Purify was great until Rational bought it and jacked up the price 10x.

Didn't they also make sure Lotus 123 didn't run as well as it could have?

That was a very old, very tasteless gag from someone who didn't understand the situation.

MS has always bent over backwards to retain backwards compatibility, to the extent that it's genuinely a corporate weakness: it's slowed software releases, bulked them up with patches and tweaks and special-case exceptions, and prevented the company from keeping the OSes relatively reasonably-sized by dropping obsolete features.

Linux is starting to do this now, but only because the team's hand is being forced by LLM-bot vulnerability discovery. So it's dropping loads of old drivers -- but then, the kernel is mostly drivers, hundreds of thousands of them.

Apple is more proactive: it regularly says "this is the next to last version that does [function X] and the release after next will remove that.

I've been using OS X since 10.0, after 13 years using classic MacOS. Over that time, OS X has progressively dropped:

* The Blue Box VM for running Classic apps (removed in 10.5)

* Then the PowerPC version (removed in 10.6)

* Then Rosetta for running PowerPC apps (removed in 10.7)

* Then the AppleTalk network sharing protocol connections -- printers remained (I forget when)

* Then 32-bit app support (removed in 10.15)

I'm on macOS 15, on an 11YO iMac thanks to OCLP. Soon I'll be forced onto Tahoe simply because it's the last ever x86 version. The current beta of OCLP supports this. I will wait for the final release.

It periodically warns me that the AppleShare over TCP/IP is going away too. Won't directly affect me on an Intel Mac.

* Intel support is going in macOS 27

I am willing to bet Rosetta 2 and x86 binary support will go by macOS 28 or so.

It also dropped HFS writing, leaving only R/O HFS support. That may be gone now. Not tried in a few years but circa 10.13 it could happily mount a 30YO floppy disk in a USB diskette drive.

Since 10.14 it will only boot off APFS although HSF+ R/W support is fine.

"New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion."

I highly doubt that New Mexico will get 25. Although it would be nice since I live in New Mexico.

"Real" engineers aren't responsible for their product being used in nefarious ways as long as the product was built according to the rules.

Yeah well lucky for all of us, the “rules” you speak of were defined by engineers, not the government. We call them codes. For example civil engineers follow codes defined by the ASCE

I assume it's the typical "accepting responsibility" of execs and politicians where nothing happens. Best case they throw some underling under the bus or have their institution pay a fine. But they themselves have no consequences

Some people are wired for addiction and some aren't. I knew a guy who did heroin or cocaine a few times a year when he felt like it and never got addicted. I also quickly lose interest in alcohol or marijuana but I can't stop eating sweets no matter how hard I try...

That's a very good question. Let's set up a workgroup that meets once a week.

Your world will get smaller and smaller . I don’t think you can stop that wave.

It’s very disconcerting. I think this will largely be solved by going all in on AI and use it to test and review the code in an adversarial manner. That won’t be cheap but it’s the only way I see this work. But a lot of companies will probably save money and use AI mainly for writing code and then skimp on review and testing. I bet we will see some huge blow ups with AI written code and hopefully the industry will learn.

It also took the industry quite a while to accept that server code needs to be secure even if that requires a lot of extra effort. AI will probably be the same.

Using AI is really not different from hiring a bunch of people to do your project. You can tell them to do the minimum it takes to make it work or you can tell them or do it according to a long term vision you have and set high standards.

I agree that with AI it's very tempting to throw together a bunch of code without any thought of the longer term. But a lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans that produce well written code following the highest standards. That is just not true.

The opposite actually. I suspect some programmers may come to realise what some of the people in product, design, marketing, who they suspected didn't do very much at all actually do. Finding programmers especially those who self-define as programmers with good product instincts is hard.

It's funny how AI has suddenly caused this great awakening in developers/mathematicians: that building stuff or working on purely technical stuff wasn't their actual value, but rather "taste", "understanding", "deciding what to or not to build" etc. It's like the parts of the field that were janitor-adjacent have suddenly being elevated and they now define the field. This transition happened so fast that it'd make your head spin if you're paying attention.

> It's funny how AI has suddenly caused this great awakening in developers/mathematicians: that building stuff or working on purely technical stuff wasn't their actual value, but rather "taste", "understanding", "deciding what to or not to build" etc

Anyone that has worked in an enterprise context knows this. You spend more time saying no and finding justifications than in the editor.