the normalization of inexplicable failures
19 points by untitaker
19 points by untitaker
I do not have an impression that «the stupid thing is just slightly broken» is a novel development in the state of software, however.
It is not. In the late 90s, I worked at a Baby Bell, putting a web front end on PREMIS, a system dating to the 1970s that matched addresses to phone numbers and vice versa. PREMIS (which ran on a Univac, ugh) had been just slightly broken apparently its entire existence. There was a lot of folklore about how to get it to reveal what phone numbers were at an address, how to compose addresses for maximum and minimum matching. I came to believe that users actually wanted PREMIS slightly broken because it was easier to both excuse their own lack of success and to anthropomorphize the PREMIS system.