BlueMonday1984Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026
sc_griffithfriend of a friend who works for meta was just ignoring the mandate to use ai. apparently this was happening enough that they’ve now implemented per character provenance tracing, and you get ranked according to how much AI is in your code
this is nearly as dumb as elon’s “show me your 5 best lines of code” shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don’t do code reviews now, that would be cool.
It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that’s just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.
It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality
A lot of younger people who are being conditioned to accept this stuff just weren’t around to experience how unstable and unreliable the vast majority of PC software was in the 1990s, and a lot of more senior-level people must have willfully forgotten. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. The difference was that in the 90s, the major PC companies could port their enterprise-grade OSes with proper memory protection down to the consumer level, as hardware advanced and running a more complex OS kernel was no longer a big demand. Even then, it was an uphill battle, especially once you threw widespread networking and dubious internet-sourced malware into the equation.
End-user software has already seen a decline in quality and increase in user frustration during the cloud era, as many apps have become siloed blobs of JavaScript running on top of an extra copy of your web browser engine. I’m concerned that we’re headed firmly back to the bad old days now, without the release valve of better underlying software stacks on the horizon. The main solution will likely be to rip a lot of this crap out and start over (which is already a pretty widespread approach anyway, my credit union is going on their 3rd online banking “upgrade” in 5 years). But that completely zeroes out the “productivity” gains, not that anyone touting such things will ever measure it that way. I suppose the cost of re-stabilizing the software industrial base will be counted as GDP gains instead.
I personally wouldn’t count on it - if nothing else, losing Internet access would be crippling in modern day life.
I’m not gonna completely rule it out, though - CNN wrote on Instax making a comeback and the BBC reported a general spike in retro tech sales last year.
