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   Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 04:17:06 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

   • Thomas 🔭🕹️
   @thomasfuchs Well… it depends on the software, some can be equivalent to shelf-stable because it doesn't needs changes, or because it's environment doesn't changes (very rare, typically it's just at a ~10 years scale).
   
   But meanwhile you have horrible ecosystems where programs sometimes needs constant churn. (Python and JS frameworks comes to mind, JS itself meanwhile is pretty stable, meaning JS frameworks can create more pain than they're supposed to solve)
   
   And there's also that software can sometimes breaks for very stupid reasons, like a version number being 2 digits instead of one and suddenly it's parsed/sorted as if it were a completely different version.
   • Embed this notice
     ian (finitebaffle@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 05:21:05 JST ian

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs this is so wrong Thomas 🙄

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Kohne (mhkohne@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 05:22:03 JST Michael Kohne

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs Yea, but the rest of the environment is swirling around like a freaking blender and tends to break things behind your back. You are correct, but in the real world the effect is as if software rots.

   • Embed this notice
     Peter Bindels (dascandy@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 05:29:45 JST Peter Bindels

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs You're right, but you have the unpopular opinion.

     Software doesn't need to "go bad" if it's been designed to be well-working. Even without updates in years.

   • Embed this notice
     ian (finitebaffle@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 05:35:34 JST ian

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs Show me an app built more than a few years ago that still launches.

     Scriptaulous helped me move from compiled native apps and launch my 20y webdev career (thanks btw ❤️) and those apps were solid as a rock for years.

     But I doubt if I spun up the exact same LAMP stack now there’d be a quagmire of deprecations to wade through.

     Ok ok, the software’s fine, I concede your point. But the environment is hostile.

   • Embed this notice
     ian (finitebaffle@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 05:37:27 JST ian

     • Michael Kohne
     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs @mhkohne the browser yeah, but the back end?

   • Embed this notice
     @usuario@instancia.org (usuario@instancia.org)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 05:59:16 JST @usuario@instancia.org

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs I think happens because data _can_ go bad like milk, if touched in unexpected ways by buggy software.

   • Embed this notice
     Harshad Sharma (hiway@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:06:10 JST Harshad Sharma

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs I'll be here in a corner chuckling; a user who has been trained by developers to not trust "security updates" because they often disable half the features and charge twice for what's left, with popups for invasive surveillance that only have "not now" as an option. The whole industry has been an insult to sense long before "AI" showed up.

   • Embed this notice
     Nazo (nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:09:15 JST Nazo

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️
     • Svavar the Neurospicy

     @svavar @thomasfuchs Firstly, to be clear, the OP isn't saying "no updates ever!" The point here is slower development and update cycles where more testing is done and more focus on stability. Less "move fast and break things," more "move slow and fix things."

     Second, a lot more than you think can be done with those things! I literally play DOS games today via DOSBox-Staging for example. A decent modern setup running a VM can probably still work with a lot of those systems. IMO the issue there is they get too caught up on never changing anything. They bought IBM 5150s in 1980 or whatever, so today only get parts made for a 5150.

     There is a balance to be had, but people seem to only go extremes on one side or the other instead.

   • Embed this notice
     Svavar the Neurospicy (svavar@masto.svavar.com)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:09:16 JST Svavar the Neurospicy

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs

     The application stays the same but everything around it changes until it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain.

     There are lots of examples of computers with specialist software to control industrial machines that still run MS DOS and work fine.

     Anything that has to connect to the Internet and get security patches is eventually going to go end of life.

     Imagine having to maintain an application written in ASP 3.0 backed by an Access database and you'll know what I mean.

   • Embed this notice
     ian (finitebaffle@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:29:46 JST ian

     • Michael Kohne
     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs @mhkohne you’re absolutely right, but devs *do* wake up to find an app they haven’t touched in years suddenly doesn’t work any more because the OS or hosting environment pulled some rug from underneath their feet.

   • Embed this notice
     Hashbangperl (hashbangperl@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:30:59 JST Hashbangperl

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs I tend to find that problems are better understood, needs change and personal development as a programmer or ij the problem domain of the job mean that what seemed a great fit 2 or 3 years ago is chaffing painfully now. Ymmv of course depending on projects, business maturity, etc. Of course the code itself, like you said doesn't get more buggy or do what it does any less well.. just the world, the business, the people and even systems around it move on.

   • Embed this notice
     Hugo Mills (darkling@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:43:47 JST Hugo Mills

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️
     • Nazo

     @nazokiyoubinbou @thomasfuchs the wheels have fallen off the business model, and they've been flailing around with ever-more horrible variations to try to keep the dead business model of continual *desirable* change going, by making change and pretending it's desirable.

     The idea of change has become so internalised that we're now getting change even though it's massively *not* desirable, and being made to use it, because that's how it's always been, and what the markets expect.

     2/2

   • Embed this notice
     Hugo Mills (darkling@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:43:48 JST Hugo Mills

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️
     • Nazo

     @nazokiyoubinbou @thomasfuchs That was the spirit in which I made my first post -- up to about 2005, you could get *massively* more capable hardware with a 2- or 3-year refresh cycle. The whole industry, including OSes and software, was *entirely* designed to work with this fact.

     Now that there's only a comparatively small change in hardware capability over the same time period, and software basically does what people want it to (so there's no compelling new features),

     1/2

   • Embed this notice
     Nazo (nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:43:49 JST Nazo

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️
     • Hugo Mills

     @darkling @thomasfuchs Hardware doesn't age that way though.

     I have a DAP from something like 2008 or so that still works today. Still sounds great on quality headphones like my Sennheiser HD650 too. It could play more than just MP3 files too. FLAC, OGG Vorbis, WMA, and I think M4A AACs (need to test that last one.) It sill powers on and it still holds a charge. It didn't rot and I won't be throwing it away just because it doesn't have bluetooth or something. (If I wanted that I could buy a bluetooth transmitter, but I don't really.)

     But I don't even think we're arguing devices from decades ago should still be usable. It's much simpler. Hardware should still be reasonably usable for a reasonable number of years. More than just two. And "usable" doesn't mean great. Just not trash.

   • Embed this notice
     Nazo (nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:43:49 JST Nazo

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️
     • Hugo Mills

     @darkling @thomasfuchs And before someone comes in nitpicking that components like capacitors, batteries, etc do age and really really old devices do eventually stop working, I will state clearly I don't mean nothing ever ages at all, just that it's not the way people treat it. People buy new phones, PCs etc on almost a two-year cycle. Some even less! Hardware doesn't age that fast. You can still use a ten-year-old PC for most of the stuff everyone does today in fact. Some games/etc will have issues or require exceptionally low quality settings, but it's hardly a "nope, throw it in the trash" thing.

     I wouldn't expect a 30-year-old PC to run today's software well, but I do expect a five-year-old one to at least run normal software well enough to not be trash.

   • Embed this notice
     Hugo Mills (darkling@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:43:50 JST Hugo Mills

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️
     • Nazo

     @nazokiyoubinbou @thomasfuchs The hardware aged fast... up to about 20 years ago. The tech industry just hasn't caught up to the consequences of that fact yet.

   • Embed this notice
     Nazo (nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 06:43:51 JST Nazo

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs :anyathis:

     This. So much this! People think software (and hardware too btw!) ages fast. Like milk. The most many people will hold onto any piece of hardware seems to be something like two years.

     There's such an obsessive need to always have the latest of something that it turns into a "move fast and break things" situation all too often. Software developers keep making fast changes and everyone acts like if there is an update it must go out now now now and people must apply the update yesterday. (Note I'm not talking about actual security updates here. I'm talking about "there was a typo in the about page and also we changed the open dialog to use a custom API that only works on some systems" stuff.)

     Software should be stable! Hardware should be stable!

   • Embed this notice
     Mutesplash (mutesplash@uncontrollablegas.com)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 07:38:37 JST Mutesplash

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs It's the OS updates and deprecations that make it go "bad" (as in not useful)? Like when 32-bit compat goes away

   • Embed this notice
     davecb (davecb@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 09:41:37 JST davecb

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs I discovered in the last three days that they can't learn from their own experience, so they re-introduce bugs from the second-last run. that they removed in the last run
     
     In addition, they can learn bugs from their training data. Each run has the same unused include.

     Conversely, you can get them to simulate lint... but like lint there will be false positives. I'm OK with that, I learned on C and lint.

   • Embed this notice
     draNgNon (drangnon@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 22-Aug-2025 11:38:15 JST draNgNon

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs my experience of this is that a lot of it stems from language expansion and/or style guide updates.

     So if you need to fix something minor in legacy code, suddenly you need to fix a bunch of stuff.

   • Embed this notice
     Deadly Headshot (dheadshot@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Aug-2025 23:33:32 JST Deadly Headshot

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs
     What rots is compatibility between it and other systems as they evolve over time.

   • Embed this notice
     David Blue ⁂ ∆ (davidblue@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 24-Aug-2025 07:43:16 JST David Blue ⁂ ∆

     • Deadly Headshot
     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs @dheadshot how I've noticed this manifesting in my latent behavior, despite agreeing wholeheartedly:

     catching myself not trying (especially *not buying*) a given piece of software simply because it hasn't been updated for.... (oh no!!) a whole *SIX MONTHS* !!!!!??? (living on iOS for literally my whole adult life+ is 1000% to blame)

     for whom this resonates: I've found simple, somewhat actively-maintained reflection/self-awareness of this dynamic has brought me *a lot* of peace.