DevGAMM
14 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2020–2025
1:02:42 · 316K views · Jul 10, 2019
A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating. He discusses how knowledge fails to transfer between generations.
It is the standard link in HN threads about software decay, lost knowledge and fragile technological civilization.
20 comments from Hacker News
"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" by Jonathan Blow comes to mind - this video A fantastic talk.
"optimal amount of fraud in society is 0" - are you sure? why? Bad Things(tm) are useful for testing and improving safety/security, and when I see people/institutions with no experience reacting to Bad Things(tm), I know they're in for a world of hurt when it does happen. Perhaps you mean, the optimal amount of fraud that isn't prosecuted... or not detected... ? Even then, I'd argue that there's a tiny percentage that's useful for keeping the safety/security industry on its toes and at the ready. As a proof point, if you believe that war (world peace) is not a solved problem, then it's only a matter of time before your city/region/civilization/race faces an existential threat, for which the only true preparation is to be ready to innovate and mobilize. Sorry if this comes across as dark. I mean it in the same vein as having a small percentage of farmers is desirable. By contrast, I visited a traditional silk factory in Stockholm (amazing btw) and the craft has been lost to the point where they're struggling to find craftspeople able to work their looms and other old equipment. See Jonathan Blow's excellent talk about lost technology: this video
Excuse me for not having much to add to the discussion but two interesting references for people to check out, if so inclined of course: a) Ginger Bill (the Odin language creator, no affiliation) stated on a podcast that Odin will never have an official pkg manager, since what they're, in his opinion, mainly automating is dependency hell, and this being one of the main reasons for rising software complexity and lower software quality; see [LINK] (timestamped to the correct position) (they mention Rust explicitly as an example) b) another programmer rather seriously worried about software quality/complexity is Jonathan Blow, who's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" is worth watching in my opinion: this video (it's not talking about package managers specifically, but is on topic regarding software complexity/quality as a whole) Addendum: And sorry, I feel like almost everyone knows this xkcd by now, but since no one so far seems to have posted it; "obligatory xkcd reference": [LINK]
this video I think Jonathan Blow made a decent argument that we're in a decadent age of software. In a decadent age, the civilization still does and can do the thing, but has started to lose a grip on the fundamentals, so it's on the way out. A decadent age is a kind of end, doesn't necessarily feel like the end, it kind of feels like a stagnant bumbling. How many programmers do you know that can write assembly code? How many layers of abstraction between a web app and the silicon? Processor, OS, probably a byte-code VM, probably a framework... leaking a little bit all of the way. He makes a good point--where's the evidence that we can write good software? It seems possible , but it doesn't appear, so really, the feeling that maybe we could is just a feeling, not evidence.
I'm not even expecting technology to get better anymore, I just wish the quality of software wasn't constantly decreasing. I've turned off automatic updates for most of them, e.g. MacOS, Android Apps, Firefox. Just can't stand the constant messing up of UIs that may have worked or were at least not as bad as the next version with more bloated features. Beautiful talk on that topic by Jonathan Blow, called "Preventing the collapse of civilization": this video