There are indeed guns which are ridiculously unsafe to use and if you just count all guns in the world and average their failure rates, then "on average" guns are less safe. The kind of gun you can legally buy, properly handled, is quite safe - as far as guns go anyway.
The point I am making is that if you just average stuff out (like with the graph) it does not reflect reality. The computers systems that work in reality have very high reliability. Those that don't work > 99% of the time are simply not deployed.
> If you exclude all security vulnerabilities of the last decade, all mainstream software is secure.
All mainstream software is "secure enough", just like all mainstream software is "reliable enough". Otherwise, we obviously couldn't use mainstream software, we would all be forced to use provably correct software that is far more expensive to develop. In practice, the biggest security problem sits at the other end of the screen and no piece of software can fix it.
> I think you are overlooking how pervasive is computing in your life.
> But I can see how a user that have no programming experience could refuse to accept the sad state of today computing.
Believe it or not, I'm an experienced programmer and that has taught me pragmatism, above all things. I could complain about the state of computing all day, but the reality is that it works. It really does. You just have to admit that. Could it be better in practice? Maybe, maybe not. There's only so much effort in the world that can be spent on improving software and actually deploying it (which is the difficult part when comes to new software).
> You are misreading the intent here: as artifacts built from fallible humans, no software can be perfect.
> But if you don't even try to keep complexity low, it will soon become unmanageable and expensive.
I'm not arguing against that, I'm arguing against what that particular graph insinuates. The idea that nothing works anymore when the sum of all unreliable parts creates a completely unreliable result. That doesn't happen in practice with the actual operating systems (and other systems) that we use.
Keeping things simple is of course desirable, but it's also not easy at all and it requires a great level of skill and care. We don't have that kind of skill to work with, at least not for the vast majority of software out there.
> Still, as Gabriel said in his essays, you are right that users can be manipulated to accept and even pay for crap.
> It's called marketing.
That's just naive. It's not like users always have a choice between expertly crafted high quality software and crap software, but then they choose crap because of marketing. They have a choice between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, both of which are crap. They pay for Microsoft Office because it works better with what everyone already uses (Microsoft Office) or they choose LibreOffice to save money. That's just one example, but there are countless others.
