Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
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I worked in early AAA in the late 90s, and it's true that games were often quite rough around the edges. But they were also often biting off WAY more than they could chew, inventing genres and innovating like crazy, often in messy ways that didn't always work. But that meant players were often also routinely and genuinely surprised by the experiences they encountered in even big budget games.
He lists a bunch of quality of life and balance issues that were fixed in Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2... but, well, Diablo 2 was obviously _important_ in ways that Diablo 3 wasn't. It's a much greater game.
And lurking in the background is the hard fact that often the progress with software (certainly game software) entailed turning to much better software engineering standards, using much better external libraries or game engines with much larger teams, and relying on much more process to capture and filter all those rough edges... and along the way, you've built a much, much larger team with a much larger burn rate, and so all those experiments and innovations become much more dangerous and need to be corralled and controlled and mostly stifled, and as the cost of all this to build skyrockets your entire game design _has_ to focus on your business model and your microtransaction story and your live services first and foremost, because you've boxed yourself into a corner where that cash flow issue is the central fact of your game / software design.
(I experienced this evolution first hand in the FPS space)
All of which is to say, I think there are multiple different axes at play here for evaluation, and it's probably fair to say that software _undefinably_ was much worse in the past along some of them... but not all of them. And there are probably deep tensions and tradeoffs between some of those axes.
I think this entirely discussion really is muddied, though, too, by the fact that hardware got radically better over this entire arc as well, and so many programming techniques in the past that made software more brittle or crash prone hinged on memory and computation optimizations techniques that really had nothing to do with the software culture of then or now. It was just a response to the realities of the hardware.
For someone who played D2 and D3 for thousands of hours, D4 typically comes off as really awful. The accessibility tradeoff means that the cheesy (and enjoyable) strategies you used to enjoy in former iterations are no longer feasible because the auto adapting numerical difficulty system is so aggressively casual. Every time you get a big piece of gear, it is watered down to pointlessness immediately. D3 and D2 do not have this problem, but their difficulty curves are more discrete and unforgiving in many areas.
Bet across 10 teams instead of one, that kind of thing.
Willing to bet a 30 million dollar budget game will play and look great with proper focus.
Even if only 1-2 take off, it’d be overall better wouldn’t it
There are some others that are similarly placed - Stardew Valley, arguably Minecraft (or GTNH heh).
I think the problem for the studios is they don't know HOW to do those 30 million dollar games, but they're really good at the 300 million dollar ones, and they're not selling to the users, they're selling to corporations (think Microsoft/Playstation/Target).
(It's also rare you have a game that is allowed to improve the way Minecraft, Factorio, or Stardew Valley have; go back and play builds or releases from around "when they went big" and you'll find they're horribly rough - I love Minecraft 1.7.10 but I simply cannot play without the QoL mods from GT:NH for long.)
Honestly I think this is the hardest thing, I've spent a bit of time now trying to look at how indie works, including building out a small team to put something together and you either need to get funding, or it's pretty gruelling.
You can build something small slow and steady, but you've got to luck out and hit the zeitgeist if you don't want your project to collapse for a lack of money.
Or you have to have someone support you, I mean Stardew Valley famously was building for 4 years before they released, with his partner supporting him, that's a huge survivorship bias.
Project Zomboid is another game that comes to mind that's been being built for a long time for a dedicated community. However they managed to get a paid prototype out early, even though they had cash issues and a fair bit of bad luck.
Not sure what the story behind Factorio is come to think about it.
None of them can you build a successful business strategy around, really, because the vast majority of games like that do NOT succeed.
And I'm not sure why? I would have thought producing and refining new IP would be good to do now and again, at least releasing something novel once every few years?
Or perhaps they prefer just buying external IP.
Sometimes how projects are run is weird, like how Hi-Fi Rush seemed to be doing well and then Microsoft axed them despite it:
> In his letter to staffers, Booty said the closures were “not a reflection of the creativity and skill of the talented individuals at these teams or the risks they took to try new things.” And while the changes will be “disruptive,” Booty said that they are “grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades.”
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/microsoft-shuts-down-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Fi_Rush
If that's true, there may not have been many at Riot who were super passionate about it. Obviously Ghostcrawler was but was probably spread very thin.
Seems like a generic platformer priced at €30, but don't worry! You can also buy skins for a couple extra €.
--
Looking at another one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2252143/The_Mageseeker_A_...
An action RPG where you can buy extra spells for your character as a DLC...
--
Hmm, no idea how their business model didn't work out.
His general outlook seems to be that the small teams of the past creates more rough edges and that the larger teams on modern AAA games creates a smoother experience but requires more concern for income because the cost is so much higher for the larger team.
I get that comparison but I think he's totally missed the advantages of the small team. The cheaper dev cost means less risk of financial ruin if the game fails which means innovations are less risky. Less developers means the vision of one person can shine through more which results in a more creative end-result, for better or worse.
The "too many cooks" in the kitchen is a real problem of modern software, especially games. Huge budgets mean games need huge audiences to be successful which means everyone needs to like it. The death of productivity software is, unsurprisingly, anything that stands in the way of productivity. The save bugs he mentions are real killers. But for games, as an art form, the turn from focusing on the vision of the artist to the desires of the audience makes for uninspiring work.
I'll take bugs all day long if it comes with a unique experience.
For example, quest tracking in modern games is phenomenal, and people used to add addons to do that - but there's really a way in which "figure it out yourself" and/or read the guidebook/talk to people was better. Same with pug tooling - no need to find a group anymore, the computer does that for you, but you also don't develop relationships with those around you.
Going to have to disagree on this one. Perhaps if you have an extremely well architected game that will organically guide a lost player in the right direction it can work, but I have many painful memories of just blindly exploring entire maps and clicking on every NPC because the obvious route of progression wasn't doing anything. Sometimes it would be an actual quest bug and I'd just be wasting my time.
Particularly in large open world games like GTA/Witcher 3/etc, quest tracking of some sort is mandatory.
Completely immersion breaking.
To be fair I only played D2 in 1.09, 1.10 and 1.12 with LoD so I don't know what day 1 looked like but I'd consider D2 still to this day the best ARPG I ever played where as I stopped playing D3 shortly after release after completing it (before it nerfed everything) in hardcore mode from the beginning, it had no longevity. I didn't even buy D4.
I think it's harder to have a sequel be well received when the previous version was considered as good as it gets for a large player base. With that said, I'm still surprised how D3 panned out.
Whilst there are many epicureans, the vast majority of time played/food consumed is going to be pretty bland, and the audience both wants and expects that.
Thankfully there is room enough for both, and I think the tension between them is interesting.
That is not my experience having gamed "seriously" since 1992. Everyone has different tastes. And besides folks over identifying with a console or platform, I recall most folks just trying a lot of different things then settling into what they enjoyed.
Sports games in particular have always been popular through many phases of low/no innovation because that just wasn't a priority to most of that demographic.
Your expectations remind me more of GameGate than 90s and oughts era gaming.
OG gamer here (started on the Fairchild Channel F). This is absurd.
What is true is that the hardware rapidly advanced, and as programmers got familiar with each platform the software also advanced, but the shelves were full of stinkers and disappointments and copycats.
Are you quite certain about that? https://archive.org/details/Lemonade_Stand_1979_Apple
Latency is one metric by which computing has gotten noticeably worse over the years.
Daily, I encounter multiple situations in which I take some action (click a button, type text in a text field, etc.) and the response is visibly delayed - from several hundred to several thousand milliseconds.
This used to happen only on websites, but lately is also happening on apps installed on my computer. The cause? My theory is that everything is now some sort of monstrosity of React or similar web app, running inside a browser process, and possibly even that local apps are sending data round-trip up to the mothership for tracking, surveillance, synchronization, etc.
And the UX is terrible - often while this is happening, stale data is showing, or there is no visual indication a process is underway.
Software is hard to use for me now.
And it gets worse, since equipment gets chained. If you add more than a few ms to the wet channel, it accumulates and can be very problematic if you ever feed the wet back into the dry signal.
Source: have shipped multiple digital pedals
good times...
I used to be able to whip through 3-4 keyboard shortcuts in a fraction of a second and the computer would keep up. This was on an 80 MHz machine, by the way. Now I have a supercomputer and I have to wait for a quarter-to-half-second zoom/pan/slide/whatever with nearly every single interaction. It's maddening.
The end result is being completely unaffected by version changes, the trends in programming that go up and down (javascript, python, whatever, doesn't matter to me what's happening in their world).
It helps that I was also an early adopter of Rust from pre-1.0 in college around 2011, and so I've had a relatively stable implementation language. That combined with C and Luajit is my permanent stack right now, but I'm in the progress of migrating to my own programming language.
The natural terminus of the path you are suggesting is to reimplement everything. Be prepared for a long road, even with LLMs at your disposal now. An LLM can't design what you want because it can't read your mind.
What’s the best way to get started with Common Lisp now for a very very experienced programmer?
GUI are useful, but I spent so much time trying to find the perfect ones while I could quickly draft a quick CLI script for my specific problems. These days, I focus on finding libraries and utilities that solves the core of my problem, then wire them up in a way that solves my workflow. After a while, you just find that most of your computing needs are solved.
You should be! CPUs these days are so goddamn fast, there is zero excuse that things don't respond instantly to user input. Sure, you can't escape the latency of the speed of light, but so much software lags and feels like shit even on things that involve no network interactions. I have to use notion at work sometimes and it feels like trudging through a lake of mud. Absolute garbage latency because the devs (and their clanker handlers) apparently don't know any better.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
It just hasn't gotten better.
Fundamentally, whenever latency gets too bad, developers fix it. But often not until then. So it always just kind of sits there at the edge of just-barely-tolerable. Which is defined by human behavior, not chip speed or similar.
I remember iTunes in the 2000's taking several seconds to respond to user actions. I remember using software like PageMaker in the 1980's that would take forever to respond. Lotus Notes in the 1990's was horrible. Running antivirus would slow your system to a crawl. Other stuff from the 2000's -- Acrobat Reader, or Outlook.
It's always been an issue with apps on the computer.
Some aspects have definitely gotten worse. For example, the latency between pressing a key and a glyph appearing on the screen.
I've been using computers for over 40 years now, and I've never been impacted by the latency between keypress and letter rendering in my life except for on e-ink. That's not something I see anybody complaining about.
Skype.
Windows File Manager.
It has been a thing for a long time in consumers software from the big guys. The people working on it don't care about UX or performance.
Now a lot of the small-company software we used to use has been replaced by slow bloated and buggy apps usually running on Electron (Slack et al) so we're seeing it everywhere as opposed to in a couple of bad apps.
It really feels like the types of software which have inexplicable pauses / hiccups has grown. Sometimes even my OS (a Debian flavor, although it's a corporate managed distribution that might be to blame) locks up from time to time when I'm tethering on my phone with limited bandwidth, which is highly suspicious.
Most of the software I use is custom now but not in like a deep way. E.g. it turns out that browser engines are blazing fast. So what’s slow? The chrome around it, the extensions. These things I just rewrite.
It turns out that MacOS GUI primitives are also really fast. It’s just that most software poorly uses it. I rewrote text viewer applications, and a terminal emulator chrome that uses libghostty. I don’t claim originality or skill. I only claim annoyance.
Now that I’ve reached the point where the thing in the way is my OS which I have trouble modifying I suddenly understand why Omarchy is compelling to so many people. And I get why DHH is so excited about it.
You can have a bespoke system on a fast, reliable base. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why suffer?
You can do a lot at the high levels, but everything needs to be reworked from the hardware level up to match the latency of older systems.
PS/2 did not use polling, it was entirely event-driven. On keypress, the keyboard sent a serial message to the 8042 controller [1], which then raised the appropriate interrupt line on the CPU, which caused the keyboard ISR [2] to be executed. The serial clock was a bit flexible, but usually sat around 10-16 kHz [3], and so the 11-bit serial message took at most 1 ms to send.
It is USB that uses polling. The keyboard describes itself using endpoint descriptors, and after obtaining these, the host controller periodically polls it with an IN token, to which the keyboard responds with its state changes since the last poll [4]. The earliest USB keyboards preferred fairly slow polling rates, but modern keyboards can be polled every 1 ms [5]. If directly connected to a motherboard USB port, a modern USB keyboard will have pre-software input latency on par with a PS/2 keyboard.
[1]: https://wiki.osdev.org/I8042_PS/2_Controller
[2]: https://wiki.osdev.org/Interrupt_Service_Routines
[3]: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/15607/25565
[4]: https://threeboard.dev/documentation/threeboard/how_usb_keyb...
[5]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/hid1_11.pdf pp. 68-69
home depots site is seriously one of the worst. Mobile phone that is from this year, on good wifi, and it takes many seconds to load any page, HOW!?!?
I’m also thinking that there might be a universal solution to all animations: user-driven animation end. Like, the system could cut off the animation as soon as the user hits another key, making it faster and learning the right rate of animations over time. That would be great!
Although I fired up Solaris 9 on an old Sun Blade a few months ago, and the GUI latency on that was imperceptible.
never have i felt a computer react so quickly. CRTs have much less lag than LCDs.
You probably can't avoid the time it takes for the pixel to physically change (~1 frame) but you can avoid all intermediate framebuffers by careful timing synchronization. E.g. when scaling, don't buffer a frame at a time, just a line.
Point being, outside competitive games, I do not expect monitor hardware to be anywhere near the bottleneck for latency and response times.
Until you can demonstrate to me that you can build an async/await server that uses a single core without deadlocking, I am not so sure you should be trusted with any additional resources.
on the contrary, native app UIs should at minimum separate the UI thread from background work, if only to keep UI controls responsive.
The UI thread may spend most of its time asleep, but it has to be available to instantly respond to user input (or events/signals from the OS)
Maybe we're talking about different things, though.
Like software used to crash, were single-threaded and constantly frozen. How many times did you have to issue Ctrl+alt+del vs today? Even UIs were constantly out of sync with the underlying data, I would even go as far to claim that reactive frameworks like react cut down a big category of software bugs.
Now when something crashes I actually need it for work, or to bank, or to navigate, or hell sometimes the only menu at a restaurant is a QR code but my damn phone is failing to recognise it again.
When you introduce technology into every facet of life, it's suddenly death by a thousand cuts when things don't work, or are a slow buggy mess.
Websites are the obvious example here. Much slower speeds but pages loaded at acceptable paces. Now I'm on gigabit internet and webpages likely take longer to load. And we all know what it's loading in the background are not things that make the UX better.
I suppose sleep has never been great on Windows, but I don't know what it's doing these days.
People remember things to be more positive than they were. This is an established bias in human psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
I read your response as “okay then, if we can’t ask that question, we have to spy” etc. which I think did not follow from my post - I misunderstood you, thanks for clarifying.
2) Asking more people gives you an answer closer to the ‘truth’ (i.e. the true population mean; the mean answer if you asked ‘everyone’). It lowers sample error, not directional bias.
Stated preference is very often different from demonstrated preference.
They put windows 95 in front of users, asked them to perform tasks, and, at the end of the test, asked them to shut down the computer. Almost everyone clicked on the start menu first, so that's where they put the shut down button.
A lot of people dislike change and sure as shit hate relearning a skill they didn't enjoy or have aptitude in the first place. I know exactly what kind of UX my dad prefers and he HATES all modern design patterns. I think several of them are great for information density and despise everything twitter popularized. Entire generations have grown up on twitter and they think it's basically the only way to display information.
Point being when we're discussing as large a surface area as "software" I'm not really sure you're going to get much out of asking 100 people except what decade they were born in and what software/patterns they grew up on. Clearly some things can outcompete others, but inertia and network effects drive adoption, and can turn people from "ugh I hate this" to "ugh why would you do anything other than this".
Basically, I tried to buy a train ticket on sbb.ch (it was an eurostar crossing the border, so I couldn't do it through the app).
I selected the day and start looking at the available trains. Before continuing I logged in with swisspass to get my halb-tax discount applied. Once done the page reloaded, I got the updated prices, I selected the train at the time I wanted and I purchased the ticket. Only when I got the ticket delivered on my app screen I notice that it was for the current day and I couldn't reimburse it.
Basically, the page reload after the swisspass login changed the date to the current one and, of course, I didn't notice. It is now fixed, but it costed me 90 bucks and couldn't really do anything because technically is my fault for not noticing it was on the wrong day.
Further more I still remember software developers in the 2000s who just refused to do any kind of testing on produced software, because it is just a waste of time. It compiles? It ships!
Not many people are such cowboys today.
Now-day, it is the llm that write tests. Nobody look at it and verify if it is meaningful. If the test pass, ship it.
It still cowboys days
All it had to do was run Check Disk, but it kept going in a loop every 30 minutes checking their "AI" for solutions, finding none. There was no way to get out of it.
I am sorry, but even in the worst days of Windows, this would have been a huge deal. This was the last straw so I installed Mint to play games.
everybody only likes their own style, and has trouble dealing with other people’s style.
maybe that’s what you mean by the total net feel/experience decreasing. in my world, it’s still harmonious, but it’s possible queen barb hasn’t showed up here yet
A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.
One is that software started being designed in a one-size-fits-all manner for a “uniconsumer” that vaguely represents every user the software will ever have. Personally I think that analytics-driven development is largely to blame here; through those you don’t see user groups, just numbers going in whatever the product manager deems to be positive and negative directions. We don’t design for specific users, but rather to produce desired metrics.
Second is that professional UI design got flooded with designers from other disciplines (e.g. print design) who only really understand the visual half of software design. The functional, interaction, and user research parts completely fell by the wayside as the job became more focused on coming up with designs that would do numbers on Dribbble and look pretty in a product page or presentation and is driven mostly by vibes now.
Not quite Scotty in Star Trek IV, but close.
can you elaborate?
No one here is winning in particular unless you make money pushing [profitable music].
If the complaint is vibe coding makes bad software, I largely believe it, but I absolutely believe that vibe arguing makes tissue paper arguments. “Everyone knows” and “it’s obvious” are flimsy things to rest arguments on.
I’m writing dramatically better software for all the reasons this post says obviously make worse software.
Testing has gotten much easier, and bug fixing has gotten much easier. I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1. The old project had no accessibility considered at all, the new ones are nicely done aria and beyond. Old project is stuck on old libraries because upgrading is a major pain. New projects take new libraries (after cooldown) no matter the effort.
So I’m left thinking that perhaps some people, too lazy to use the new powers of new tools, churn out the same or worse quality code/essays.
But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, and I believe the same could be done with essays by leveraging these tools to research and find real data beyond “it’s obvious”. But that does take a lot more work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR4i3Ho9zZY&t=37s
The reason is clear - without scarcity of compute or memory, performance is no longer a feature. That works until all the laziness compounds into a crawling bloat.
This is regarding desktop software. With services, microservices is basically a performance anti-pattern that is used without any due diligence in most cases.
With most software being free, cost is optimized for the developers not users and we end up with Electron apps
I'm semi-sarcastic here, but this is actually possible now, while it was an often futile and very expensive roundtrip before AI resulting in two versions of your software that you have to simultaneously maintain.
Things get lost-in-translation, and Claude doesn't seek your input for decisions that matter.
Lines of code is a poor metric for measuring, both for application code and testing code
Somehow LOC morphed from one metric among many to "you should never even think about LOC, 15 lines and 15k lines are exactly the same thing". It's weird.
They should write a test and stash the fix they just wrote. In this state it should fail. Once they re-apply the patch, it should become green and this gave use enough information to deduce that the test does test something.
Personally, I haven't seen too much of that. What I've seen is software that _looks_ pretty, has a shiny interface, a well-designed animated website made with god knows what, but under the hood it's a bit of an alpha mess....
Goodhart's law etc.
About 50% of the test cases I've ever seen are pointless.
Tests fix how the software can be changed and when software-spec evolves lots of tests can become obsolete. Maybe with AI it is easier to change the tests (?) which is good.
But there is another purpose for tests, besides "testing". It is to document your modules in a way that shows you how to use them, and let's you easily verify is this still working, can I trust it.
In your case of course any existing utilities behavior/specs should be tested first, regression tests just on top, if they are not already covered.
A test is mostly useful only in the case that by failing it alerts you to a bug.
Yes it was vibe coded. The "a" variable was never used, and was tested to be 1 several times.
It was several hundreds lines of course so I didn't bother reviewing the rest.
It does not affect Debian, Fedora, or Qubes OS.
From the consumer POV you can make a great app that does the thing great, and then that's it. Pay once upfront. Just security updates and maybe light compatibility updates after.
Instead we get constant toying and adjusting, and even worse, get pigeon holed into a monthly subscription to bankroll the $200k salaries needed to pay the team that hides the menu button every 6 month to boost screen time.
This too is subjective.
No one designs for users any more. It's all gas no breaks on the path to enshitification. A lot of this is the motivation of the people building software.
Raise your hand if you ever saw a PM get promoted for removing a bunch of bad and/or unused features?
But in general sure, it's not like we have good databases that count and classify bugs and track their numbers and severity and determine causes so we can compare the dynamic
Depending on machine-generated tests that nobody reads isn't better than having poorer coverage. The only thing that is guaranteed is that that mass of code returns "true" with the current implementation and "false" if the implementation changes in some ways. Unless people actually read the LLM-generated code, it's impossible to know if it tests anything that actually matters or just tests the same code path that would never be actually used in production in 5 different ways.
cite 1
Since it was much harder to make stuff, you really had to architect it well or otherwise it would simply fall apart. For example in assembler you need discipline in your calling conventions, layout and so on, otherwise it just corrupted, you needed to follow sensible naming conventions otherwise it degenerated into unreadable label spaghetti and so on.
Nowadays it's the other way around, the micro level is so much better due to libraries, code reuse, LLMs and better languages/tools, you can use highly sophisticated data structures and functions at your fingertips. In exchange, you can afford to skimp on architecture because computers are fast anyway, and the programming languages don't let you make a huge mess. (Most don't have unstructured goto/jumps, can't corrupt memory accidentally, etc.)
However, this has the cost of making larger programs a nightmare to maintain and systems suffering from a "death of thousand cuts" i.e. on the micro level all is well but when you look at the entire system it's a sprawling unreliable mess. This is where rewrites often happen ;)
Those downsides existed, but then that’s just how lots of stuff is or was.
Larger systems are not imo any worse to manage now, but the scale of what is possible and expected dramatically changes what we consider a large system these days.
I think this is like looking back at a few hits and being nostalgic for some decade of music forgetting all the terrible songs of the time. Or perhaps if the volume has increased seeing on YouTube all the school bands that you’d never have seen before because recording was expensive and distribution reserved for the very few.
Similar to how using lambda functions and some document DB is easy and fast, but it often times leads to shit architecture as you don't have to think about it anymore, bolt on whatever cloud service X and Y for features and you have a mess.
AI is similar to cloud in that way, it's so forgiving that it pushes you towards a shit architecture as it "doesn't matter anymore".
Funnily enough AI makes the cloud mess easier to manage. These opinions are based on my own experience and most importantly, vibes.
What popular consumer software today matches the incredible extensibility of Winamp?
Who is developing fun tools like Coverflow, which was popular enough that Apple incorporated it into iTunes.
You actually do see some of this today but it’s almost entirely limited to software tools, because software devs are willing to spend a little more effort on the tools they use because they know their users can just develop an alternative otherwise.
AI might change this, but well crafted software was genuinely disappearing for the past decade and a half.
Now it's all websites.. or horrible android apps. Open source is the only thing remaining.
The good thing is that with LLMs, it is more and more possible to add all sort of cool functionality to existing code. And soon we will be able to add functionality also to compiled programs [like adding line numbers to windows note pad as a "cracking" tutorial, that was so cool].
Just yesterday I added the functionality of "show all unread" to an open source C++ low resource Slack desktop app [the official one is so bad]. And also I added VIM bindings to a text editor.
The baseline has moved down, but it also encourages laziness. Those who break out of the "Claude, do the thing, no mistakes" rut will do great things.
That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)
https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....
https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html
(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:
https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history
which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)
While I believe that the decline of the west started with the Reagan Revolution, that decline didn't show up in our consumer technology until about 2010. The best car motors, and the best version of Windows (Windows XP) were released in the mid-aughts.
- Purchased or downloaded a software package.
- Installed it onto your local machine.
After that you were free to do what you liked with the software.
Now software generally:
- Runs on someone else's computer, or is at least locked behind a login.
- Is served to you through a web browser.
- May be revoked or changed without notice at any time.
For this reason, regardless of reliability or capability, software was generally better in the past.
- What you buy is yours forver?
- Even if the company's servers go offline?
- Even if you change your PC?
- Apple can't remove it from your machine whenever they like?
- You can back up the installer and license and reinstall it later? Offline?
Let's flip it: Do you have some examples of software needed that is not available as a regular install for MacOS? Not saying it doesn't exist, but you can almost always find high quality local software.
These are the largest pieces of software people use, and there's more bloat and less control than ever.
Games I don't care about, for those a PC or console is most likely your better option.
> Office and many professional productivity tools (Adobe) converted from "software you buy and install" to "software you pay a monthly subscription to keep using".
MacOS comes with a free office suite which is perfectly capable for personal or small business use. Affinity is a great alternative to Photoshop that is free, although the new version 3 now checks your license when you run the app. Affinity 2 was software you buy and install. You can otherwise buy Pixelmator Pro for $50 from Apple.
> all your chat apps are basically mini web-browsers
The included iMessage is probably not.
I haven't been in a situation where there wasn't a great traditional app available for purchase or for free for the tasks I needed.
Of course if your task is "I specifically need Microsoft Office/Adobe Photoshop and nothing else" rather than "I need to get this or that done", then you are stuck.
As an analog, I don't feel it's much value to ay "Facebook sucks, use Hacker News" (or any of the hundred other social media that are not a data harvesting platform). The existence of (more) ethical alternativea doesn't erase that fact that most are on unethical software. Likewise, there being efficient software doesn't invalidate that most people are on electron powered services that each take up GB's of data.
User 1: There are no good cars anymore!
User 2: You can get this car A or this car B which are good.
User 1: But I have car C which isn't good!
I didn't claim in my original comment that all or most software was high quality. I said that high quality software is generally available for MacOS. Then it's up to each person what they do.
That's basically been the attitude of politics for awhile now. And I see that result doesn't end well.
This is comparatively harmless, but I'm overall trying to unsubscribe from that paradigm of "let stupid stupid". I at every least want to help contribute to alternatives if others wake up one day.
You say you want X but you do Y.
But then you say you don't want X, you want someone to magically make Y as good as X.
That type of wishful thinking is all the rage in politics.
For larger topics, you tackle system, not people.
https://helmlet.app/en/
I wanted to call it pervitin but then I learned about the ugly historical connotation.
Software is bad when it's buggy, slow, bloated, annoying, distracting, anti-user, anti-consumer, anti-ownership, and rent-seeking. I pine for the days where something as simple as "wtf can't it autosave" be a reason to call software horrible.
Software in general used to be much less stable. For example, browsers didn't always have tab isolation. A single bad site could, and frequently would, crash the whole browser.
No browser had tab isolation. In fact, no browser had tabs.
Memory protection in Win311 (first to use the new v86 mode) and Win9x was intentionally weak to allow DOS programs to access hardware directly. WinNT/2000 broke sound in all DOS games and lots of other programs that relied on direct hardware access. The price of stability was incompatibility.
I ran Win98 until 2006 or so. Once I replaced all bad software and drivers, it was stable enough to not bother to turn off at night and do suspend-to-ram instead. I recently bought an Acer Swift Edge w/ Win11. It is so bad, it is not capable of S3 sleep. It won't even disconnect from wifi.
The article mentions Windows XP which certainly had IE with tabs but the problem predates that.
Earlier versions of Windows (95, 98, 2000) featured a single window per site. So if one wanted 3 "tabs" one would need three separate windows. But the browser windows were not isolated. An issue in one window would impact ALL of the web browser's windows.
In addition, there was some issue with IE in particular. A crash in IE would sometimes make the taskbar and desktop disappear then restart.
More generally, browsers did not have isolation. This made for a much worse user experience.
There was a setting to open each window in a separate process. Even Windows Explorer (the file manager) had this setting, in case it crashed extracting a thumbnail or something.
IE crash would take down Windows Explorer because it was integrated into it since Win98. A bad ideea, IMO - the point where bloat began.
Like I said, technologies were just being invented. Back then things improved (mostly - see IE integration as a counter-example). Each new version was better than the one before. Can you say that now?
Turns out tabs were added in IE 7 [1] about 2/3rds of the way through Windows XP's lifecycle.
> Like I said, technologies were just being invented... Each new version was better than the one before. Can you say that now?
That is largely what the article is saying. Software is getting worse BUT software improved by leaps and bounds for quite a while. These improvements compounded over time meaning that new software (while regressing) is still much better than software from the 1990s and 2000s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_7
I agree that we have huge advantages today. I agree that the best practices, tools, and computing resources are much better today than they were in the past.
But these don't invalidate OP's point.
For instance: an AI-assisted developer can probably make a pretty decent basic text editor, but let's say they need to make an entirely new type of app, then I think the new app will lack polish or finesse because no one has made that before. Or AI can help find bugs in mature, well-written code but what if someone needs to write a new kind of app? Then there's a lack of polish again...
AI companies are seemingly having a hard time to make a text editor that doesn't flicker so I think AI cannot make a simple text editor.
(Claude Code)
- I've never heard or experienced NES cartridges rusting -- but I've had to blow on them, and I've had plenty of CDs scratched (typically when storing them without a case).
- Yes, Windows had significantly more blue screens; however, the cause of lost work was always failure to Ctrl+S (not a blue screen).
- Memory was certainly limited (and in DOS there mostly was no multi-tasking), but only fanatical players would run into the issue described. And you were aware that many games required a memory extender.
- Even now, games are massively hacked e.g. GTA V Online.
- My original PC had a TURBO button, but I never had to use it.
Snow Leopard on the macOS side of things, Windows 7 on the other, both offering marked improvements in stability and sandboxing over their predecessors. Shareware is booming, the first App Stores have only just launched, Facebook is still that place you share exam notes with your college classmates.
I remember these! I could not figure out why it never seemed to make the computer faster and actually made it slower. TURBO was even written in italics to imply speed.
I suppose for some short time it may have actually overclocked the CPU, until the default clock speed caught up. After that, the turbo button was a lie.
Edit: Maybe I have it backwards, it sounds like on some machines it might have been in the underclocked condition when it was off. I just remember disappointing results with the machine that I used.
* Turbo was default ON and was the regular marketed speed the cpu was designed to run on, for my (dad's:) PCs it was 12 and 16mhz I think
* Turning turbo off reduced speed significantly for software written with original cpu timing in mind (I think 8088 but that was just outside of my direct experience).
So perspective on turbo button is a little bit philosophic, is it half full or half empty:). But it did not give you any EXTRA boost, like over clocking OVER manufacturer design cpu speed.
Ahh the good old times :-)
There were some programs made for that speed, but not nearly as many as when the problem happened for the first time on the 286. Most developers have learned timing practices at that point, and the APIs have improved a lot.
Mandatory EULA must be banned. Any device must be usable and provide all features advertised without accepting an EULA.
I, for my part, as much as I dig a little 70s and 80s retro stuff, would never ever want to go back.
If you read through old HIGs, they generally have actual concrete reasoning behind the choices they made. They're pretty interesting to read because back then they did scientific user studies to try to make computers more usable.
For example, Microsoft didn't make the UI gray because of some aesthetic preference. They chose gray because black-on-gray text is easy to read, and because it makes it immediately obvious what's UI vs. what's content (vs. if they made the background white or something). They made all the buttons three-dimensional because it makes it immediately obvious that something is clickable. Getting rid of stuff like this makes the UI prettier, but it also gets rid of hints for how to use the software.
How do they know it's good design? Did they think long and hard about where people would click to shut down? Maybe, but the more direct reason is they had user testing labs, and at the end of the test they asked users to shut down the computer, and almost all of them clicked on Start.
macOS’s Apple menu, which only ever contains system management commands and doesn’t try to be an app launcher too, is so much more logical.
Because of how much of a radical departure Windows 95 was from previous UI designs, and because of how driven the design was by user testing, there's a lot of information available going over why the design is the way it is. For example, there's an article going over the iterative design process here: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... and there's a detailed document explaining the UI for reviewers here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260209083725/https://tech-insi...
TweakUI indeed doesn't add support for scrolling inactive windows. I used IntelliMouse driver for that feature.
I've been trying to piece together what was actually there based upon some historical sources [1], [2], [3] and it's quite murky to me. As far as I can tell, scroll-follows-mouse was not truly possible in Windows 95, because the custom MSH_MOUSEWHEEL event lacked a way to carry the keyboard state, and an unfocused window would not have received the keyboard events to infer it correctly, so it would have been broken in a lot of edge cases. Then, Windows 98 added the standard MS_MOUSEWHEEL event, which does carry the keyboard state, but only 32-bit applications are able to access it, so the O/S locked scrolling to the focused window. Finally, Windows 10 pulled the plug on 16-bit compatibility, and so could and did make true scroll-follows-mouse possible.
[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080806-00/?p=21...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070503040017/http://msdn2.micr...
[3]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160420-00/?p=93...
And some others. IP? No, we are a NetWare IPX network!!
It’s hard to determine what was aesthetically good from a different time because tastes change.
But there’s nothing wrong with small buttons when your only input tool is a pixel accurate mouse. Arguably what’s worse is too large a button.
But what’s inarguably worse are things like window corners where the click zone extends far beyond the actual window, and parts of the window are not click zones.
Hence it was also extremely important to put the important stuff above the bottom of the first visible page.
Someone really uses that??
I personally don't know any less convenient way to scroll (ok, except clicking on the scrollbar arrows).
And if mice with the scroll wheel weren't widely available at the Windows 95 launch, they became shortly after. You've also always been able to scroll with the keyboard, btw.
Scrollbars became disdained with the modern smartphones, because some ##### thought that touch scrolling was enough.
Except that without a scrollbar it's extremely hard to figure out how long the page you're considering to read is.
And, rather than scroll wheels, I love and always use chirals on laptops, but both with them and with touchscreens, to make big jumps in a document a scrollbar is often more convenient.
As for inconsistent - what!? Every app looked approximately the same, and behaved in a predictable manner.
The vast majority of software (past or present) is not distributed and therefore difficult to access. So I find when people talk about “software” in this context they often mean commercial “boxed product” software or software that otherwise has an end-user that is the general public rather than “all software”. That is simply the only neighbourhood of the software universe that most people are familiar with. Yet even if we were to restrict ourselves to that category of software there is a complete lack of convincing comprehensive comparisons. And even if there were it might only be an indication of a trend confined to that category of software.
Most commentators suggest the trend concerning software quality continues and may even accelerate in the future. So instead of trying to compare the present with an inaccessible past, why not compare the present with an eventual future? Design objective metrics and/or recruit esteemed judges for subjective assessments, then assess today's software and repeat this assessment a number of years later and compare the metrics.
I'm truly horrified all that data is online somewhere synced from external sources in 1 dump.
On the end he said to me: you don't seem impressed...
He didn't knew a thing he was talking about technically. Barely even the db used ( postgres).
He mentioned sha256 for passwords, but doesn't know rainbow tables exist. If I would mention it to him to use a salt, he would probably break every login.
He has no dev and no test environment. Doesn't know about pr's, but he was proud he says he uses git and he "made" it.
It's under "NDA" and his step brother is checking it. Lol
I don't think I've had to do that in 15-20 years or so. At some point, shit just started working. Simple as. DLL hell is a thing of the past.
Maybe choice might come back when some talented kindergartener or junior high schooler who doesn’t know any better comes along and kickstarts the process all over again?
A user of alternative systems from the 1980s, early 90s…
>Blue Screen of Death >Windows had extreme stability issues for most of my childhood.
I was a Windows system administrator from 1997 through 2013. In the beginning, we had issues with the blue screen of death in Office Professional and Windows 98. It turned out that when HP wrote their printer drivers for the LaserJet 4000 printers, they used an optimizing compiler, and it dynamically loaded floating point emulation.... and let it get unloaded, thus when you needed to compute page layout to print.... blue screen of death.
Once I solved that, we never had problems again, for over a decade!
Once we got to Office 2000 Professional, we stopped upgrading, and enjoyed 12 years of stability.
The only real problems were with the gigabytes of email people kept around, most of it in their "Deleted Items" folder, used as a filing cabinet, and the Exchange server that was full. They wouldn't let me buy a spare machine for to test out the email server backups, which naturally turned out to be a prayer in the end. 8(
----
>Nothing was secure Nothing has changed, it's still not secure, no matter your choice of OS. We're not running HURD or Genode on everything, or even Qubes. It's ambient authority everywhere, which is nuts in an era of persistent megabit internet.
----
>Software came on unreliable physical media That's what backups are for. I had a folder of all my CDs, that was included in my system backups. So, I could restore the domain server, restore the backup filesystems, then reinstall everything, without using any media other than the Windows Server CD (actually, a copy of it, with the serial number written on it)
That Office 2000 install should still work today, without buying it again. It's unlikely to get memory holed.
----
>Give me higher-level programming languages that abstract common pitfalls from C and C++.
Yep... Turbo Pascal, then Delphi, and now Lazarus/Free Pascal have done that since the beginning.
90s software ran mostly offline. It was simpler and more deterministic. I think that's why it felt more reliable. Your UI couldn't depend on laggy server round-trips. Things either worked or they didn't.
Also, force stopping the app remembers the video you were watching, but deletes the queue of next videos you built up.
Oh gosh, and how could I forget the software crisis [2], a term coined in 1968, naming a problem identified long before.
Bad software is not a new thing.
[1]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis
I think that software (and hardware) should be made in a better way which combines what should be good from new and old things, instead of necessarily avoiding what they were in the past due to thinking that the newer ones are somehow inherently better even though it is not that simple.
The author then kids in [0] that the most popular software in Debian was editors to edit X86Config but...
I fully agree that Windows was an horrible crashing piece of crap back then. Linux was a godsend to me (installed it in the early Slackware days).
Armed with Emacs and LaTeX, on Debian 1.1 then 1.2, I wrote a 440 pages book (published by an editor).
Linux was already rock stable solid, while Windows was a crashing PoS.
Linux was so solid that I'd also run it on my laptop (and back then all laptops were crappy). When I was late I'd let LaTeX convert the files to .dvi (IIRC) and the PostScript while driving to my editor. We'd then the PostScript file to the printer at my editor.
It was something else then Windows.
As for Windows, yes, I was using it too.
And the absolute best software I ever got back then was Ghost, way before Norton bought them (it then became Norton Ghost). That allowed me to take a full dump of the Windows partition and then restore it at will from that partition, when Windows would invariably become unusable.
When I discovered Linux, suddenly I had a stable system that didn't need to be re-installed every other day. There's a reason the world is powered by Linux and companies like Google weren't built on Windows.
And I also had a small consulting gig (for little SMEs) where I basically had a business installing brand new Windows systems for the clients and all their stuff (like Outlook) and then immediately imaging the entire disk.
Because the only guarantee was that Windows would be borken rather sooner than later.
TFA is right and Microsoft has always produce mediocre shit.
It's hard to say if the BSOD'ing Windows of yore was even shittier than the ad-infested, surveillance, behemoth Windows of today. Both are equally bad IMO.
Because the day Microsoft shall product a product that doesn't suck is the day they'll start producing vacuum cleaners.
When you separate the OS from the UI Windows is fast and stable, and with things like powershell it is remotely manageable.
It's the UI and application level where most of the problems crop up.
I will note that like any large enough company, it also employs a lot of cool people doing great work, and don't see this as a contradiction in any way
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- Windows 1.0 through ME era: Legitimately an unstable OS due to dangerous memory model/lack of memory isolation.
- Windows NT through XP: Before KPP was added, software was monkey-patching the kernel, and it was causing instability (particularly multiple trying to over-patch each other). For example during that era it wasn't UNCOMMON for antivirus to do so as a matter of course.
- Windows Vista Specific: They made significant changes to the driver model of several popular device types, and manufacturers weren't ready. So a lot of driver-related failures.
But since then, it has mostly be smooth sailing. If you see a BSOD, you can trace it down, and more often than not the source will be underlying hardware failure which is why BSOD exists and isn't a software bug or problem.
Turns out it was my sound card, or at least it's drivers. It was some super cheap Crystal-based one. It would have some glitch during the permissions swap of the UAC environment, and when it went to play that ding it would break the system and require a hard power off. If I muted the computer before the UAC, it was fine.
Pulled the sound card and it ran fine.
That is a strictly worse system than displaying BSOD information right away, which lets you diagnose it immediately, it's a downgrade, which is what this entire thread is about.
I've seen more on MacOs/OSX in the same time frame.
Antivirus on my work Windows laptop has caused countless BSODs. VPN clients are often junk.
I had a KVM that could occasionally trigger one.
Windows itself seems to be pretty BSOD free. It is almost always something installed after or hardware.
There's got to be a subreddit for that I'm sure
Sure they might be using older unpatched Windows but it only reinforces its reputation of being crap and perpetuates the meme.
independent blogs can still exist! Not everything must be a subreddit!
Quite often you'll see non-windows displays like that crashed too.
Everything used to be horrible.
There were a few gems of good UI and functionality but they were rare and either got snuffed out by bigger companies like Microsoft or bought out and then forgotten.
Now, everything is more horrible than it should be.
It's like airplanes: Just barely 100 years ago, nobody could even dream that a common person could fly across the world to anywhere within hours.
Now we have planes and spaceships but they cram you in like cattle to squeeze into tiny inhumane chairs for hours..
The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.
Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.
YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.
Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.
There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.
And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.
Which it does
> Which it does
Not worse than humans have been doing on their own since forever.
I've been using AI to make private apps for my own personal use, and it's pretty amazing how quickly I can iterate to fix minor niggles and UI annoyances.. within minutes, while the app is running.
Meanwhile operating systems, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, etc have such shit UX here and there for YEARS. You're telling me they can't fix it with all their employees that get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars?
?
> Not worse than humans have been doing on their own since forever
If it's not reviewed well (some people stopped even looking at the code) it can be immensely worse.
And most people end up producing much more code with LLMs, quickly reducing how much of it they review; a lot have become fine with turning the interface upside down often just because it's easy, even if the new interface is worse and a lot buggier.
When was the last time you ..or anyone.. reviewed the assembly language or binary output of your compiler?
...
What if the CODE DOESN'T MATTER anymore?
No really, wait:
What if all that matters is the result?
First, you ask the AI to make what looks correct.
Then you ask it to make it work correctly.
Then you ask it (or another adversarial AI) to do a security review pass.
Then a performance benchmark.
Then a few more iterations of whatever.
If all pass, does any human really NEED to look at the code?
not even a week ago. But generally people prefer to burn millions on compute instead of seeing the output of the compiler and see how they can optimise their code
An LLM can spout anything at times, however good it might be on average.
> If all pass, does any human really NEED to look at the code?
Yes, for the love of god.
You don't really know what's the result: however comprehensive and correct your test suite might be, however well you check the running software, there are things that are unlikely to be caught by that, such as data sent to unintended servers or deletions of random files (maybe only under weird conditions).
Having other AIs review the code is not going to always catch everything, and pleading the AI to do a good job won't help very much.
How many bugs and vulnerabilities from unterminated strings and buffer overruns and underruns? How many leaked accounts and passwords?
What's the longest you've gone without hearing about a 100%-human-caused bug? Why wasn't it caught? Why did it happen in the first place?
The point is that a (well-meaning) human will never add obviously malicious code, while an LLM most certainly can do that.
I have a book from 1953. Among other things, it has airline timetables. You could fly from LA to Hong Kong (with several stops). It cost $1200. In 1953.
Now it's going to be a much worse experience. But it's something that regular people can afford at least once, if they want to.
Does "really great experience that I can't afford" really beat "crummy experience but at least I can afford it"?
Computers are more affordable than they were in the past (or they were, until this year). Software is more affordable than it was in the past - much of it is free. Does "I can do what I want to, but it's a really crummy experience" beat "the software is wonderful, but I can't afford all the pieces I want/need"?
It's "some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world haven't fixed some problems for decades"
and now when a new era is dawning with the potential to improve that, people think that it's somehow going to be a worse experience than what humans were doing on their own.
The code I wrote was ugly yes, but vscode back when I wrote it was nowhere near that miserable.
The other day google docs started freezing, It got stuck on the creating sheet state.
Youtube is making my fans spin recently just because I am hovering over the play button.
God forbid you use a lesser known SaaS tool. I started a trial on a platform and it kept asking me to start trails because I suppose the modal system was just trash.
The list is endless.
Things just don't work as intended and I know hn gets very offended when you're critical of AI but I couldn't care less honestly because I have my own data. Vibe code slop is slop no matter how good you are with your "orchestration". Oversight is a side effect of vibes and no ambition.
I don't think the author understands what 'worse' means
If anything, software 'may' be getting worse due to non-programmers (vibe coders) releasing things they have no business making in the first place.
Today's software isn't even software. It's just a bunch of poorly made extraction machines backed by utter delusion that "it works" when a lot of it most certainly doesn't (or if it does, at best, it works as an efficient extraction machine and torture device with no real utility).
It seriously feels like we've been huffing gas for the last 15 years.
There were games released in a pre-alpha state (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing), games that were basically released in a normal alpha state (Superman 64, Action52, etc) and there were games which literally didn't work because of major programming issues (SQIJ! had a player character which couldn't move due to the game only looking for lower case inputs while leaving the caps lock on).
And that's only the most extreme examples. Plenty of games had broken features and mechanics, or were outright impossible to complete due to poor level design and a lack of proper testing. Fan games, mods, ROM hacks and indie game scenes from the earlier days were just as notorious for works that were barely functional.
Generally games are at least now functional nowadays, with even the worst tending not to outright crash to a black screen or leave you with a player character that's completely unable to move. In many ways, the baseline level of competence arguably seems to be getting higher, with the march of AI meaning the worst is probably better than it might have been previously been.
Outside of games, it's worth noting how deeply insecure and flawed many older websites and programs were. There was a time where storing passwords in plain text was more of a norm, where input validation and sanitisation was often forgotten about, and where sites getting hacked was just as common an occurrence as today. Many Perl devs probably recoil in horror after hearing the term "Matt's Script Archive".
Are some things worse? Sure, performance seems to have become increasingly ignored in recent years, with web page sizes getting incredibly bloated and latency going through the roof. In some places there's more bad software overall, since the ability to vibe code it means non-programmers are building software more than ever. And some big companies that used to be respectable have let standards slip a lot (see Epic Games, Microsoft, etc).
Sturgeon's Law/Revelation held back then, and still holds today: 90% of everything is crap.
So now, it is worse than horrible.
Every time I open my phone, Google has a new "busy/loading" icon. Why?!
If it's getting worse, one can logically deduce that it used to be better
If it used to be better, why are you saying it used to be much worse? You cannot have it both ways unless AI already fried your brain.
...and if we are actually heading the wrong direction, why does it matter that we haven't regressed fully quite yet. AI is pushing us towards regressing fully. It's only a few miserable humans ranting about wanting a future filled with hope
And computer software is not a linear track, so regression is not going to result in the same 'bads' that existed back then, it's resulting in new ones, some of which are better,and some which are worse. It's not an all-or-nothing state.
I mean, you obviously can, if the past isn't a straight line to where we are today -- it's an arc where at x-10 it was worse, x-0 it was better and x+10 it's worse again?
Of course hardware also got better but software also got a let better at working around the hardwares quirks.
Client side hacks? Crypto is the bottleneck for all of security. Doing TLS on a 66MHz chip:
I have no problems with AI-written code and I've been a working programmer since the 90s. I don't even code review it as a matter of principle. I firmly believe that code itself has quickly reached an asymptomic value of $0, and if there are any bugs then just ask the AI to fix it.
He says that he learned to read around 1990, and just about remembers navigating computers in the mid-1990s and using them in the early noughties -- the 2000s.
So, earliest OS Win95, learning to use them WinXP.
That is the beginning of enshittification. Windows 3 is when the GUI came to the PC, but it's also the beginning of the era of PCs crashing all the time. It's also the beginning of the era of dial-up internet, meaning patches from online, meaning it was OK to ship bugs.
The previous generation of PC software was the height of the DOS era. Lightning-fast apps like WordPerfect, sold on their speed and their device support. If a printer could put marks on paper, WordPerfect would drive it, and drive it as well as it could be driven. Hacks like overprinting twice for bold, backspacing the print head and typing underscores for underlining.
People navigated documents by just pressing the cursor-up or cursor-down key and waiting: the text blurred into a flickering wall of grey as the text scrolled much too fast to read, but with skill and practice, you spotted the shape of the paragraph edges to spot where you where and let go, and it was tuned to stop instantly.
Computers were shipped with 1 app and used in that single app for years, sometimes for decades. Walls of floppy disk cases, thousands of media, hand indexed.
Speadsheets tuned to be no bigger than fit in RAM, and used daily for years on end, upgraded only for faster recalcs.
Home computers with libraries of tens of thousands of games, and not a single byte of update or bugfix in playable lifetimes of years, because there was no way to distribute updates, so you made sure it worked as shipped. Tiny playable imperfections became cheat modes.
In offices, multiuser boxes running OSes like Concurrent CP/M or, if you were richer, SCO Xenix, or for big corporations, OpenVMS, with uptimes in years. Operators who used apps 7-8 hours a day for a decade and who could navigate with keystrokes so fast that a CRT couldn't update quick enough to show the UI in time for their controls... and developers knew this and detected the keystrokes first and acted on them, and updated the display later when there was time.
Giant mainframes running hundreds of thousands of lines of code in 1960s languages, arcane and hard to modify, so they are still there 50 or 60 years later, buried under layers of terminal emulation and screen-scraping so now they look pretty. Still running natively on modern gigahertz-class bespoke CPUs today and every time you use a credit card or book an airline flight, it goes through that half-century old code.
Those enterprise minicomputers had clustering Linux will only ever dream of, with individual running processes able to migrated seamlessly from node to node across different CPU architectures, while in use. Cluster uptimes in decades. Still running today. OpenVMS is still being maintained, still running. So are all those IBM mainframe OSes.
Ever seen Tron? The big baddy is MCP, the Master Control Program. That was a real OS, an old fashioned one in 1982 when Tron was made.
It is still maintained. You can still buy it.
https://www.unisys.com/product-info-sheet/ecs/clearpath-mast...
It was released 65 years ago and there is a current version on sale. It was in production 8 years before Ritchie and Thompson typed the first line of UNIX into a terminal on their PDP-7.
Sure, it looks like it has got better, but only if you entered this world right at its lowest point. Before that lowpoint, before Microsoft subsumed the world in a second-rate copy of the best of the 1980s, SOFTWARE WAS BETTER.
Funny that you bring up airline flights because I've never been to an airline's website and had a pleasant experience. The only service that's given me a quick seamless experience is Google Flights, but airlines only allow for search and not checkout.