Comment by MagicMoonlight
3 days ago
Just look at current software.
Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year.
Linux is still written by a couple of people.
Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire web browser behind the scenes…
Eventually you’ll have lead engineers at Apple who don’t know what computers really are anymore, but just keep trying to slop more JavaScript in layer 15 of their OS.
I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.
I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.
Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.
Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.
There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.
Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.
All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux
Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.
I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.
Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.
> Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence?
I was there in the DOS days. I was there when Windows 3.1 came out (others too but I didn't use them). I was there when Windows 95 came out.
Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds it produced that ran on cheap beige PCs. Not excellence. Mediocrity. Cheap, but mediocre.
At some point 95% of all machines sold with an OS had Windows and the times were incredibly dark. Thankfully things changed and now Windows is only present on something like 11% of all devices sold yearly that have an OS.
We dodged a big one and many of us shall never ever forget how slow, insecure, horrible and mediocre the products of that company were.
> Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds
Microsoft's goal was to make machines everyone could afford. Their mission statement was a desktop in every home and they pulled it off.
They didn't pull it off by making an OS that needed a boat load custom chips (Amiga), or that required a huge beefy system to run (OS2, Unix).
They did it by making compromises that kept costs down and made computers accessible. They pushed for multimedia standards when the technology was appropriately matured, and their consumer OSes evolved in maturity as Moore's law progressed. Even then everyone complained about "ever growing" system requirements, especially when the move to XP happened, and then again when Vista came out with its improved security model.
Those fancy slick Sun OS boxes cost a fortune compared to a Windows box of the same time. Sure the Windows box crashed, but as a kid growing up in a working poor family in the 90s I was able to afford Microsoft's imperfect OS, because they had purposefully built an entire ecosystem that was designed to be affordable.
Microsoft pitted every PC OEM against each other in a race to the bottom, until margins approached and then fell below 0 for a new PC.
I've used tons of different systems. Thanks to the efforts of Valve desktop Linux is now usable, but it still has a thousand stupid bugs, many of which I wouldn't have tolerated on Windows 20 years ago. MacOS is very black box-ish and despite daily driving it for 6 or so years now the machine doesn't feel like it is "mine" in the same way a Windows 7 or Windows 2000 machine did. The old 16bit graphic power house machines were sexy but those custom chips don't age well and there was no way they could compete with an open standard like the PC.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Microsoft very much made software that was good enough, but the truth is good enough is also admirable. Good enough is affordable, it is quick to market, it is adaptable, it is usable by the masses in a way that perfect isn't.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
This is certainly false. There are plenty of young people that are incredibly talented. I worked with some of them. And you can probably name some from the open source projects you follow.
I have some level of faith here. Those kids you mention may not be visible online, but they certainly deliver. Honestly, it is not a good example, because that name is well known, but Gerganov came out of the blue for me.. I am not saying we don't lose more to the social media and whatnot.. but they are there.
Young people's brains have always been mush, according to the older generation. Your brain is mush according to those older than you. The term for this is juvenoia, and it's as old as humanity.
Regardless of what old people say for young people, which are after all still developing and not so bright or word-wise, there's also actual turning to mush going on. TV, social media, now AI all contributing to further mush-ying.
There's also some specific measurable "turning to mush" going on, like reduced literacy rates, and lowering of IQs (slowing/reversing of the Flynn effect)
And yet, when they worried about what television would do to a generation of brains, they were right. The Boomers, as a generation, never became wise, and their brains are mushier than ever.
Nah this isn't right. We also have access to a ton of information even regarding arcane things such as writing x86 boot sequence in real mode or writing boot loaders. More now than ever before.
In fact today on GitHub alone you can find hobbyist OSs that are far far more advanced what Linuses little weekend turd ever was originally.
Their success is not gated by technical aspects.
You should go outside of the "web" world. Automotive, medical or heavy industries. You will see that their are plenty of low level developers/engineers our there. Yes even ones born after 2000.
And they get paid squat compared to their brainrotted silly-valley webshit-slinger counterparts. Can we pay these fine folks, as well as people in professions like teaching, more?
I mean... no? I've worked on chips for basically my entire career, and I get paid a more than when I briefly worked in web stuff. Not sure where this idea has come from. My previous startup I worked for just got acquired for 10s of billions of dollars, which is a higher valuation than my friends who have gone through acquisitions in the web-dev / SaaS space
I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff, but there's an entire industry of deep tech software and the payouts are excellent.
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> Linux is still written by a couple of people.
How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).
Most of them work in drivers for devices, not Linux proper.
I've worked with many people born post-2000 who could write an operating system kernel. Hell, I have one brewing righ now. It's not rocket science. The machine language parsed by the chip is described in exquisite detail in any processor manual.
Windows is being deliberately enshittified by rent-seekers.
Rent-seeking and Promo-seeking is the only motivation for the people with the power.
None of that class wants to make a better product, or make life better or easier for the people.