Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

Software has definitely gotten worse, and tbh it will only keep getting worse. I really like this talk by [the possibly notorious] Jonathan Blow on the software industry and software in general decomposing [1]. [1] ▶ this video

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After reading this I can't help but think of a talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" given by Jonathan Blow (the game dev) about progress and how it's not always increasing like we tend to think. Super interesting if you have the time for it: ▶ this video

in “1.5-Inch Hand-Carved Agate from 1500 B.C. Shows Sub-Millimeter Details (2017)” · View on HN

▶ 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.

in “Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?” · View on HN

I am reminded of the excellent "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" talk by Jonathan Blow: ▶ this video

in “What's the problem with old but excellent Mac apps?” · View on HN

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

in “Disillusioned by Tech in 2022” · View on HN

Anyone who finds this concept interesting to think about and hasn't seen this video may enjoy it: ▶ this video See also Foundation by Asimov.

in “Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again” · View on HN

Tangentially reminds me of this video by Jonathan Blow [0], "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization". The eye-opening moment, for me, was the importance (and neglect) of the inter-generational transfer of knowledge in maintaining technological complexity. [0] ▶ this video

in “The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber” · View on HN

> quality will deteriorate over time Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"[1] makes a good argument that software quality has already suffered significant deterioration. We've just gotten used to software not working. Reboot the computer; refresh the webpage; spend the morning trying to work around the "improvements", regressions, and removed features in the software that forced an update. [1] ▶ this video

in “Let's Make the Web Weird Again [audio]” · View on HN

I have had a really frustrating relationship with software maintenance in all of the companies I've worked for. I've always been a strong, strong believer in an analogy like: How much time would you estimate that nuclear engineers spend operating and maintaining existing reactors, versus building new ones? How about public highway departments and building new roads, versus fixing or improving existing ones? No analogy is ever perfect, but the only logical conclusion I can reach is that software engineering is a really weird discipline relative to practically all of its "we build things that last years" peers. Its weird because, well, our organizations in my experience chronically under-invest in maintenance then act flustered when new developments don't meet deadlines or take forever; but its also weird because all of my experience screams at me "I'm not even sure if we know how to maintain systems well". I've seen this in one org (a public company you'd recognize); where years ago we had and met lofty goals like "99.999% availability"; today its a good month if we hit three-nines, API wide. In team meetings with really senior, smart engineers when we ask How Can We Improve This, you start observing this learned helplessness where they suggest small changes like, you know, adding a cache for some external API, or replacing the built-in HTTP client with some other one that has a more comprehensive knob for timeouts, or whatever. I talk with them privately and say: Is this real

in “There Is No Software Maintenance” · View on HN

They should/can, but not at the expense of understanding how the underlying system works. Right now, the major players significantly abstract away from "how the web works" which means newer developers don't understand and are being led into a trap. Cute marketing terms like "serverless" confuse developers into thinking there is no server (or even worse, that there's such a thing as a "serverless developer"). I'm working on this problem right now: [link] . I know I sound like a curmudgeon when I say this stuff but it's a serious problem that will have dire consequences later (see: ▶ this video ).

in “Netlify raises $105M and acquires OneGraph” · View on HN

> like Plan-crashes technically it's always human error That's a $1M fine for misspelling "Plane". ;) Also, it's definitely the software. There's a wonderful talk by Alan Kay regarding this, but I cannot find it. It might be referenced in Jon Blow's talk: - ▶ this video

in “Nearly 200K Medical Records of US Military Veterans Leaked” · View on HN

It was just a few days ago when I mentioned how often I see the dragon book held up as a punching bag. It seems that at some point the book, along with K&R, have become the target for unsubstantiated criticism. I've pressed for details, and I've seen others do the same, but it never ends in anything concrete—just an implicit appeal to the new conventional wisdom that they do more harm than good. Reminds me of how "truth" gets synthesized on Reddit. Here's a counterexample: Russ Cox has a series on regular expressions, beginning with Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast < [link] >. In the last several years, it has become very well-received. In it, he lays out the case for Thompson NFAs, and also laments in some places about how the approach is not more widely known, having become a sort of lost knowledge. (See also Jonathan Blow's < ▶ this video >.) For all the criticism of the dragon book, though, you'd think that would mean enough people have read it that someone would have pointed out that Thompson is cited in Chapter 3, where his approach is described in some detail. I think that what's actually going on is that, like The Art Of Computer Programming, the dragon book is widely referenced and rarely read. Now, enter the 21st century meme factory. Having said that, the most recent comment I saw that was being casually dismissive of the dragon book—ironically for its "second-rate methods" that have "held back" compiler development—did motivate me into digging the boo

in “Turing Award goes to Aho and Ullman” · View on HN

This. So much code so many frameworks so much wow, to do so little. And we a little closer to collapse of civilization. [0] There is not enough Jonathan Blow's for all JavaScript bloatware unmaintained unusable in a few years tools. [1] [0] ▶ this video [1] [link] `I think we're now in a situation where everybody in the world is flooded by low-quality software, and everybody wishes that they had higher quality software, at least people who make software I think. We're making a game, games have a lot of things they want to do, a lot of those things are potentially stuff that a library could do of some kind, and so, let's go out, whether it's maybe to do some constructive solid geometry or text layout or something. There's a lot of different little sub-jobs. If I go on the internet, what is the state of the art of what people out there are doing for this task? Very often I will find a number of things that claim to do the job. Some of them actually do it to an okay level and some don't, and a lot of them don't really work for high-stress situations, and a lot of them don't even like frickin compile anywhere. Just the amount of swimming through a sewer that I have to do to even figure out, "What is the thing that I can seriously consider to maybe do this job versus writing it myself?" That is a huge investment, time and energy investment`

in “Ytmdl-web – download music from YouTube with metadata” · View on HN

There is a talk by Jonathan Blow about this topic: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc) ▶ this video

in “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan” · View on HN