This whole presentation has aged like fine wine

This presentation is even more relevant in the advent of vibe coders...

“What if we just let software get really complicated and then make an AI that actually understands it, but having civilization not understand how to make software does not sound good”

This quote at the end is horrifying watching it unfold in realtime.

Meanwhile on r/gamedev, some guy wants to learn about how engines work and everyone told him that he is wasting time and should not even bother do it.

As a student, its scary how much of this applies to me.

This did age like wine.

I read an article a few months ago where Computer Science professors lamented that incoming students often didn't know how to navigate files and directories. Nowadays, people come into computers through smartphones and tablets. While convenient, they offer far less opportunity for tinkering with the hardware or exploring the system. Probably makes it more likely for some kind of capability loss to occur.

As a retired software engineer - Software complexity grows during development until you hit a critical point where nearly everything works, then if you are allowed by management to keep going, it will get simpler and simpler as you refactor based on what you've learned during development until everything actually does work. Unfortunately, management rarely allows you to keep going much past that complexity peak because it's close enough to ship.

"Supply chain issues". Wow, that one turned out to be more prescient than even he could have predicted. Great talk.

I watched this talk on my smart tv and the youtube app just randomly froze, which in a way seems fitting.

Year 2025, everything goes exactly like John said. Software is breaking everywhere, hardware is improving. "AI" is triumph of really bad code running on really fast hardware - producing ridiculous amounts of slop. Also, young developers are losing the ability to code at all

There is one point that I've never been able to swallow and that is putting up with awful software, and by that I mean things that are broken. Chronically.  It is clear that the platform here is Windows, and back in the day when I was programming at the Win32 level, I thought the whole stack I was working on was pretty awful, but there wasn't anything that was really affordable and didn't take a lot of work to get to the productive stage. The era was Windows 2000 and I was dual booting Linux. I had hardware issues and Microsoft does what anybody does who doesn't do error handling. Oooh. Something bad happened. Print all our registers to the output and halt the CPU immediately. - I got the friendly blue screen with meaningless numbers and no clue how I got there. On booting Linux, I had screens full of What Went Wrong, and from the useful information gleaned just before Linux stopped, I knew I had a hardware problem and I sent the motherboard in for repair. During this time I was forced onto Linux back in the painful years. A month later, I was fully on Linux and never went back to Windows. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, I mean, come on, no more rebooting every time you sneeze (and often when you don't). Up-time in years, not hours....Until the same thing started happening in the Linux realm. I swear all those Microsoft employees went to Red Hat and Ubuntu (GTK3 anyone?). Thankfully, I was able to avoid Red Hat until I was forced to by a major corporation that used CentOS all over the place. I had to dig in and learn all about how awful Red Hat had become (I started with the original 5.2 CD release back in the 90s). Systemd, Pulse Audio, Anaconda, Spacewalk, The 8,000 lines of code to glibc to handle an overlapped memcopy so they could fix a problem with Adobe flash (no kidding Linus's comments were priceless). This latter, um, work of art, by yet another Red Hat employee cost us a week of my time and 25x slow down in some of the hardware we were talking to. On another job, I have no control over the software that gets loaded, and periodically Gnome terminal (all of them, not just the one I'm working in) die. Kaput. Gone. Up-to-date CentOS 7.  This is happening everywhere, and I have to hunt hard to find a Linux distro these days that isn't badly broken in some way.  The list goes on and on. I can't imagine what it will be like in 10 years. And he is right - the hardware is making up for terrible, bloated stuff that would grind those old 486s to a screeching halt. Linux used to run just fine with translucent windows on 12M of RAM and a 100M HDD. It was lighting fast compared to dos 6.x on the same machine. Ugh, I wrote a book again.

"Supply chain restrictions?" Boy did this age well. Like fine wine.

I'm learning about how to work in an Agile environment, and now I can say it's part of the problem. The whole idea of sprints, constant change and never being finished is really toxic to writing good software. It's about adding new features as fast as possible without considering the quality of the code, and when things get ugly people just jump ship, and it is up to someone else with no idea about the code to fix it while continue adding more bloat.

Software has DEFINITELY been free riding on hardware. Because memory allocation and garbage collection and resource management are tedious and people don't want to do it, we just use languages that don't require you to think about that stuff. Our databases don't necessarily need to be well designed because we can compute millions of lines in a matter of moments. We've been spoiled with crazy computing power.

This talk resonated with me so deeply. My brother always asks me why macs cant play games or why so-and-so program cant be made, and as I try to explain it, it always does seem unnecessarily complicated. Additionally I think about all of the software that I have in my possession that I cant really use anymore (whether it is games or phones or storage disks, none of them are compatible with anything else so they dont work), and I think about how much knowledge we are constantly losing

hardware tech companies in 2024:
they put AOSP on an arm board, install an android app on it that uses OpenAI, and call it a day

Another parallel is in the shipbuilding industry.  In 2000 Swan Hunter cot a contract to build two Bay class landing ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.
The yard hadn't built a ship in years, so a lot of the knowledge of how to build these ships had been lost. Costs went through the roof, the yard went bust and the second vessel was transferred to BAe systems at Govan for completion.

This talk is significant for me building my worldview, thanks

I worked in a company that used five nines. It was just that the definition of downtime was very fluid.