> We trained users to treat their devices like unruly animals that they can never quite trust. So now the idea of a machine that embodies a more clever (but still unreliable) animal to wrangle sounds like a clear upgrade.
I wish I didn't agree with this, but I think you're exactly right. Even engineers dealing with systems we know are deterministic will joke about making the right sacrifices to the tech gods to get such-and-such working. Take that a step further and maybe it doesn't feel too bad to some people for the system to actually not be deterministic, if you have a way to "convince" it to do what you want. How depressing.
Software is only deterministic if the software it relies on never changes. Forced updates make this impossible, so treating software as deterministic is actually wrong.
I wish I didn't agree with this, but I think you're exactly right. Even engineers dealing with systems we know are deterministic will joke about making the right sacrifices to the tech gods to get such-and-such working. Take that a step further and maybe it doesn't feel too bad to some people for the system to actually not be deterministic, if you have a way to "convince" it to do what you want. How depressing.