🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
The thing I don't get about large software projects is why there are occasionally bugs that live for years and no one gives a shit about them. Also, why do you, my fellow programmers, consistently mis-categorise serious bugs as feature requests?
CertBot has a bug where it ignores the order of domains in the numeric list you give it when you create a certificate, causing it to pick a random domain as the main one. Fixing that bug is not a feature request. If it's an annoyance, it's a bug.
🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
I'm a developer, but also a user, and when I'm a user, I fucking hate developers, because I know they could've done better. 90% of the software I use on a daily basis is basically mediocre because nobody seems to care about perfection. In fact, 90% of society seems to be like that. Someone has a good idea, and sometimes, if a startup did it, it's good for a while, and then it goes bad. If government is tasked to do it, it's bad from the start. Why must everything suck mildly?
🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
They say nobody's perfect and it's human to err. However, there HAVE been perfect products. Usually, they're so good that we don't even notice how perfect they are. If, for example, your fridge looks stylish, always keeps your food at the right temperature, and runs reliably for over 10 years, that's a good product. If it has (equally reliable) features you didn't know you needed but are now indispensable, it's a perfect product, because it goes above and beyond what's necessary.
🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
If you buy a knife and it keeps sharp for a long time after sharpening it, feels right in the hand, makes things easy to cut, it never breaks, and the design is attractive, that's also a perfect product. There are such knives out there, and many ordinary kitchen knives do approach that kind of quality, possibly because we've been perfecting the craft of knife making and forging steel for thousands of years.
🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
The most perfect high tech product I can think of, given the criteria above, is the iPhone. It does most of the things a high quality piece of equipment is supposed to do, and is very specialised at the task. It's not a computer that you carry in your pocket. It's an appliance. It's good at being an appliance, not so good at being a hacker's toy, because it wasn't designed for that purpose. It approaches perfection, but issues common to all smartphones prevent it from quite reaching it.
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