617
Why is everything these days so broken and unstable?(self.sysadmin)
Am I going crazy? Feels like these days every new software, update, hardware or website has some sor...
since 2 months, 4 weeks ago
6 of 6
Tip Reveddit Real-Time can notify you when your content is removed.
your account history
Tip Check if your account has any removed comments.
view my removed comments you are viewing a single comment's thread.
view all comments
Thank CI/CD. There’s no such thing as “finished” so there’s no incentive to assure the quality at any given build stage- why bugfix today and miss your commit quota taking a ton of time to fix a thorny issue when you can put it on the backlog and bugfix later?
It reminds me of the game industry with every game being in “early access” or “beta” for years
"No such thing as finished" is really just a recognition that:
Now you're just talking about Goodhart's Law in action: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Some of my most-impactful days have been making a one-character commit. If it wasn't for mediocre coders, I might have to work for my results.
Respectfully, that’s a sweeping generalization that doesn’t hold true. People aren’t tripping over themselves to innovate on the screwdriver, and they aren’t tripping over themselves to innovate on atomic tools like DNS or NTP.
There is absolutely a class of tools, frequently used in our field, that are “done.” They were constructed to address a clearly specified use case, and they have done that. We can argue about the interfaces to those tools until we’re blue in the face, but if the tool’s algorithm can be expressed as a Boolean tautology, it is done. End of story.
That’s the reason games age gracefully, despite dated graphics- the narrative and the game’s mechanical flows were completed to the point where they don’t need improvement. They’re “done” instead of sitting out in the ether waiting for a patch that may never come.
It's easy to cite changes over time in all of those examples. But I agree that those haven't gotten categorically much bigger or much more complex, if that's what you're saying.
Consider the infrastructure and not just the suprastructure of the game. When a popular game gets open-sourced (or decompiled) and given extensive attention, what kinds of things happen to the source code? Porting to additional platforms, porting to newer APIs like Vulkan, adding new controllers or control schemes, removing third-party libraries. Or just making the code 64-bit clean so the game can be compiled 64-bit, use more than 4.29GiB of memory, and be allowed in the Apple app store.
(Emulation of the original is another nearly-ubiquitous option, with different trade-offs. Emulation is easier and more attractive for some runtime platforms than others, as well.)
Even small, sharp tools deserve to be compiled native 64-bit. That way you don't end up like the 16-bit
SORT.EXEincluded with Windows 95 that wouldn't even attempt to function with a data file larger than 64KiB. Sure, the old 16-bit Unix/BSDsorthad no such limit, but then we're back to the subject of whetherSORT.EXEwas "done".And despite screwdrivers being a solved problem, there a surprising number of companies out there making screwdrivers.