3 ms·

True embedded software is a lot different. Smart TVs are desktop or phone class computers, and even then, the glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" or "

True embedded software is a lot different. Smart TVs are desktop or phone class computers, and even then, the glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" or "One feature that wouldn't exist at all without software stops working" type of thing. For non safety critical stuff it's much better to crash every week than to wear out in 5 years.

bumby 4y ago
>glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics. It's the bane of my existence that I have to continuously power cycle a device to do something seemingly simply like change a tv streaming service or scan a document. Interface failures are rampant.
- lloeki 4y ago
  > your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward you'd be surprised how often watchdogs get their GIGO conditions triggered and things perform a cleanup reboot while you drive
  - bumby 4y ago
    I have no issue if it automatically recovers to a safe or known state. My issue is when this doesn't happen and the user has to perform the recovery via a power cycle. From my perspective, this means the system has failed and is, by definition, not reliable. We just seem to accept low reliability in consumer software.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  It's definitely not ideal, and I obviously try to do better than that in any product I work on. But I've seen so many things fail due to bad switches, connectors, and other simple parts, to me it's a great tradeoff to occasionally reboot something as opposed to having it totally fail at some random time within a few years. I wouldn't trust my life to it, but I'll trust my watch party to it. Plus, a consumer now only needs to power cycle or factory reboot, so untrained people can keep stuff going. I'd much rather they need reboots than need skilled work like they used to, that just wouldn't be practical in a digital first world. Oddly enough having failures be so normalized makes them less problematic, because the victim doesn't get many complaints. People who have to wait just assume that's how it is, nobody will tell you you shouldn't have used a computer for that Before all these complex systems we used pen and paper and things subject to human error, and we had to deal with that quite a bit. Computers suck compared to what they could be but they are amazing compared to a lot of older stuff.
  - bumby 4y ago
    We can design hardware to last, but I think we often don’t for economic reasons. My larger point is that using software just trades one well-understood failure mode for a group of unknown, hard to test failure modes, usually because it’s cheaper. I think my biggest complaint comes as a result of the data economy. You can still find “dumb” tvs but they are usually a lot more expensive than their smart variants, I assume because they cannot monetize your viewing habits. My SO convinced me to get rid of my old laser, USB interface printer. That one always worked but was old. My new WIFI enabled one requires logging into an app to use, and the USB interface maybe works 10% of the time. The app and hardware constantly require power cycling before it works. Many times it never does. One thing becomes apparent in quality engineering: often, adding more components/interfaces undermines reliability because there are often exponentially more failure modes. It feels like we’re being trained to no longer expect reliability, and the beneficiaries are not the consumers but the companies that create unnecessary interfaces to monetize data.
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      I think that definitely applies when you have updatable software or software that interacts with something updatable, but less so for the 8 bit embedded MCU stuff typically used to replace hardware. If you, say, use a microcontroller to soft start a motor instead of making it bigger, or use a capsense pad instead of a switch(Yes they can be obnoxious, but at least they last!), you are unlikely to get into a permanent bricked state because you're not writing to flash at all. Your failure modes might increase in number as software complexity increases, but for the most part they stay ephemeral. I'm not sure exactly why experiences are so varied on things like smart TVs and WiFi printers. I have the "Smart" version of almost everything, and it usually works very well, but some people seem to have generally bad experiences. I think some of it might be because they only test on fairly generic consumer setups with the latest stock Android, no firewall, no VPN, Bluetooth never turned off, no custom DNS, gmail for the email account, etc, and more tech savvy people tend to have a few things that modern tech doesn't like. It always seems like people who tinker have problems other people don't. I also notice iOS users seem to have trouble with random gadgets and peripherals not being too happy, but a my iPhone using friends aren't a big sample size. If I was designing a product, I'd definitely be more careful, but as a user at home, I tend to avoid anything heavily customized, so I don't usually see as many of the bugs.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  "Let me reboot my tv". "Just reboot your phone". These are relatively common phrases now that would have baffled anyone 30 years ago.

bumby 4y ago

>glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics. It's the bane of my existence that I have to continuously power cycle a device to do something seemingly simply like change a tv streaming service or scan a document. Interface failures are rampant.

lloeki 4y ago
> your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward you'd be surprised how often watchdogs get their GIGO conditions triggered and things perform a cleanup reboot while you drive
- bumby 4y ago
  I have no issue if it automatically recovers to a safe or known state. My issue is when this doesn't happen and the user has to perform the recovery via a power cycle. From my perspective, this means the system has failed and is, by definition, not reliable. We just seem to accept low reliability in consumer software.
eternityforest 4y ago
It's definitely not ideal, and I obviously try to do better than that in any product I work on. But I've seen so many things fail due to bad switches, connectors, and other simple parts, to me it's a great tradeoff to occasionally reboot something as opposed to having it totally fail at some random time within a few years. I wouldn't trust my life to it, but I'll trust my watch party to it. Plus, a consumer now only needs to power cycle or factory reboot, so untrained people can keep stuff going. I'd much rather they need reboots than need skilled work like they used to, that just wouldn't be practical in a digital first world. Oddly enough having failures be so normalized makes them less problematic, because the victim doesn't get many complaints. People who have to wait just assume that's how it is, nobody will tell you you shouldn't have used a computer for that Before all these complex systems we used pen and paper and things subject to human error, and we had to deal with that quite a bit. Computers suck compared to what they could be but they are amazing compared to a lot of older stuff.
- bumby 4y ago
  We can design hardware to last, but I think we often don’t for economic reasons. My larger point is that using software just trades one well-understood failure mode for a group of unknown, hard to test failure modes, usually because it’s cheaper. I think my biggest complaint comes as a result of the data economy. You can still find “dumb” tvs but they are usually a lot more expensive than their smart variants, I assume because they cannot monetize your viewing habits. My SO convinced me to get rid of my old laser, USB interface printer. That one always worked but was old. My new WIFI enabled one requires logging into an app to use, and the USB interface maybe works 10% of the time. The app and hardware constantly require power cycling before it works. Many times it never does. One thing becomes apparent in quality engineering: often, adding more components/interfaces undermines reliability because there are often exponentially more failure modes. It feels like we’re being trained to no longer expect reliability, and the beneficiaries are not the consumers but the companies that create unnecessary interfaces to monetize data.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I think that definitely applies when you have updatable software or software that interacts with something updatable, but less so for the 8 bit embedded MCU stuff typically used to replace hardware. If you, say, use a microcontroller to soft start a motor instead of making it bigger, or use a capsense pad instead of a switch(Yes they can be obnoxious, but at least they last!), you are unlikely to get into a permanent bricked state because you're not writing to flash at all. Your failure modes might increase in number as software complexity increases, but for the most part they stay ephemeral. I'm not sure exactly why experiences are so varied on things like smart TVs and WiFi printers. I have the "Smart" version of almost everything, and it usually works very well, but some people seem to have generally bad experiences. I think some of it might be because they only test on fairly generic consumer setups with the latest stock Android, no firewall, no VPN, Bluetooth never turned off, no custom DNS, gmail for the email account, etc, and more tech savvy people tend to have a few things that modern tech doesn't like. It always seems like people who tinker have problems other people don't. I also notice iOS users seem to have trouble with random gadgets and peripherals not being too happy, but a my iPhone using friends aren't a big sample size. If I was designing a product, I'd definitely be more careful, but as a user at home, I tend to avoid anything heavily customized, so I don't usually see as many of the bugs.
mgkimsal 4y ago
"Let me reboot my tv". "Just reboot your phone". These are relatively common phrases now that would have baffled anyone 30 years ago.