Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry

&quot;In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft&#x27;s new terminal [32].&quot;<p>&quot;In the article Software Disenchantment, author Nikita Prokopov exposes how bad software has become commonplace in our daily lives [35]. From programs that get incredibly bigger and slower with each new version, offering little or nothing more in return, to the fact that they get worse as they are used, to the most complete chaos that is the software development process.<p>For example, when creating an empty (!) project in npm for web development more than 50,000 files are downloaded, taking about 350 MB. This house of cards is so fragile that it gives rise to situations that are, to say the least, embarrassing. In 2016, an npm library called Left-pad, downloaded about 2 million times a month, was removed from the repository by its author, resulting in many web projects around the world crashing, including large corporations, forcing npm to revert the deletion [36]. The library, which contained 10 trivial lines, could be implemented in a few minutes even by programming students.&quot;<p>Some, but not all, developers get defensive when the issue of &quot;bloat&quot; is raised.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34842863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34842863</a>

I feel like the person writing this article has never worked in a professional environment: getting it right is hard, you always have pressure to meet a deadline (for obvious reasons), but if you don&#x27;t have a deadline, you can also end up in analysis&#x2F;development paralysis where you don&#x27;t spend your time on important stuff.<p>A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch: Cyberpunk 2077 is a pretty good open world game (if not the messiah some people got hyped for), Apple Maps is not bad these days (especially in California), the iPhone 4 is now considered pretty revolutionary, hell even Windows Vista was not that bad after all the patches!

This article has stated very clearly and succinctly something that a lot of knowledgeable people have been screaming about for a long time. Excellent work.<p>Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t see a solution to it anytime soon, short of everything just falling apart.

The only sentence I disagree is this one<p>&gt; We are allowing too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of money, not a human project for society.<p>Swap &quot;power&quot; and &quot;money&quot; and I agree.<p>&gt; We are allowing too much MONEY to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of POWER<p>First step, stop giving them your money. 2nd, take away what they&#x27;ve illegally or otherwise ill gotten.

&gt; Apple, known for supposedly delivering sleek products, launched in 2010 the iPhone 4, still under the tutelage of Steve Jobs. Within hours of release, users flooded the internet to complain about dropped connections and abrupt reductions in internet speed. The problem, according to Jobs, was with users holding the iPhone 4 with their left hand [8]. As this was a hardware issue, it was never really solved.<p>They did fix it with later versions of the iPhone 4 and with the iPhone 4S. Also, I remember that they made the &quot;bumper&quot; cases to alleviate the issue with the antenna: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IPhone_4_Bumper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IPhone_4_Bumper</a>

You know what’s bullshit? Articles like these. They all mash together a big list of unrelated and cherry-picked problems and pile on complaints and cynicism.<p>With how long this piece is I honestly feel bad for the author for wasting so much time on the endeavor.<p>What purpose does an article that’s essentially a gigantic list of every recent corporate scandal serve?<p>On top of that, toss in the tech geezer’s “back in my day page load sizes were small and now everything is bloated” take we’ve all heard a thousand times. Like, holy shit please stop my phone has a 100Mpbs+ cellular connection, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage I don’t care that websites are 7MB.<p>There’s nothing actionable about this monstrosity and all it can do is make you upset over a bunch of random shit you can’t control.

The author keeps saying capitalism is at fault but I’d argue the bigger issue is that the world economic system is not capitalist at all. The world economic system is debt based and not capital based. Debt is accumulated as if it were capital instead of saving for future investment. Essentially, the time order is reversed. Instead of sacrificing the present for the future, the future is sacrificed for the present. The entire economic system functions in this manner, and it perverts every signal. It encourages spending now, ROI now, and worry should never happen. Of course, this also means that debts eventually collapse and the system collapse wipes out all but the largest players, concentrating all wealth at the top. This will keep happening as long as the system is debt based.

Counterexample: RaspberryPi. Little tech still has a future (but everything the author says about overhyped Big Tech outfits sounds pretty accurate).<p>Personally I think it comes down to an over-financialized economy. Raising taxes on corporations and individuals while providing loopholes in the form of writeoffs for re-investing profits in R &amp; D and manufacturing facility upgrades etc. is one obvious solution.

&quot;Too big to fail&quot; means everything fails. In my opinion we are on the precipice of civilization collapse. The reason is that people can no longer think logically and the tools they use are increasingly becoming a hinderence.<p>The problem crosses multiple domains, not just &quot;Tech.&quot;<p>Basically we have reach a point as a civilization where failure and ineptitude are increasingly not penalized.

Agree with Article to some extent.<p>To mention what good software without bloatware looks like, go checkout <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nirsoft.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nirsoft.net</a> website. Small size and absolutely wonderfully working tools made by single dev. Its epitome of craftmanship.<p>PS: Also System internals tool made by Mark Russinovich

If &quot;bullshit&quot; means this, then that&#x27;s what you&#x27;d expect from &quot;fake it til you make it.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_Bullshit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_Bullshit</a><p>But I think the author really just means software failures. The truth is that we make software to just barely work, knowing we can fix it later. But apparently the author somehow hasn&#x27;t been exposed to software ever.<p>Further, I think the author is angry and knows something isn&#x27;t right in the world and is railing on the software industry. I think (hope) that&#x27;s misplaced anger, but the author is probably right to be angry about . . . something.

This is an example of confirmation bias. It overlooks all the examples in which technology works and makes improvements to people&#x27;s lives. Things like airline safety and medicine have made big advances.<p>But I think some of the bullshit is superfluous features that do nto do anything or seem redundant. Why is there a warning if you try to turn the volume up too loud on windows? So annoying. Or McAfee being preinstalled and then annoying popups (bloatware). In that sense, I agree with the author.

I find that I generally agree with the sentiment but putting Apple in this list is a little preposterous. Yes Apple Maps was terrible, but with continuous improvements, at the moment it is a good if not the best product. Outside of that, they have had very few bad products that they released (yes including the $1000 stand) in the last decade.

Cathartic venting for some, perhaps, but not a very insightful piece. Rehashes various mostly wrong examples and comes to a predictably lame conclusion about “capitalism”.

I don&#x27;t quite know what the author&#x27;s conclusion is here. Capitalism is bad? Part of the problem in my mind is that consumers don&#x27;t actually punish these behaviors. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is massively profitable even though it was so shitty at launch. The same is true of many of the other examples in the list. So if companies are going to still make tons of money by cutting more and more corners, why wouldn&#x27;t they?

<i>Well, then maybe the problem is that, from an economic point of view, it is unsustainable to make decent software. However, when we analyze the increase in productivity compared to the increase in wages, we see that, for decades, the former has grown at a much faster pace than the latter. Currently, this gap is almost 50%.</i><p>Some of this can be explained by employer sponsored healthcare and other benefits for employees. Also, employees can capture this divergence by investing wages in index funds like the S&amp;P 500. The divergence, which began in the early 80s, also tracks the start of the huge bull market. Profits that would go to employees are instead reflected in rapidly appreciating share prices and dividends. A lot more people today have IRAs compared to 40 years ago, representing significant wealth .

&gt; After the fiasco that was the release of Cyberpunk 2077 — a game estimated to cost more than 300 million dollars, including the performance of actor Keanu Reeves —, many people began to question how far the so-called late stage capitalism can go.<p>Really? Releasing a multi-year software project worked on by many, many people that was buggy but still more or less served its purpose is someone&#x27;s idea of capitalism teetering on the precipice? If we truly believe &quot;bad results for consumers&quot; means capitalism itself is reaching its end stages, an earlier stage of capitalism featured people just brazenly selling pills with tapeworm eggs as a weight loss supplement and no real regulatory apparatus equipped to stop that, so what was that? &quot;Late-stage capitalism&quot; is becoming one of those buzzwords that doesn&#x27;t mean much of anything.

&gt; Capitalism has never put so much money in so few hands as it does nowadays, and it is just getting worse every year. There is less real competition in the market, as companies are buying each other, centralizing power.<p>I assume the author is talking about the US.<p>Genuine question: How does the software industry look in more non-capitalist countries? Is it flourishing without these issues. I bet their equivalent of Apple Maps was perfect on first release!<p>The software industry has issues but I am sure the author has a causal link from capitalism to these issues coming up in a second edition of this post that is thoruoughly researched!<p>(Edit: any snark is accidental!)

Just hilarious to me to lay the blame for &#x27;bad&#x27; software at the feet of capitalism when one of the &#x27;purest&#x27; capitalist countries, the US, is so dominant in this sector worldwide.<p>Of the 100 largest tech companies, 62 are from the US. Next-highest China has 9. [0] Where&#x27;s all the great software developed by non-capitalist economies?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;companiesmarketcap.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;largest-tech-companies-by-market-cap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;companiesmarketcap.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;largest-tech-companies-b...</a>

What’s the point here?<p>Should the industry be perfect?

Of all the things we are bringing back from the past, why does communist propaganda have to be one of them? Why do people, smart people! keep making almost the exactly same mistakes?<p>Modern socialists have clearly studied history, but how are they able to interpret it like this?