Eric Lengyel1 tweeted an incident he came across when updating his own website through FTP. You can read the twitter threads here if you feel like it. Long story short, he was trying to update the content of his site but due to some weird issue with Windows Explorer, he end up with a broken site and worse, without even knowing it until someone told him so.

But the detail doesn’t matter here, and he is not trying to bash Windows or anything (although there are plenty of things to say in that regard), it is just yet another story to prove how broken mordern software has come to be.

I have trouble recalling how many times I witnessed some weird layouts caused by css when watching videos on youtube. I use google podcast to listen to my favorite podcasts, and the layout issue hasn’t been fixed since day 1. I don’t even want to mention the visual gliches and random abnormalties on Windows 11. For a long time I had to juggle between linux and windows on a daily basis, because something would suddenly not work on Windows and I have to shut it down in rage and boot up my linux distro. (I am writing this on my linux machine again2).

I don’t think linux can be my daily driver either, the hurdles you need to go through to get it work properly aren’t for the faint of heart. But I have no right to complain here, as nobody is making a dime building open source softwares, I am in no place to ask for more. I am just grateful that those alternatives even exist. On the positive side, modern linux has been fairly plesant to use anyway even for people without a tech background3.

“Move fast and break things”4, this used to be the motto used by Facebook. It has become the single DNA that constructs the cells of any modern “tech” company. Not only the web companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon are following this rule, the pandemic is much more far-reaching: Apple and Microsoft as two companies providing the de-facto infrastructures for the modern world are joining the cult too.

It is one thing to have some CSS issues or visual abnormalties, you can just shrug it off and accept it because you understand the web is built on shaky grounds, besides, it isn’t that critical anyway.

It is a totally different thing when your livelihood depends on it to work as expected and be productive (such as an Operating System). Maybe one end user doesn’t matter in the broad spectrum, but how about millions or billions end users alltogether, how do you calculate the casualties when you are treating every customer as beta tester, when it should be a working release without any rough edges in the first place?

  1. Eric Lengyel is a computer scientist specializing in game engine development, he is the author of Foundations of Game Engine Development. ↩︎

  2. I use Arch Linux btw. ↩︎

  3. For those that are rocking Nvidia graphics card, just ignore what I said. Linux + Nvidia is an invitation for trouble, at least for the time being. ↩︎

  4. Move Fast and Break Things, by Johnathan Taplin. ↩︎