I didn't say it was impossible to put a patch on a physical media.

I was saying that in my experience as a user, I never, EVER received a patch or got any mean to request one.

My point being that the expectation was that what I was buying was "finished". When there was a bug, FOR ME, it was there forever.

With modern software, I encounter so many bugs everyday that I don't even realise anymore. Look at someone using something that depends on software for a while (not very long), see how they work around bugs (by restarting the app, or retrying the button, or going through a different path). When they do one of those things (like retry), if you ask them "wait, what did you just do?", chances are that they won't even know that they had to retry because of a failure. Why? Because modern software fails constantly.

Code is never perfect, that's for sure. But back when it was hard to update, the code had to be a lot more stable than today.

▲ godelski 7 days ago | parent [-]

  > I didn't say it was impossible to put a patch on a physical media.

You never said those exact words but you heavily implied it. You cannot tell me that it was an unreasonable interpretation.

  > Did you live at a time where Internet was not a thing?

You came out swinging. You can't throw out punches and expect to not have one thrown back.

  > My point being that

My point was

  > When there was a bug, it was there forever.

I stated this quite clearly

  >>>> Software isn't "ever finished" because we are not omniscient writers who can foresee all problems, fix all bugs, and write software that is unhackable.

  > With modern software, I encounter so many bugs everyday that I

I encounter so many bugs it drives me crazy.

Look, we don't disagree on this fact. I'm not encouraging the shipping of low quality or untested software. But patches coming through online was a good thing. We were finally able to fix those bugs effectively, not leaving tons of users stranded and vulnerable. This feature is not going to go away because it provides such high utility.

But shipping low quality software is a completely different issue. The ability to patch easily is not the cause of shipping low quality work. It is the abuse of this high utility feature. It is based on the greed and lack of pride in the product. There are so many little things that add up and create this larger problem. But pretending that software was ever finished is ignoring these problems. It oversimplifies the reasons we got to this point. We won't actually solve the problem *that we are both concerned about* if we oversimplify. We need to understand why things happened if we're going to stop it.

▲ palata 7 days ago | parent [-]

> You came out swinging. You can't throw out punches and expect to not have one thrown back.

I was not throwing punches. One can be 25 years old now and never have lived in a world without smartphones or social media.

> But pretending that software was ever finished

I'm not saying it was perfect (or bug-free). I'm saying that when you shipped, in many situations there was no way to patch the bugs. And even when there was a way, it was painful. So when you shipped, it was finished, as in "fully functional". Doesn't mean there wasn't any bad software or that good software did not have bug. But the teams shipping a product had to finish it before.

Nowadays, the norm is to ship unfinished software, with the expectation that there will be plenty of bugs, and those that are deemed worth fixing will be fixed.

And I do believe that it became like that precisely because it's easy to send patches. It's now economically viable to ship bad software, because people are used to having to wait for bugfixes. I'm guessing that back then, people would not have bought twice from the same company if the first time had ended up with unusable software.

> if we're going to stop it.

There is no stopping it. The quality of software is going down because it's economically viable, and I don't see that changing anytime soon (especially with LLMs).

▲ godelski 7 days ago | parent [-]

  > I'm saying that when you shipped, in many situations there was no way to patch the bugs.

This was never in disagreement.

  >>>>>> We had patches that [...] that came through physical media. ***The latter making it harder to patch.***

  > And I do believe that it became like that precisely because it's easy to send patches.

Look, we aren't going to go back to a setting where we don't patch software. That's a WORSE place to be. It leaves people vulnerable for long times. Devices carry more valuable information now and the threat model is much more sophisticated. We do not want to do this.

Besides that, I just don't believe you can blame the ability to patch over the internet as the reason for shoddy work.

Is Linux full of bugs and shipping half built products? I don't think so.

  > There is no stopping it. The quality of software is going down because it's economically viable, and I don't see that changing anytime soon (especially with LLMs).

The great thing about the future is that it is in our hands to control.

The bad thing about the future is we need foresight and to work together to avoid pitfalls.

Luckily humans are quite adept at having foresight. I mean here we are talking about likely future problems. But we're also often feeling helpless to address those issues. But this is an observation bias. Look at the Y2K bug, it is a perfect example. The average person brushes it off as if we made too big of a deal about it. But the thing is, it was a big deal. The thing is... we solved it before it created major issues. We also had similar success in big problems like fixing the ozone layer. We've done this countless times. We just have a tendency to focus on problems that are still problems and not look back and use our success as motivation to keep going.

Every big problem can be broken down into many smaller problems that are much more manageable. "They" win by making us believe that the little things don't matter. "They" win because it means we aren't taking the first steps or making progress, killing any momentum. The worst thing that can happen is to make us feel like the problem is too big to be solved. But that's a lie. We've created this mess and frankly I would like to try to fix things before it becomes an even bigger mess. Personally, I'm a big fan of not doing unnecessary and avoidable work.

So the question is are you with me? Are you going to help try to fix this problem? Or are you going to just sit by and let it grow worse? Hoping that it just solves itself or someone else solves it? Frankly, we need as many people in on this as we can. You don't need to do a lot of work. All I ask is that you speak up and question when the teams you work for are trying to push unfinished products. All I ask is that you help encourage others to do quality work, and not let slop just slip by. I'm not asking you to change the world, certainly not over night. I'm asking if you will make just a modest attempt to address the problem in your own sphere of influence.

	▲	palata 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Look, we aren't going to go back to a setting where we don't patch software. And I never said we should. I was just describing the situation. > Look at the Y2K bug [...] We also had similar success in big problems like fixing the ozone layer That's an optimistic point of view :-). I would argue that both of those were infinitely easier to solve than, say, the current mass extinction, energy problem and climate change. We've past what, 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries? We've pretty much lost the Amazon, we've pretty much lost coral reefs, we've definitely failed at the 1.5C goal and are now moving forward to failing the 2C goal. With the inertia in that system, once you fail there is no coming back in the next thousand years (unlike the ozone, BTW). Those are real problems that we are not only not solving: we're making them worse. All of them. > All I ask is that you speak up and question when the teams you work for are trying to push unfinished products. Most software is part of the problem. The problem is that we do too much in general. Doing requires energy. The more we do, the more energy we use. The more energy we use, the more we screw up the planet. You want to help? Do less. But at the end of the day, you still need to get paid, right? And for that you need your company to be profitable, right?