Comment by godelski
1 month ago
> Did you read my comment at all? :-)
Did you read *MY* comment at all?!
Everything @mechanicalpulse said was accurate.
To answer @grishka's question (because it seems you also don't know)
> What did that look like?
Well I literally answered that in my comment!
>>> Back when software came on physical media we still had patches.
We had patches that came through the internet AND WE HAD PATCHES THAT CAME THROUGH PHYSICAL MEDIA.
THE ***LATTER*** MAKING IT ***HARDER TO PATCH.***
I broke it up and emphasized the key parts.
If you are going to accuse someone of not reading your comment you damn well better be reading the comments you're responding to.
> Oh I get it. Maybe we just weren't playing with the same toys
Considering it was "harder to patch", yes, it does also mean "things often went unpatched." Mind you, this doesn't mean patches didn't exist nor does it mean, as you suggest, patches don't matter.
But again, I already addressed that in my original comment, so I'm not going to repeat myself again...
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.
You never said those exact words but you heavily implied it. You cannot tell me that it was an unreasonable interpretation.
You came out swinging. You can't throw out punches and expect to not have one thrown back.
My point was
I stated this quite clearly
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.
> 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).
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