Quantifying software complexity is still largely an open problem. There are approaches that focus on quantifying but are arguably of limited use due to their disconnect with mental models, and there are approaches that focus on evaluating mental models but can't be objectively quantified. The best output from the latter group is that they can serve as guidelines on how to make simple software systems,and how to keep them simple.
> I don't feel we are getting results that are thousands of times better today.
You are getting results that are way better than thousands of times. You just aren't aware where they are showing up.
To give you a glimpse, the same modelling problems which a couple of decades ago tool days to come up with a crude solution are now being executed within a loop in optimization problems.
You are also seeing multiphysics and coupling problems showing up in mundane applications. We're talking about problems that augment the same modelling problems that a couple of decades ago tool days to solve with double or triple the degrees of freedom.
Without the availability of these supercomputers the size of credit cards, the whole field of computer-aided engineering would not exist.
Also, to boot, there are indeed diminished returns. Increasing computational resources unblocks constraints such as being able to use doubles instead of floats. This means that lowering numerical errors in 3 or 4 decimal places comes for free at the expense of taking around 4 times longer to solve the same problem.
To top things off, do you think the results of two decades ago were possible without employing a great deal of simplifications and crude approximations? As legend has it, the F117 Nighthawk got it's design due to the computational limits of the time. Since then, stealth planes became more performant and with a smoother design. That's what you get when your computational resources are a thousands times better.
> Incidents like this repeatedly happening reveal that’s mostly a myth. They aren’t much smarter, their standards are somewhat wishful thinking, their accomplishments are mostly rooted in the problems they needed to solve just like any other company.
I think you're only seeing what you want to see, because somehow bringing FANG engineers down a peg makes you feel better?
A broken deployment due to a once-in-a-lifetime configuration change in a project that wasn't allocated engineering effort to allow more robust and resilient deployment modes doesn't turn any engineer into an incompetent fool. Sometimes you need to flip a switch, and you can't spare a team working one year to refactor the whole thing.
If anyone needs to flip a global switch, and can't convince their leadership to allocate the resources to do it safely, engineering culture is dead, at least locally to that system.
But I'm not convinced lack of headcount was the problem here, the incident report makes it sound like there's an established pattern for feature flagging even for global changes like this.
Putting aside the fact that this team seems unperturbed by global deployments and all the other scary things, high impact changes should use every mechanism available to shrink fault containers. It would be inexcusable to roll this change out without tha feature flag mechanism if this were a regional roll out.
Skipping the feature flag when this is global is simply incomprehensible. It goes beyond headcount, it should never have been considered in the first place.
> Sometimes you need to flip a switch, and you can't spare a team working one year to refactor the whole thing.
This seems to imply that the person in charge at G was right to cause this outage... and that Google is very short-staffed and too poor to afford to do proper engineering work?
Somehow that doesn't inspire confidence in their engineering prowess. Sure seems to me that bad engineering leadership decisions is equivalent to bad engineering.
> I used to think the same way. But life taught me that responsibility is a fairy tale only for the bottom 90% — a story told to keep them obedient, hardworking, and self-blaming.
I think you're missing the big picture. You're focusing on your conspiracy theory that the hypothetical 10% are the only ones valuing responsibility as a manipulation tactic. However, what do you do when anyone, being it a team member or a supermarket or an online retailer or a cafe employee fails to meet your bar of responsibility? Do you double down on their services, or do you adapt so that their failure no longer affects your day?
You've put together this conspiracy that only higher ups value responsibility, and only as a crowd control strategy. If you take a step back and look at your scenario, you'll notice that it is based on how you are in a position where you are accountable to them. Is that supposed to mean that middle management is not accountable for anything at all? Is no mom and pop shop accountable for anything? Why is Elon Musk crying crocodile tears over how unfair the world is and for having been kicked out of DOGE and the world stopping buying Tesla cars?
Richard Field (Lehman Brothers) walked away with 500-1000 Million USD after causing the worldwide financial crisis.
Trump bankrupted multiple corporations, impacting the lives of thousands of workers and their families. He is president now.
RFK Junior's budget cuts stopped important work on HIV and cancer research, delaying finding a cure or better treatment, which will cause pain and suffering for millions of people. He just sacked the entire vaccine committee. He still is secretary of health.
I would go on, but my stomach ulcer is already flaming up again.
The only people who face the consequences of their actions are you and me. The wealthy shit on your morals of taking responsibility. That's not a conspiracy theory.
> gatekeeping on distribution is unbelievable. getting something to financially work requires marketing and "white passs from gatekeepers" expenditures which eat away any margins you may have
That is one way of putting it.
Another way to put it is that app stores are so saturated with N versions of the same God damned app doing exactly the same God damned thing that even when they start to charge a gatekeeping fee you still get marker saturation.
> I think you'll have a lot more independent software devs. I think that's good, corporations were surprisingly bad at developing software.
Will you, though? I mean, working on software for a living means having someone paying you to do something. If a corporation with an established business and reliable revenue can't justify paying you for your work, who do you expect to come in and cover your rent?
I don't know if you've worked for an "established" corporation developing software before but most of what they pay you for is dealing with internal (arguably mostly social) stuff. Some minority is actual useful software development work.
> (...) but most of what they pay you for is dealing with internal (arguably mostly social) stuff.
Not really. They pay you to deliver something, but you also need to coordinate and interact with people. That involves coordinating and syncing.
There is absolutely no position or role whatsoever, either in a big corporation or small freelancer gig, that you do not need to coordinate and interact with people.
Pray tell, how do you expect to be paid while neither delivering results nor coordinating with anyone else?
> (...) at this point, should tell us that we are really quite dumb and simply not good very good at either using or evaluating the technology (yet?).
I don't know about that. I think it's mainly because nowadays LLMs can output very inconsistent results. In some applications they can generate surprisingly good code, but during the same session they can also do missteps and shit the bed while following a prompt to small changes. For example, sometimes I still get prompt responses that outright delete critical code. I'm talking about things like asking "extract this section of your helper method into a new methid" and in response the LLM deletes the app's main function. This doesn't happen all the time, or even in the same session for the same command. How does one verify these things?
Not OP, but a couple of days ago I managed to vibecode my way through a small app that pulled data from a few services and did a few validation checks. By itself its not very impressive, but my input was literally "this is how the responses from endpoint A,B and C look like. This field included somewhere in A must be somewhere in the response from B, and the response from C must feature this and that from response A and B. If the responses include links, check that they exist". To my surprise, it generated everything in one go. No retry nor Agent mode churn needed. In the not so distant past this would require progressing through smaller steps, and I had to fill in tests to nudge Agent mode to not mess up. Not today.
Do you mind me asking which language and if you have any esoteric constraints in the apps you build? We use a java in a monorepo, and have a full custom rolled framework on top of which we build our apps. Do you find vibe coding works ok with those sort of constraints, or do you just end up with a generic app?
> Trump would not have won if Dems had not escalated illegal immigration 2020-24.
Do you actually have any source to support your claim? I mean, MAGA nuts have been swearing for over a decade that there was a torrent of illegal immigrants arriving each day into the country, and that somehow democrats were to blame, but even after Trump's fascist push with it's forced deportations of everyone including US citizens without due process the numbers barely reached 100k. And now we're seeing Trump's ICE thugs mobilizing a small army of agents to assault Home Depot parking lots?
The Congressional Budget Office estimated [1] about 10.4m immigrants during 2020-2024, more than 3 times more than under Trump's first term, and of which most was illegal immigration.
The numbers cited by Republican scaremongers like Stephen Miller were probably inflated and derived from CBP border encounters, rather than on how many people were entering the country. But there does seem to have been a significant surge, partly thanks to new immigration programs that made it easier to entering the country while seeking asylum. Deportations seems to have remained high under Biden.
> If illegal immigration is such a problem, why not fine businesses 5x salary for using the labor, for as long as it was used?
The Nazis leveraged hatred towards minorities as a wedge to force their totalitarian control over Germany's state and society. They built up a ficticious enemy within, they inflamed society against that enemy, and proceeded to promise they would eliminate that enemy if the were granted total control over everyone and everything.
It's no coincidence that Trump is targeting California to fabricate a crisis and rapidly escalate the issue he created himself, specially how he forced the unjustified and illegal deployment of national guard and the armed forces. The goal is clearly not illegal aliens standing next to Home Depots. The goal is to force a scenario where loyalists in the armed forces target any opposition. It's no coincidence Trump has been threatening the governor of California with prison for the crime of "running for elections" at the time he's announcing deploying armed forces in California without authorization or legal standing and against the will of the governor of California.
They blamed them for pre-existing social problems. I feel the important context was that the government had to be significantly dysfunctional for the Nazi party to even exist.
I know that CECOT is not nearly as bad as concentration camps, but at the same time it's not like Trump refrains from sending people off to camps, based on loose accusations.
What I'm trying to say, or I guess repeat after you, is that fascism doesn't have to be Hitlerian to be fascism. Or in other words, at this point it's too late anyways.
We absolutely should start comparing and measuring now, because at the point where the comparisons match 100%, too much damage will have been done.
If I was religious I'd probably pray for the US, as I'm not I'm just shaking my head in astonishment.
Trump isn't sending his political opponents to camps (yet), is my point. If you're a citizen currently in US, you can, to paraphrase the old Soviet joke, stand next to the White House and shout "Trump is an asshole", and you won't find yourself on a deportation flight tomorrow. OTOH Nazis started creating concentration camps specifically for communists and dissident journalists less than a month after their electoral victory.
I think that focusing on broad comparisons is not the best idea precisely because it's way too easy to deconstruct, and "X is literally Hitler" is such an overused political trope that most people stop listening right away regardless of how much truth there is to it. It's better to focus on the specific negative actions.
> The Nazis had strong support. But Hitler was appointed.
Well, yeah, PM’s (and the Chancellor in the German system at the time, and now, is a PM) are almost invariably appointed by the head of state after either a general election—or sometimes between them if an incumbent resigns or a vacancy occurs by other means—as the leader of the majority party (if any), the leader of the majority coalition (if there's no majority party but there is a majority coalition), or sometimes (and whether this is allowed and whether it makes a sooner next election than would otherwise be required varies) some minority party leader based on some combination of size of minority, support and opposition from other parties, and discretion of the head of state.
And, yes, Hitler was first appointed as the last and weakest kind, but that's still effectively winning the tiebreaker set out for an ambiguous electoral result, since it could only happen because no other party or coalition could form a legislative majority.
> They blamed them for pre-existing social problems.
Is immigration a new hot topic in the US?
I mean, a few years ago the US government started wasting money building a wall on the US-Mexico border whose only purpose was propaganda and dog whistling.
And is it really necessary to point out the obvious parallels between the Nazi's "vital state" propaganda and Trump's "Canada as 51st state" and "Greenland is ours" rhetoric?
If they talk like Nazis and they goose-step like Nazis, what are they? I would ask if you'd start being concerned when they started rounding up random people off the streets, but apparently that's still not enough.
reply