- cross-posted to:
- programming@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programming@lemmy.ml
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I’ve not read the article, but if you actually look at old code, it’s pretty awful too. I’ve found bugs in the Bash codebase that are much older than me. If you try using Windows 95 or something, you will cry and weep. Linux used to be so much more painful 20 years ago too; anyone remember “plasma doesn’t crash” proto-memes? So, “BEFORE QUALITY” thing is absolute bullshit.
What is happening today is that more and more people can do stuff with computers, so naturally you get “chaos”, as in a lot of software that does things, perhaps not in the best way possible, but does them nonetheless. You will still have more professional developers doing their things and building great, high-quality software, faster and better than ever before because of all the new tooling and optimizations.
Yes, the average or median quality is perhaps going down, but this is a bit like complaining about the invention of printing press and how people are now printing out low quality barely edited books for cheap. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of that, but it produces a lot of awesome stuff too!
I don’t trust some of the numbers in this article.
Microsoft Teams: 100% CPU usage on 32GB machines
I’m literally sitting here right now on a Teams call (I’ve already contributed what I needed to), looking at my CPU usage, which is staying in the 4.6% to 7.3% CPU range.
Is that still too high? Probably. Have I seen it hit 100% CPU usage? Yes, rarely (but that’s usually a sign of a deeper issue).
Maybe the author is going with worst case scenario. But in that case he should probably qualify the examples more.
I haven’t really checked but CPU usage on Teams while just being a member on a call is low, but using the camera with filters clearly uses more. Just checking CPU temps gives you more or less how much CPU is used by a program. So clearly it is just worst case scenario: using camera with filters on top.
My issue with Teams is that it uses a whole GB of ram on my machine with it just existing. It’s like it loads the entire .NET runtime on the browser or something. IDK if it uses C# on the frontend.
Ram usage today is insane, because there are two types of app on the desktop today: web browsers, and things pretending not to be web browsers.
Unless you’re running out of RAM what’s the issue? Unused ram is wasted ram.
that im running out of ram maybe ?
Running out of ram isn’t a problem in itself. You want your ram to be in use as much as possible ideally, otherwise why do you have it?
By running out I mean you’re getting issues caused by something needing ram and it not being able to get any, not simply all your ram being in use.
IDK if it uses C# on the frontend.
Pretty sure it’s a webview app, so probably all javascript.
Naah bro, teams is trash resource hog. What you are saying is essentially ‘it works on my computer’.
Teams doesn’t use 100% of all CPU’s and 100% of your RAM. It just doesn’t. The article speaks about like 3 people having an issue with teams 2 years ago lol.
Well, it’s also stupid to use RAM size as an indicator of a machines CPU load capability…
Definitely sending off some tech illiterate vibes.
Most software shouldn’t saturate either RAM or CPU on a modern computer.
Yes, Photoshop, compiling large codevases, and video encoding and things like that should make just of an the performance available.
But an app like Teams or Discord should not be hitting limits basically ever (I’ll excuse running a 4k stream, but most screen sharing is actually 720p)
You’re right, they shouldn’t be stressing either resource. Though my point was that referencing how much RAM is in the system is a bit silly when referring to a CPU being pinned at 100%. There is a HUGE swathe of CPUs with an even bigger range of performance that are all sold in 32GB systems.
I’m positive the low end of that scale could be rightfully pinned at 100% for certain common tasks.
“AI just weaponized existing incompetence.”
Daamn. Harsh but hard to argue with.
Weaponized? Probably not. Amplified? ABSOLUTELY!
It’s like taping a knife to a crab. Redundant and clumsy, yet strangely intimidating
Love that video. Although it wasn’t taped on. The crab was full on about to stab a mofo
Yeah, crabby boi fully had stabbin’ on his mind.
nonsense, software has always been crap, we just have more resources
the only significant progress will be made with rust and further formal enhancements
I’m sure someone will use rust to build a bloated reactive declarative dynamic UI framework, that wastes cycles, eats memory, and is inscrutable to debug.
That’s been going on for a lot longer. We’ve replaced systems running on a single computer less powerfull than my phone but that could switch screens in the blink of an eye and update its information several times per second with the new systems running on several servers with all the latest gadgets, but taking ten seconds to switch screens and updates information every second at best. Yeah, those layers of abstraction start adding up over the years.
Non-technical hiring managers are a bane for developers (and probably bad for any company). Just saying.
Don’t give clicks to substack blogs. Fucking Nazi enablers.
Fabricated 4,000 fake user profiles to cover up the deletion
This has got to be a reinforcement learning issue, I had this happen the other day.
I asked Claude to fix some tests, so it fixed the tests by commenting out the failures. I guess that’s a way of fixing them that nobody would ever ask for.
Absolutely moronic. These tools do this regularly. It’s how they pass benchmarks.
Also you can’t ask them why they did something, they have no capacity of introspection, they can’t read their input tokens, they just make up something that sounds plausible for “what were you thinking”.
The model we have at work tries to work around this by including some checks. I assume they get farmed out to specialised models and receive the output of the first stage as input.
Maybe it catches some stuff? It’s better than pretend reasoning but it’s very verbose so the stuff that I’ve experimented with - which should be simple and quick - ends up being more time consuming than it should be.
I’ve been thinking of having a small model like a long context qwen 4b run and do quick code review to check for these issues, then just correct the main model.
It feels like a secondary model that only exists to validate that a task was actually completed could work.
Yeah, it can work, because it’ll trigger the recall of different types of input data. But it’s not magic and if you have a 25% chance of the model you’re using hallucinating, you probably end up still with an 8.5% chance of getting bullshit after doing this.
Also you can’t ask them why they did something, they have no capacity of introspection, (…) they just make up something that sounds plausible for “what were you thinking”.
It’s uncanny how it keeps becoming more human-like.
No. No it doesn’t, ALL human-like behavior stems from its training data … that comes from humans.
i think about this every time i open outlook on my phone and have to wait a full minute for it to load and hopefully not crash, versus how it worked more or less instantly on my phone ten years ago. gajillions of dollars spent on improved hardware and improved network speed and capacity, ans for what? machines that do the same thing in twice the amount of time if you’re lucky
Well obviously it has to ping 20 different servers from 5 different mega corporations!
And verify your identity three times, for good measure, to make sure you’re you and not someone that should be censored.
This seems like a problem with your phone tbh.
It’s really an issue with companies, not software.
If you use corporate crap, that’s on you.
I’ve been working at a small company where I own a lot of the code base.
I got my boss to accept slower initial work that was more systemically designed, and now I can complete projects that would have taken weeks in a few days.
The level of consistency and quality you get by building a proper foundation and doing things right has an insane payoff. And users notice too when they’re using products that work consistently and with low resources.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about my current boss. He keeps talking about some future project that uses a new codebase we’re currently writing, at which point we’ll “clean it up and see what works and what doesn’t.” Meanwhile, he complains about my code and how it’s “too Pythonic,” what with my docstrings, functions for code reuse, and type hints.
So I secretly maintain a second codebase with better documentation and optimization.
How can your code be too pythonic?
Also type hints are the shit. Nothing better than hitting shift tab and getting completions and documentation.
Even if you’re planning to migrate to a hypothetical new code base, getting a bunch of documented modules for free is a huge time saver.
Also migrations fucking suck, you’re an idiot if you think that will solve your problems.
(I write only internal tools and I’m a team of one. We have a whole department of people working on public and customer focused stuff.)
My boss let me spend three months with absolutely no changes to functionality or UI, just to build a better, more configurable back end with a brand new config UI, partly due to necessity (a server constraint changed), otherwise I don’t think it would have ever got off the ground as a project. No changes to master for three months, which was absolutely unheard of.
At times it was a bit demoralising to do so much work for so long with nothing to show for it, but I knew the new back end would bring useful extras and faster, robust changes.
The backend config ui is still in its infancy, but my boss is sooo pleased with its effect. He is used to a turnaround for simple changes of between 1 and 10 days for the last few years (the lifetime of the project), but now he’s getting used to a reply saying I’ve pushed to live between 1 and 10 minutes.
Brand new features still take time, but now that we really understand what it needs to do after the first few years, it was enormously helpful to structure the whole thing to be much more organised around real world demands and make it considerably more automatic.
Feels food. Feels really good.
That’s awesome. Your manager had some rare foresight in that case.
He’s a great boss. He really is.
I had goodwill stored up because like me, he uses the tool to several times a day, he really likes it because it makes some tasks far easier (v0.1) and I added loads of extras over the years, and it was me that dreamed it up in the first place.
The new server constraint affected me on the daily but wasn’t going to affect him at all for most of those three months, and even then, not often and there was a workaround for his usage, but he trusted me and he wants my end to be as convenient as his is (very fair minded guy indeed).
I would go a long long way for him. I went to his wedding in 2023 and we sometimes have drinks after work. He knows how it is, has been there, done that and got the T shirt and isn’t afraid to tell truth to power:
You know you like to have X? We’re gonna need Y…
Remember the prioritisation of Y you were going to do?..
Yeah, so no, sorry, we don’t quite have X, partly because of this and that mistake we made, but also we weren’t able to get very close to X because we never got Y.
Genuinely, cue recommitment of senior management to Y in the next quarter! It might not happen, but no shouting, no blaming, and rationality all round.
I don’t think they like it at all when he says stuff like that, but they love that the crises pretty much dwindled out when they put him in charge and as he gradually recruited more people who put more effort into making things better than shouting and blaming, and as the shouters and blamers left to find employment elsewhere where shouting and blaming was effective. It simply does not work on my boss even a little bit, and he simply never does it. Customers now praise his department instead of complain about it, so he gets a lot of leeway from management to do things his way.
Brilliant. It’s so valuable to have a manager that actually treats you like a professional in these situations. Sounds like a diamond in the rough alright.
Some agency when working goes a long way to fostering a really good working relationship. I’m still a lot earlier in my career, so generally in my first non-internship role I was expecting to be given little bits of work like change this button, widen this form, that kind of stuff.
Turns out I’d joined one of those “sink or swim” smaller companies where you have to wear a lot of hats. Initially I thought quite negatively about it but once I started to gain some confidence I realised he was giving me the time and space to properly learn stuff and develop it until it was “good”. He, thankfully, still shoots down my sillier ideas but if I have a good one he throws his full support behind me.
Currently he was like, I need you to investigate how to set up automated fraud prevention checks and flag, let’s say things, for clients to investigate further, and he sent me off for a week to analyse the problem, speak to everyone involved and gather a list of data points and how to calculate them. Then he gave me the time to design the system, including the mental room to develop our first shared lib after .net framework.
Really I’m rambling a bit, but my point is, you can get a lot of good work out of people if you invest in them and allow them some agency. Maybe some can’t work well without constant pressure, but I think a lot of people thrive when supported and enabled correctly by management.
Yeah. Some people love to micro manage and play power games, but it’s so refreshing to work for someone who has the confidence to just concentrate on doing a great job.
I think a substantial part of the problem is the employee turnover rates in the industry. It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises). This leads to a situation where, consciously or subconsciously, noone really gives a shit about the product. Everyone does their job (and only their job, not a hint of anything extra), but they’re not going to take on major long term projects, because they’re already one foot out the door, looking for the next job. Shitty middle management of course drastically exacerbates the issue.
I think that’s why there’s a lot of open source software that’s better than the corporate stuff. Half the time it’s just one person working on it, but they actually give a shit.
True, but this is a reaction to companies discarding their employees at the drop of a hat, and only for “increasing YoY profit”.
It is a defense mechanism that has now become cultural in a huge amount of countries.
Definitely part of it. The other part is soooo many companies hire shit idiots out of college. Sure, they have a degree, but they’ve barely understood the concept of deep logic for four years in many cases, and virtually zero experience with ANY major framework or library.
Then, dumb management puts them on tasks they’re not qualified for, add on that Agile development means “don’t solve any problem you don’t have to” for some fools, and… the result is the entire industry becomes full of functionally idiots.
It’s the same problem with late-stage capitalism… Executives focus on money over longevity and the economy becomes way more tumultuous. The industry focuses way too hard on “move fast and break things” than making quality, and … here we are, discussing how the industry has become shit.
That’s “disrupting the industry” or “revolutionizing the way we do things” these days. The “move fast and break things” slogan has too much of a stink to it now.
Probably because all the dummies are finally realizing it’s a fucking stupid slogan that’s constantly being misinterpreted from what it’s supposed to mean. lol (as if the dummies even realize it has a more logical interpretation…)
Now if only they would complete the maturation process and realize all of the tech bro bullshit runs counter to good engineering or business…
My hot take : lots of projects would benefit from a traditional project management cycle instead of trying to force Agile on every projects.
Agile SHOULD have a lot of the things ‘traditional’ management looks for! Though so many, including many college teachers I’ve heard, think of it way too strictly.
It’s just the time scale shrinks as necessary for specific deliverable goals instead of the whole product… instead of having a design for the whole thing from top to bottom, you start with a good overview and implement general arch to service what load you’ll need. Then you break down the tasks, and solve the problems more and more and yadda yadda…
IMO, the people that think Agile Development means only implement the bare minimum … are part of the complete fucking idiot portion of the industry.
Funny how agile seems to mean different things to different people.
Agile was the cool new thing years back and has been abused and misused and now, pretty much every dev company force it on their team but do whatever the fuck they want.
Agile should have a lot of traditional project management but doesn’t because it became the MBA wet dream of metrics. And when metrics become the target, people will do whatever they need to do to meet the metrics instead of actually progressing the project.
Yep! Funny how so many good ideas get ruined by the people that think they deserve the biggest pay checks…
Shit idiots with enthusiasm could be trained, mentored, molded into assets for the company, by the company.
Ala an apprenticeship structure or something similar, like how you need X years before you’re a journeyman at many hands on trades.
But uh, nope, C suite could order something like that be implemented at any time.
They don’t though.
Because that would make next quarter projections not look as good.
And because that would require actual leadership.
This used to be how things largely worked in the software industry.
But, as with many other industries, now finance runs everything, and they’re trapped in a system of their own making… but its not really trapped, because… they’ll still get a golden parachute no matter what happens, everyone else suffers, so that’s fine.
Exactly. I don’t know why I’m being downvoted for describing the thing we all agree happens…
I don’t blame the students for not being seasoned professionals. I clearly blame the executives that constantly replace seasoned engineers with fresh hires they don’t have to pay as much.
Then everyone surprise pikachu faces when crap is the result… Functionally idiots is absolutely correct for the reality we’re all staring at. I am directly part of this industry, so this is more meant as honest retrospective than baseless namecalling. What happens these days is idiotry.
Yep, literal, functional idiots, as in, they keep doing easily provably as stupid things, mainly because they are too stubborn to admit they could be wrong about anything.
I used to be part of this industry, and I bailed, because the ratio of higher ups that I encountered anywhere, who were competent at their jobs vs arrogant lying assholes was about 1:9.
Corpo tech culture is fucked.
Makes me wanna chip in a little with a Johnny Silverhand solo.
Fuck man, why don’t more ethical-ish devs join to make stuff? What’s the missing link on top of easy sharing like FOSS kinda’ already has?
Obviously programming is a bit niche, but fuck… how can ethical programmers come together to survive under capitalism? Sure, profit sharing and coops aren’t bad, but something of a cultural nexus is missing in this space it feels…
Well, I’m not quite sure how to … intentionally create a cultural nexus … but I would say that having something like lemmy, piefed, the fediverse, is at least a good start.
Socializing, discussion, via a non corpo platform.
Beyond that, uh, maybe something more lile an actual syndicalist collective, or at least a union?
Yeah, a union would be great, although I feel like that would be something that would have to come quite a ways down the road of ethical devs coming together. After all, not even the FOSS community agrees on what is ethical to give away and to whom.
Maybe a union is still the right term for the abstract ‘coming together’ I’m thinking of, since it’s hard to imagine how they could go from a generic collective to a body that could actually make effective demands, but perhaps it’s roughly the same process as getting a job-wide union off the ground.
I’m glad that they added CloudStrike into that article, because it adds a whole extra level of incompetency in the software field. CS as a whole should have never happens in the first place if Microsoft properly enforced their stance they claim they had regarding driver security and the kernel.
The entire reason CS was able to create that systematic failure was because they were(still are?) abusing the system MS has in place to be able to sign kernel level drivers. The process dodges MS review for the driver by using a standalone driver that then live patches instead of requiring every update to be reviewed and certified. This type of system allowed for a live update that directly modified the kernel via the already certified driver. Remote injection of un-certified code should never have been allowed to be injected into a secure location in the first place. It was a failure on every level for both MS and CS.
Accurate but ironically written by chatgpt
And you can’t even zoom into the images on mobile. Maybe it’s harder than they think if they can’t even pick their blogging site without bugs
Is it? I didn’t get that sense. What causes you to think it’s written by chatGPT? (I ask because whilst I’m often good at discerning AI content, there are plenty of times that I don’t notice it until someone points out things that they notice that I didn’t initially)
Not x. Not y. Z.
It wasn’t that --em dash–it’s this.
It loves grouping of 3s
Those are just the ones I noticed immediately again when skimming it, there was a lot more I noticed when I originally read it. I read it aloud to my wife while cooking the first time and we were both laughing about how obviously chatjipity it was lol.
Anyone else remember a few years ago when companies got rid of all their QA people because something something functional testing? Yeah.
The uncontrolled growth in abstractions is also very real and very damaging, and now that companies are addicted to the pace of feature delivery this whole slipshod situation has made normal they can’t give it up.
That was M$, not an industry thing.
It was not just MS. There were those who followed that lead and announced that it was an industry thing.
I must have missed that one
