> I'm saying that when you shipped, in many situations there was no way to patch the bugs.
>>>>>> We had patches that [...] that came through physical media. ***The latter making it harder to patch.***
> And I do believe that it became like that precisely because it's easy to send patches.
Besides that, I just don't believe you can blame the ability to patch over the internet as the reason for shoddy work.
Is Linux full of bugs and shipping half built products? I don't think so.
> There is no stopping it. The quality of software is going down because it's economically viable, and I don't see that changing anytime soon (especially with LLMs).
The bad thing about the future is we need foresight and to work together to avoid pitfalls.
Luckily humans are quite adept at having foresight. I mean here we are talking about likely future problems. But we're also often feeling helpless to address those issues. But this is an observation bias. Look at the Y2K bug, it is a perfect example. The average person brushes it off as if we made too big of a deal about it. But the thing is, it was a big deal. The thing is... we solved it before it created major issues. We also had similar success in big problems like fixing the ozone layer. We've done this countless times. We just have a tendency to focus on problems that are still problems and not look back and use our success as motivation to keep going.
Every big problem can be broken down into many smaller problems that are much more manageable. "They" win by making us believe that the little things don't matter. "They" win because it means we aren't taking the first steps or making progress, killing any momentum. The worst thing that can happen is to make us feel like the problem is too big to be solved. But that's a lie. We've created this mess and frankly I would like to try to fix things before it becomes an even bigger mess. Personally, I'm a big fan of not doing unnecessary and avoidable work.
So the question is are you with me? Are you going to help try to fix this problem? Or are you going to just sit by and let it grow worse? Hoping that it just solves itself or someone else solves it? Frankly, we need as many people in on this as we can. You don't need to do a lot of work. All I ask is that you speak up and question when the teams you work for are trying to push unfinished products. All I ask is that you help encourage others to do quality work, and not let slop just slip by. I'm not asking you to change the world, certainly not over night. I'm asking if you will make just a modest attempt to address the problem in your own sphere of influence.
> Look, we aren't going to go back to a setting where we don't patch software.
And I never said we should. I was just describing the situation.
> Look at the Y2K bug [...] We also had similar success in big problems like fixing the ozone layer
That's an optimistic point of view :-). I would argue that both of those were infinitely easier to solve than, say, the current mass extinction, energy problem and climate change. We've past what, 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries? We've pretty much lost the Amazon, we've pretty much lost coral reefs, we've definitely failed at the 1.5C goal and are now moving forward to failing the 2C goal. With the inertia in that system, once you fail there is no coming back in the next thousand years (unlike the ozone, BTW).
Those are real problems that we are not only not solving: we're making them worse. All of them.
> All I ask is that you speak up and question when the teams you work for are trying to push unfinished products.
Most software is part of the problem. The problem is that we do too much in general. Doing requires energy. The more we do, the more energy we use. The more energy we use, the more we screw up the planet. You want to help? Do less. But at the end of the day, you still need to get paid, right? And for that you need your company to be profitable, right?