Decline in Software?
I wrote this up as a youtube comment and then figured I’d post it here.
talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
summary:
Jonathan Blow discusses the trajectory of technological advancement and decline, particularly in software, by drawing parallels from historical events such as the U.S.-Soviet space race. He highlights that significant advancements, like sending humans to the moon, can be lost over time due to the complexity of systems and a lack of knowledge transfer across generations. Blow argues that contemporary software is experiencing a decline in robustness and productivity due to increasing complexity and reliance on higher-level abstractions that obscure foundational knowledge. He stresses the importance of simplifying systems at all levels—from hardware to software—to avoid potential societal collapse reminiscent of ancient civilizations. The talk serves as a call to re-evaluate our current trajectory in software development to ensure sustainable technological progress and knowledge preservation. (from TL;DW https://tldw.tube/?v=ZSRHeXYDLko)
Hard disagree. This is rose-tinted to the extreme.
I’ve had my computer on and running (MacOS + homelab Ubuntu) for months straight.
That simply was not possible in 2005. Does anyone remember getting BSOD? when was the last time that happened? What about on the web, anyone remember flash? One tab crashing and taking down the whole browser, possibly the whole OS? Today we can do GPU rendering in the browser! I have 225 tabs open right now on my machine and… it’s fine, my PC wakes up from hibernation (!) and I can click on a tab from months ago and scroll up and down the page.
And like, it’s kind of funny to bring up Elon. The flight computer of those rockets, the ones that land themselves, balancing on one end while computing the slosh of the fuel in their tanks – that is Linux with PREEMPT_RT. Very far away from bare metal machine code!
Sure, Ken Thompson wrote Unix in 3 weeks. Likewise, any good computer science graduate (we’re comparing to ken here) would be able to write a basic kernel for an embedded target. Many do, for their final project.
Finally, the hardware. Software is a huge part of the hardware story today. Today, we can simulate the electrical behavior of an entire IC, billions of transistors, before ever putting a mask to silicon. Is it written in assembly, or even C?
So yeah. I do get the sentiment, especially when we’re talking about your average frontend web slop. But no, look around. Magnificent, beautiful, robust software is absolutely everywhere.