HarkMahlberg

No. The question at hand is whether you expect any company, or any person, to indefinitely fix and maintain legacy systems. And yes, your argument is indefinite support because you want the purchasing machine to be granted use of the software in perpetuity, you want it to never lose access to the software. You provided no deadline by which anyone is allowed to stop fixing things that broke. And yes, things break naturally as a function of time.

It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows

Denial.

All software breaks.

I mean, there is still an industry of Cobol engineers maintaining mainframe code for banks from the 80s.

my gramps, that’s not the beacon of good business practice you think it is 🤣

Can I hold you to the decisions you made 20 years ago? I bought that program you built decades ago, that means I’m entitled to your continued support. And don’t you even think about getting paid, your support should be free. You shouldn’t have built and sold the software if you can’t support it…

Lol, I’m a software developer that started by writing legacy windows software, I know exactly how much (little) has changed.

It is this perspective that exposes your bias and colors your perception.

We live in a post-Heartbleed world. We live in a post-UAC world. We constantly find new bugs and vulnerabilities, and they cannot always be patched without massive changes to the architecture. We cannot forever maintain old systems that cultivated bad habits in it’s users.

Not all change is good, but all change is inevitable.

they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.

Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?

That’s a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.

The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.

I… Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn’t just run natively on my Windows 10 PC… I need DOS Box. Heck, that’s exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can’t run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?

Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, … [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!

That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it’s ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.

I’m a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.

And though Valve shouldn’t always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don’t really agree with his arguments.

Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10…

Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father’s Gateway. Maybe he means the game’s original system requirements, as listed “on the back of the box” so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.

The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that’s why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It’s why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.

Stripping the copper wiring from the walls.

Why would I bother?

It’s not for the sake of right wing media, it’s for the sake of the normal people who call Los Angeles home.

I get your point, but calling it a war zone is exactly what right wing media wants everyone to hear. It’s a protest, we’ve had one every single weekend since 1/20, in nearly every state, and nobody needed to call the NG.

Let it not go unsaid: fuck waymo, I’m happy to see those death traps burn.

(and sometimes newer)

My God man, say it louder for the folks in the back. A 21 year old answer, heck even an 8 year old answer like OP said, might not STILL be the best answer in the current age. Technology evolves, new languages get invented, old languages gain some new features, and all of that happens at a rapid pace.

I get super dismayed using SO and seeing the top answer predates Rust. (Note I don’t mean to say Rust is always the answer, but that Rust is already 13 years old. Things change.)

which kinda sucks

Can’t wait to meet the successor to M1 Abrams: the M2 Sad Tin Can.

I’ve seen lazy developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, and paste them directly into code with no scrutiny, no testing, no validation. I’ve also seen talented developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, verify them, scrutinize them, simplify or expand on them. The difference wasn’t the source of information, but what the developer did with it.

AI is a crutch for the shameless, careless developers who create more problems than they solve. It’s just made them more efficient at it. Which only creates problems faster than than the talented developers can solve; it’s easy to destroy, but difficult to build. I know talented developers who use AI, but it hasn’t made them faster or more efficient, because their strength is also their weakness: they take their time, they evaluate their options, they scrutinize AI output because they know its prone to mistakes.

My greatest worry is the folks in the middle - they’re neither experts nor novices, just average. I want to see more engineers develop the skills needed to make them experts, but I worry that AI will just make them lazy.

That sounds like treating the symptom rather than the disease. Why automate the toil, when we could remove it instead? The other commenters brought up examples:

generating (the boring) parts of work documents

when I notice auto-generated parts, which triggers that I use AI in turn, and I ask it to summarise all that verbose AI generated content.

The AI wrote a document a human didn’t want to read, so AI then read the document AI wrote. The incentive thereafter is to save, and use, the shorter AI doc over the longer one.

Was any value created by this cycle? We just watered down the information with more automation. In the process, we probably lost nuance, detail. Alternatively, if we all agreed the document wasn’t worth a human’s eyes or keystrokes in the first place… why have the AI do anything? Sounds like we would all be happier to not have the document in the first place.

Much like programming itself, where if you have to write tons of comments to explain what you’re doing and why, your code is the problem and should be rewritten to be more legible. If you need a training seminar on how to use the program, the program maybe isn’t very usable lol.