I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can see?

Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start using it.

  if (request.authenticationData) {
    ok := validate(etc);
    if (!ok) {
      return authenticationFailure;
    }
  }

Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me to set up a sensitivity label. Etc.

It mostly tells me about MS doing very bad software architecture for web apps, though apparently the desktop apps are not immune to it either.

Some additional examples beyond the OP:

- In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank).

- GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...).

The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.

Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug.

There was a similar bug at facebook years ago where the user's notification count would say you had notifications - and you click it, and there aren't any notifications. The count was updated by a different code path than the code which inserted notifications in the list, and they got out of sync. They changed the code so both the notification count & list were managed by the same part of the system, and the all instances of the bug went away forever.

Typical response is "Well it should just work anyway!". Which is theoretically true -- the worst kind of true.

But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03

Seeing how that complicated if-then logic is just too stiff a challenge to your average developer, we should probably just dispense with it.