that he is the only one who's put any effort into measuring world GDP also stretched believably.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  I can't actually find that statement in the video but if he said that, I'd say it's brilliant. The thing about the "AI safety" nerds is ... if some vast corporate entity were to create a truly god-like computer program, whether the program escapes the control of its masters is a problem for the corporate entity but just fact of thing being created and being in the hands of this entity would be the problem everyone else would face. And more broadly, if we haven't done much about the general sickness of society, what chance should we expect against a final problem of this beyond-human-control AI. Bad "reductionism" points toward too simplistic solution. Good "reductionism" debunks bad but supposedly-sophisticated solutions. This is Good reductionism imo.
GameOfKnowing 4y ago
Legitimate question— is the guy’s name really Jo Blow, or is that a joke?
RockRobotRock 4y ago
I really can't believe how much of an arrogant blowhard (pun intended) he is sometimes. 95% of the things coming out of his mouth are negative, cynical, and self aggrandizing. He has some good points, sure, but I really just can't get past his personality.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rglover 4y ago
  So...the typical Hacker News user?
  - RockRobotRock 4y ago
    honestly yeah lmao
- kelnos 4y ago
  That was kind of my reaction as well, though perhaps not quite so negative. It's fine that he has these sorts of opinions. I might have some opinions about this topic, and I might write a blog post or something about it. But I would expect others to tear my arguments apart, because I -- just like Jonathan Blow -- don't really have the expertise or background to properly evaluate something like this. In reality, though, my opinion would barely be noticed, because I'm just some random person on the internet. Blow is a fairly well-recognized figure, but that doesn't mean we should give greater weight to his opinions on things that are well outside his expertise to evaluate.
zeroq 4y ago
This hits close to home. On one hand, I completely agree with Jonathan. I started my career 20 years ago in games dev and digital advertisement which were strangely close to each other at that time. When I work with developers today who need an external library to check if a number is odd it's terribly frustrating. There are certain techniques like working with binary formats, that were taken for granted even at junior level when I started that seems like a rocket science these days. When I share my gripes with fellow managers they often joke if I would be a developer on their team and came up with one of my "optimal" ideas they would fire me on the spot, because such solution would be too convoluted and obscure for todays standards and not maintainable. On the other hand I completely understand that the software industry shifted a lot since I started and now every bussiness is an IT company. This creates a lot of demand on the market and someone has to push these deliverables somehow. And despite what business stake holders will tell you, world won't collapse if these applications cracks in few spots if you'll be able to ship them before competition. People will still continue to use LinkedIn even if it takes 7 seconds to gain interactive on my phone. Jonathan comes from a different background and his views may seem radical for someone working in an ordinary IT company, but even the game dev industry shifted in that direction. Back when games were released on CDs and you couldn't assume that every user will have a constant access to the internet it was absolutely crucial to make sure that the game will work on day one. But that's no longer the case. Companies like CD Project proved that you can ship a broken build on day one and keep releasing patches months and months after premiere. I mean, it's embarrassing that GTA V required 5 minutes to parse a simple JSON file for 7 years, but the game sold in 170 million copies regardless.
- strangeattractr 4y ago
  > I mean, it's embarrassing that GTA V required 5 minutes to parse a simple JSON file for 7 years, but the game sold in 170 million copies regardless. It's because the game was good enough in spite of the tedious load times. I feel like devs often forget the fact that the computer is a black box to 99.9% of users. They don't care about how fast the game should parse JSON, they don't even know what JSON is. They only care about total load time relative to the enjoyment they get from the game.
BirAdam 4y ago
I didn’t care too much for the article, but it made me think. I think about civilizational collapse quite a bit, and mostly due to loving history and strategy games. A large collapse could happen, but as far as I can reason it out, it won’t be anything close to the scale of collapse that the Bronze Age collapse was. There are multiple reasons for this. First, at the end of the Bronze Age, writing existed but it wasn’t everywhere all the time. Writing is now everywhere all the time, and most humans can read and write. This means that, in a collapse, most people can carry on knowledge. The level of death required to create a true dark age (like that following BAC or the fall of Rome) would be on such a scale that I cannot think of something other than global thermo-nuclear war causing it. Second, even in the Bronze Age natural disasters weren’t enough. You had to have disasters plus invasion by the sea people. That wouldn’t work well now since surveillance is good. Any nation would now if masses of humans were on their way to attack. Last thing, if software had gotten worse, I figure my computer wouldn’t start at all considering I had to reboot computers just as part of normal usage through the 80s and 90s. I also had to obsessively save everything all the time because a random crash was normal. Take off the nostalgia goggles.
scrollaway 4y ago
I quite like Jonathan Blow. I think the talk mentioned in this post is kind of poor though, I remember watching it a couple of years ago in its full context (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko). IIRC it had a bit of a "kids these days" / "they don't make 'em like they used to" feel to it. It's not untrue, but it doesn't really explain anything. IMO, a MUCH BETTER version of a similar point was outlined by Bert Hubert in this article: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/ - How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents (Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQccNdwm8Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQccNdwm8Tw) In short, this goes beyond software; it's in general about why the incentives around specialization and outsourcing/offshoring cause innovation and expertise to die out. Bert Hubert takes the example of toasters, but it's of course very generalizable: > The problem is that this is not just a toaster problem. This is a continental problem. All over Europe, this is happening simultaneously, where we’re saying, look, we’re not that much into actually building things anymore. > So we’re just getting everyone else to build stuff for us. [...] We’re just thinking about things and then telling some other people how to do their stuff. > In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  > In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property. Why not? Anyone can do. Doing the right stuff is what matters. If you're unwilling to do (Europe, generally), and you can't even come up with good things that need done anymore, that seems like a problem. I don't think Europe is there. I would argue it's a bigger problem to be focused too much on doing, and not focused enough on direction. You can probably make a convincing argument that direction is random, and no one is good at setting it, but people at least believe other people can do this - and IP / ideas are currently where the money is. Like, is Apple's IP actually valuable? Who cares. It makes a ton of money. Anyone can put together their phones.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    > Why not? You're replying to a snippet of a fairly significant and long talk. If it sparked your interest, I invite you to read or watch the full thing. He answers the "why" later down, but "not surviving" is not really the important part at all. It's about how we globally lose out on innovation, ingenuity and new ideas, by not fostering the right environment for creativity when we outsource everything. Really, Bert Hubert is fantastic, and this article/talk should be a required reading for all startup founders and entrepreneurs in general.
dang 4y ago
Related: Johnathan Blow on Software and Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080927 - July 2022 (1 comment) Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 - Jan 2021 (94 comments) Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24662990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24662990 - Oct 2020 (4 comments) Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965908 - May 2019 (2 comments) Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19950860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19950860 - May 2019 (2 comments) Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452 - May 2019 (116 comments)
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I quite like the direction that modern software is taking, but I also think there are endemic quality issues. Some of these issues are pretty bad, but I also think that things are improving. Big goals need big tools. Can’t be helped. Lots of layers, moving parts, infrastructure, and complexity. I feel that we are still in adolescence, in handling this stuff. I think that there will be some reckonings, and am confident that we’ll stabilize. I don’t have all the answers. I do have a few, for my small corner, but I’m not sure they would scale particularly well.
plaguepilled 4y ago
I remember Jonathan Blow all the way back when the Indie Game movie came out. Shame he hasn't matured since then - or learnt how to actually formulate an argument.
- np_tedious 4y ago
  Yep. He obviously touches on interesting concepts and I feel like he has decent things to say. But this is just way too disjointed for me to get much out of it
tstrimple 4y ago
> “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.“ > ~ Socrates I wonder if we will have a generation without these doomsayers. Every generation there are claims that everything is falling apart and not as good as it used to be. Literally every single one. Yet society continues to advance and move forward regardless. Maybe it’s time we start ignoring the curmudgeons despite their successes when they were still relevant. The kids are alright. Yes, even the ones who use TikTok.
- nightski 4y ago
  I don't particularly agree with Mr. Blow, but to dismiss wisdom is folly.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    If it's truly wisdom and not just out of touch crotchety people whining about the next generation, society would have actually collapsed by now.
    - nightski 4y ago
      I find often there is a hint of both. People are people.
dqft 4y ago
And if you decide to take it upon yourself to do something about it.. John's good friend Casey can give you the blackpill: https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero/clip/GrossResilientYakinikuTBTacoRight https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero/clip/GrossResilientYakin...

104 points by beefman 4y ago

there's a few religious/historical assertions in there (this piece, not the talk itself, which I recommend without reservation) that are pretty contentious for various thorny reasons but are kind of just presented off-handedly as fact.

jiggawatts 4y ago
With no references, not even hyperlinks to most of the Wikipedia articles that are mentioned in the text..
- ccooffee 4y ago
  Agreed. The gist seems...rambling and unfocused. Other than "collapse" being very zeitgeist-y, I'm not sure what people are finding in this gist.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    I think people are reading the title of the submission and assuming it's a link to the actual talk (which has been around for awhile and people like it), instead of a gist written by someone else entirely, and upvoting accordingly
joe-collins 4y ago
Jonathan Blow made a couple of neat video games. He also tweeted this while wrapping up development on The Witness. https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/690327260109283328 https://web.archive.org/web/20160318053101/https://twitter.c... Whatever the actual contents of the bottle, its intended interpretation is obvious, and it features in the secret ending video to that game. He's a clever designer, but I'm not going to accuse him of being a well-grounded individual.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  this "article" was not written by Jonathan Blow. the "pee jug" is a prop in the FMV secret ending of The Witness like you said. the tweet with the "pee jug" photo seems to have been made kind of off-handedly as a joke, given that nobody would know about the FMV secret ending of the game at release. (the joke being that he really did pee in a jug during development of the game.) none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people.
  - pxc 4y ago
    > none of this has to do with the "article"'s author making offhandedly controversial to the point of being offensive assertions about the history of the Jewish people. You mean the part where he briefly paraphrases Wikipedia on the consensus view of modern scholarship on the historicity of the Exodus narrative, namely that there isn't much? It's not even like he brings it up to make some point about Judaism, just outgrowing his own religious upbringing which also involved the Exodus narrative. I get that dismissing the Exodus narrative as historically false can fit into a wider project to deny the persecution of Jews more generally, and that the denial of religious foundation myths can sometimes be tied into genocidal or colonialist projects of other kinds. But that is so obviously not what is going on in the OP, and the general expectation should never be that anyone else takes one's religion's narratives as fact, or even anything close to it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

labrador 4y ago

Anders Hejlsberg explains in the link below that for decades much of computer science was concerned with strict typing as a tool to ensure program correctness. As the consequences of incorrect code have declined - you're unlikely to crash the browser much less the machine with bad JavaScript - the opportunities to explore flexible and more expressive typing have increased. I know younger programmers who don't even bother to check for errors. This is shocking to me as an older programmer. I wonder if this is a factor for the decline in software quality Jonathan Blow talks about in his video. If so, we need to find a way to encourage programmers not to be lazy about errors. The Blue Screen of Death used to be all the encouragement I needed. Typescript - Type System explained from Anders Hejlsberg - creator of Typescript https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvV3GIDeLfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvV3GIDeLfo

voxl 4y ago
No one has stopped studying strict types, they are alive and well
- labrador 4y ago
  No one said that. Obviously software that can bring down the entire machine is still being written, but by highly skilled specialists. Meanwhile we've grown an army of coding bootcamp programmers churning out all the software that is eating the world (™ Marc Andreessen)
  - nightski 4y ago
    That's because the value of them churning out that software, however bad, so far has been greater than the alternative (none of it existing). I'd imagine this will hit a breaking point however (maybe it already is) due to hardware not advancing as rapidly. But who knows, maybe we are on the verge of another breakthrough and don't even know it. But once we hit the wall, things will shift.
hayley-patton 4y ago
> I wonder if this is a factor for the decline in software quality Jonathan Blow talks about in his video. Wouldn't hold my breath; I recall a tangent on programmers being "afraid of pointers". Depending on your favourite not-C-pointer way of managing memory, that's saying that use-after-free bugs are a sign of bad programmers, or shunning substructural/region/etc types for verifying that explicit memory management is correct.

stephc_int13 4y ago

His style in unconventional to say the least, and you can straw man his talks in hundreds different ways, nitpicking the numerous weaknesses. But, in my opinion, that would be missing the point. The point is not on being rock-solid, I find this type of risky rants refreshing and thought provoking, and there are many good/interesting things there.

lkrubner 4y ago

Part of me wants to write a point by point rebuttal of this, but I’m not sure it would be useful. There are many, many assumptions in this work that would have to be teased apart before the good ideas here could be discussed on their own. I’ll limit myself to a comment about his comment regarding the end of the Soviet Union, quoting from a long essay I wrote last year, comparing the crisis in the Soviet Union to the global crisis: ———— If you think two things are completely separate, and yet they change at the same time and in the same way, then you need stop and ask yourself why were you so confident that they were completely separate? https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-struggle-to-save-the-soviet-economy https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-struggle-to-save-the-so...

Litost 4y ago
As someone with more than a passing interest in Societal Collapse, but without time to watch the video right now, how does Blow's talk stack up against say The Great Simplification series by Nate Hagens [1], Joseph Tainter [2] or any of the many authors contributing to this field as referenced in this Nodes of Persisting Complexity paper [3]? [1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episodes https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episodes [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sbEDS84AAAAJ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sbEDS84AAAAJ [3] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm
akkartik 4y ago
What's the answer? The post tapered off with a long quote, unless I'm missing something by having js turned off..

yomkippur 4y ago

krapp 4y ago
We already live in a surveillance hellhole so I welcome open season on billionaires. Also, if you make a habit of hostile edits like that you're going to be banned.

westoncb 4y ago

Controversial—I know—(and I'm happy to hear counterarguments) but I think there's a much simpler way of accounting for the present state of software quality. It amounts to 'tolerance'. Commercial software is optimized with respect to a set of business goals, and one dimension of the space that process operates on is software quality. Beyond a certain threshold, increasing quality has diminishing utility. (I.e. there's effectively a tolerance for quality; it can be imperfect and not change the operation of the machine—i.e. business—which it's a component of.) The present state of software is precisely in the neighborhood of where that added utility begins rapidly diminishing. (This assumes that the business in question is competent, which we can approximate by observing that they survive. Outside the possibility of that being incorrect, this implies that the level of software quality hovers right around where it it's good enough that improving it more wouldn't significantly impact customer purchasing decisions. Of course this is not an ideal state of affairs—but how could you expect otherwise? —and interpreting it as a sign of societal collapse... seems a bit absurd to me.)

swivelmaster 4y ago
I would argue that the decline in software quality is related to the rise of SaaS coupled with Product Manager-driven development. If a product is generating consistent revenue, resources are devoted to expanding that revenue. It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data, so organizations are generally not incentivized to reward that kind of activity.
- westoncb 4y ago
  > It's extraordinarily difficult to justify bugfixes and incremental improvements using exclusively analytics data Why would analytics be any less capable of conveying how these attributes of a software product affect customer purchasing decisions? If the metrics relate to e.g. retention, new users etc., these are independent of which aspects of the software cause them. A correlation is a correlation. Unless there is some reason to think product managers would be especially unaware of quality as a variable to observe.
- 4y ago

rebelos 4y ago

> People will complain all day long about the total incompetence or even criminal nature of every human government in recorded history, but when it comes to the prospect of an entity with hypothetically superior intelligence taking over, they want to prevent it! This reductive drivel at the very end of the post nullified any credibility the author may have had.

bee_rider 4y ago
The apparent claim that he is the only one who's put any effort into measuring world GDP also stretched believably.
joe_the_user 4y ago
I can't actually find that statement in the video but if he said that, I'd say it's brilliant. The thing about the "AI safety" nerds is ... if some vast corporate entity were to create a truly god-like computer program, whether the program escapes the control of its masters is a problem for the corporate entity but just fact of thing being created and being in the hands of this entity would be the problem everyone else would face. And more broadly, if we haven't done much about the general sickness of society, what chance should we expect against a final problem of this beyond-human-control AI. Bad "reductionism" points toward too simplistic solution. Good "reductionism" debunks bad but supposedly-sophisticated solutions. This is Good reductionism imo.

GameOfKnowing 4y ago

Legitimate question— is the guy’s name really Jo Blow, or is that a joke?

RockRobotRock 4y ago

I really can't believe how much of an arrogant blowhard (pun intended) he is sometimes. 95% of the things coming out of his mouth are negative, cynical, and self aggrandizing. He has some good points, sure, but I really just can't get past his personality.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rglover 4y ago
So...the typical Hacker News user?
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  honestly yeah lmao
kelnos 4y ago
That was kind of my reaction as well, though perhaps not quite so negative. It's fine that he has these sorts of opinions. I might have some opinions about this topic, and I might write a blog post or something about it. But I would expect others to tear my arguments apart, because I -- just like Jonathan Blow -- don't really have the expertise or background to properly evaluate something like this. In reality, though, my opinion would barely be noticed, because I'm just some random person on the internet. Blow is a fairly well-recognized figure, but that doesn't mean we should give greater weight to his opinions on things that are well outside his expertise to evaluate.

zeroq 4y ago

This hits close to home. On one hand, I completely agree with Jonathan. I started my career 20 years ago in games dev and digital advertisement which were strangely close to each other at that time. When I work with developers today who need an external library to check if a number is odd it's terribly frustrating. There are certain techniques like working with binary formats, that were taken for granted even at junior level when I started that seems like a rocket science these days. When I share my gripes with fellow managers they often joke if I would be a developer on their team and came up with one of my "optimal" ideas they would fire me on the spot, because such solution would be too convoluted and obscure for todays standards and not maintainable. On the other hand I completely understand that the software industry shifted a lot since I started and now every bussiness is an IT company. This creates a lot of demand on the market and someone has to push these deliverables somehow. And despite what business stake holders will tell you, world won't collapse if these applications cracks in few spots if you'll be able to ship them before competition. People will still continue to use LinkedIn even if it takes 7 seconds to gain interactive on my phone. Jonathan comes from a different background and his views may seem radical for someone working in an ordinary IT company, but even the game dev industry shifted in that direction. Back when games were released on CDs and you couldn't assume that every user will have a constant access to the internet it was absolutely crucial to make sure that the game will work on day one. But that's no longer the case. Companies like CD Project proved that you can ship a broken build on day one and keep releasing patches months and months after premiere. I mean, it's embarrassing that GTA V required 5 minutes to parse a simple JSON file for 7 years, but the game sold in 170 million copies regardless.

strangeattractr 4y ago
> I mean, it's embarrassing that GTA V required 5 minutes to parse a simple JSON file for 7 years, but the game sold in 170 million copies regardless. It's because the game was good enough in spite of the tedious load times. I feel like devs often forget the fact that the computer is a black box to 99.9% of users. They don't care about how fast the game should parse JSON, they don't even know what JSON is. They only care about total load time relative to the enjoyment they get from the game.

BirAdam 4y ago

I didn’t care too much for the article, but it made me think. I think about civilizational collapse quite a bit, and mostly due to loving history and strategy games. A large collapse could happen, but as far as I can reason it out, it won’t be anything close to the scale of collapse that the Bronze Age collapse was. There are multiple reasons for this. First, at the end of the Bronze Age, writing existed but it wasn’t everywhere all the time. Writing is now everywhere all the time, and most humans can read and write. This means that, in a collapse, most people can carry on knowledge. The level of death required to create a true dark age (like that following BAC or the fall of Rome) would be on such a scale that I cannot think of something other than global thermo-nuclear war causing it. Second, even in the Bronze Age natural disasters weren’t enough. You had to have disasters plus invasion by the sea people. That wouldn’t work well now since surveillance is good. Any nation would now if masses of humans were on their way to attack. Last thing, if software had gotten worse, I figure my computer wouldn’t start at all considering I had to reboot computers just as part of normal usage through the 80s and 90s. I also had to obsessively save everything all the time because a random crash was normal. Take off the nostalgia goggles.

scrollaway 4y ago

I quite like Jonathan Blow. I think the talk mentioned in this post is kind of poor though, I remember watching it a couple of years ago in its full context (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko). IIRC it had a bit of a "kids these days" / "they don't make 'em like they used to" feel to it. It's not untrue, but it doesn't really explain anything. IMO, a MUCH BETTER version of a similar point was outlined by Bert Hubert in this article: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/ - How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents (Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQccNdwm8Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQccNdwm8Tw) In short, this goes beyond software; it's in general about why the incentives around specialization and outsourcing/offshoring cause innovation and expertise to die out. Bert Hubert takes the example of toasters, but it's of course very generalizable: > The problem is that this is not just a toaster problem. This is a continental problem. All over Europe, this is happening simultaneously, where we’re saying, look, we’re not that much into actually building things anymore. > So we’re just getting everyone else to build stuff for us. [...] We’re just thinking about things and then telling some other people how to do their stuff. > In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property. Why not? Anyone can do. Doing the right stuff is what matters. If you're unwilling to do (Europe, generally), and you can't even come up with good things that need done anymore, that seems like a problem. I don't think Europe is there. I would argue it's a bigger problem to be focused too much on doing, and not focused enough on direction. You can probably make a convincing argument that direction is random, and no one is good at setting it, but people at least believe other people can do this - and IP / ideas are currently where the money is. Like, is Apple's IP actually valuable? Who cares. It makes a ton of money. Anyone can put together their phones.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  > Why not? You're replying to a snippet of a fairly significant and long talk. If it sparked your interest, I invite you to read or watch the full thing. He answers the "why" later down, but "not surviving" is not really the important part at all. It's about how we globally lose out on innovation, ingenuity and new ideas, by not fostering the right environment for creativity when we outsource everything. Really, Bert Hubert is fantastic, and this article/talk should be a required reading for all startup founders and entrepreneurs in general.

dang 4y ago

Related: Johnathan Blow on Software and Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080927 - July 2022 (1 comment) Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 - Jan 2021 (94 comments) Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24662990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24662990 - Oct 2020 (4 comments) Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965908 - May 2019 (2 comments) Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19950860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19950860 - May 2019 (2 comments) Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452 - May 2019 (116 comments)

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I quite like the direction that modern software is taking, but I also think there are endemic quality issues. Some of these issues are pretty bad, but I also think that things are improving. Big goals need big tools. Can’t be helped. Lots of layers, moving parts, infrastructure, and complexity. I feel that we are still in adolescence, in handling this stuff. I think that there will be some reckonings, and am confident that we’ll stabilize. I don’t have all the answers. I do have a few, for my small corner, but I’m not sure they would scale particularly well.

plaguepilled 4y ago

I remember Jonathan Blow all the way back when the Indie Game movie came out. Shame he hasn't matured since then - or learnt how to actually formulate an argument.

np_tedious 4y ago
Yep. He obviously touches on interesting concepts and I feel like he has decent things to say. But this is just way too disjointed for me to get much out of it

tstrimple 4y ago

> “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.“ > ~ Socrates I wonder if we will have a generation without these doomsayers. Every generation there are claims that everything is falling apart and not as good as it used to be. Literally every single one. Yet society continues to advance and move forward regardless. Maybe it’s time we start ignoring the curmudgeons despite their successes when they were still relevant. The kids are alright. Yes, even the ones who use TikTok.

nightski 4y ago
I don't particularly agree with Mr. Blow, but to dismiss wisdom is folly.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  If it's truly wisdom and not just out of touch crotchety people whining about the next generation, society would have actually collapsed by now.
  - nightski 4y ago
    I find often there is a hint of both. People are people.

dqft 4y ago

And if you decide to take it upon yourself to do something about it.. John's good friend Casey can give you the blackpill: https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero/clip/GrossResilientYakinikuTBTacoRight https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero/clip/GrossResilientYakin...