I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model.

For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").

On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.

You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.

You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.

In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.

I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results.

"In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see"

Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'. That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks, even though others think it's fine. Sure, maybe something is wrong, could even be improved, but lets save the word 'bug' for something more specific.

Responding to something from the linked Patreon post:

> Blackboard (as well as Epic and SharePoint) are classic examples of software where the user and the purchaser are different and the purchaser basically doesn’t care about the user, so you don’t expect the software to be good and it would be a bit of a surprised if the software didn’t deliver a bad user experience. But it was even more surprising to me that someone working on some of the most reviled software out there could think that the software was widely loved.

I worked briefly at Epic and the attitude there seemed to be more like "yes we know people hate Epic but they're wrong". :P People there didn't think Epic was widely liked!

(The explanations given were basically, 1. people hate Epic because their IT department configured it wrong, if they configured it in a more suitable manner they wouldn't have these problems, and, 2. it's not Epic per se that's the problem it's all EMR software, if you think Epic is bad you should see the competition, they're even worse. I'm not sure that second one is really such a good excuse, but, that was what I remember hearing.)

I think having my career be started in testing has broken my brain. Having seen so many different failure scenarios, it makes actual development difficult. Failure handling in particular is exceptionally difficult, especially when you're hitting low level filesystem errors.

If you can't write to the filesystem, almost everything you do in an embedded system will fail. So you can't undo a partial write. Your logging will probably fail too.

A relatively big database (a tier 2/3 database) that I was using handled this in a really bad manner: it'd just segfault. Depending on when this happened you could get data corruption and never be able to open the DB even in read-only mode.

It's one of the core principles of a database! And it didn't even do that correctly.

One of the things I love about reading a bug report for a bug I've experienced is the feeling of solidarity it gives, a sort of "wow, me too, I thought I was the only one". I immediately recognized this issue, for example:

> when opening a new Google Doc, I used to immediately put the title I wanted into the doc. At some point, maybe ten years ago or so, Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten, so I now have this habit where, after opening a Google Doc, I do something else and then I change the title.

I seriously doubt Google is going to do anything about this behavior, though.

Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.

Our brain is geared towards efficient signal processing, and is actively working to delete signals it deems "unnecessary". It wants us to notice only the new and the unexpected; that's why after a short while you don't notice the same smell or the same recurrent noise. They are just ignored as "already detected / not new".

The reason for this may be evolutionary (although we don't know what traits were the most effective to help us survive in the wild); but there is a very practical reason to ignore signals, which is that there's so may of them: if we did process every data sent from every sensor and thought about odors, light, temperature, noise, etc. then we would be overwhelmed and could not do anything else.

That's also why we usually don't "see" things or people: we identify them. We don't see faces, we simply identify Alice or Bob. Which in turn explains why most people can't draw: the concept of Alice can't be drawn; to draw Alice we need to actually follow the features of her face. Being an artist means being able to unlearn (or disable) that identification process.

And I think the reason most people don't see bugs is similar: they're not interested, all they want is to get something done. If there's a simple workaround that makes the thing work, then that's good enough; all the rest is irrelevant. This is not bias or benevolence: this is efficiency.

>I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that it's mostly that people are hitting the same bugs and don't notice.

I suspect I know why they do not notice. See below.

>it works well, etc., but when I open up the thing and try it, it's in a state where the thing only works if you do quite a few non-intuitive workarounds.

I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.

I can use a novel UI and figure out where to find what I need to do very quickly. In my experience with lay people, they can use the software for a decade longer than me and still not understand some of the capabilities and navigate to utilize them as I can within a few minutes or small amount of research.

Shoutout to https://grumpy.website/. Love it.

I'm with danluu on this, at least as far as the headline, and not actual details.

I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week.

I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid. I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller). No idea how to fix that. Closing the keyboard and re-opening does not. And killing the app, whatever app, is out because I'm in the middle of filling out a form and don't want to have to start over. I've had the phone's screen freeze quite often recently, no response to any finger presses. Locking and unlocking the phone recovers. This one is new (started happening 1-2 weeks ago)

Common/not-common. Any app that uses the phone camera to scan things (checks/ids) almost always fails in one way or another. Doesn't recognize the thing or times out like the only way they tested was in perfect conditions in their office and never tried with real users.

I also think it's due to normalization of deviance, people are just used to it..

- You can't build a model, because everything will be changed with the next update, so, even if not consciously, people won't do it, why bother learning something that's not going to be of any use next time you use the application.

- because you basically don't know how anything works, it's a coin toss whether it's actually not working, or you're just "using it wrong".

- most things won't do the thing you expect of them consistently, so you don't expect anything of them.

Last night, I uploaaded some documents to my insurance company => modal:

- Title: "Files successfully uploaded"

- Text: "An unknown error occurred"

- Button: "Ok"

Thank you.

I've had to live with shipping software with really poor quality that had loads of small bugs. My Product Manager forced me to. However, at the end, the customers seemed happy, and I have to admit that I was partially wrong.

The QA guys flushed out the big bugs and many of the small ones. Without any proof, I imagine something like 99% of the customers would hit only a few bugs, that they are used to compensate for (reloading pages etc), leading to a view of the product as having good quality. I was wrong: the sw quality is poor, but the percieved quality is good. I would of course prefer to do sw of much better quality.

This is rather interesting to read. But it reinforces something I've seen in my career. The majority of users of software I've helped build, they use it in ways that are mind bending to me. Workflows I would never think of, that somehow do what they need.

The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.

I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed.

After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.

I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.

I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.

Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.

Blackboard is definitely a really strong contender for the worst software I've ever had to use. When I was in uni, I went so far as to write an alternative that scraped the content from blackboard and published it on a site that I could actually browse sensibly.

They were paying exorbitant amounts of money for the license too.

Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.

Parts of this reminded me pleasantly of one of my favorite John Regehr posts, "Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs" https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861

It’s interesting the author ponders what they might be missing now. it seems like it’s the deterioration of the writing due to llms. I’ve liked some of the authors posts in the past. And might look in more detail at the differences between the old posts and new ones because it could be a great example for what to watch out for when using llms for writing and maybe coding.

There weren’t any concrete examples of bugs besides the Google Docs issue. Like what was so bad about blackboard (I also remember thinking it was terrible). There was a link to a great article about search but again no specific example here. There are a lot of words but not a ton of new information. Maybe I’m just bias against llms, this could have been written entirely without then for all I know.

That is something that should be obvious to any developer who worked with a real QA-team or person. They just have a different mindset.

The problem with contemporary software development is not only that often the majority of QA work is shifted left (meaning to the existing devs) but also that the developer mindset is contagious. Have QA-people, who are usually in the minority, work too long and too closely to the devs and they become blind.

I worked in V-model teams where the only communication between the development team and QA-team was supposed to be the spec. I still think that is the best way to develop software that works.

>And, sometimes, the issues are severe, to the point where one might even say the thing actually doesn't work.

>I find this last category a bit mysterious, as when I look up discussions on how the thing got into this state ...

I'm currently on the dev side of such a product and can tell you one way it can end up like this.

Leadership decides a new feature is required, but refuses to commit to writing what they want. Through a bunch of meetings and calls developers have learned a number of vague requirements to the product, many which are conflicting, just as many are unclear if they are long term features or needed immediately.

The result is something that implements - to the letter, but not the spirit - of what the developers can agree on from this vague mountain of requirements.

The feature is returned to leadership in the hopes that having something tangible will make it clear what leadership actually wants.

However, leadership returns with a "Looks great, can you add?" and they sign off and we begin the next sprint.

My absolute favorite bug is the one where the “cancel your Amazon Music subscription” is seemingly the only one of what must be tens of thousands of UI elements in the Amazon app that simply loads a blank white screen no matter what.

What are the odds!

I also see bugs others, especially developers, are blind too. I've wasted I'm not sure how many hours reporting bugs to unresponsive companies and teams. Often the problem is not only that the developers cannot see or believe the bugs, but that there is no channel for reporting them. Even many open source projects resist receiving and addressing bug reports submitted by users. Commercial companies actively shield developers from users to the point where 9-figure customers have to escalate to a VP (who they can actually talk to because they're a hundred-million dollar customer) to get action on a serious bug affecting them, instead of just emailing the SWE 3 who's ultimately going to make the one line fix after the message gets passed down through many layers of emergency meetings.

When I worked at Google, it was at least possible to report bugs internally with some hope they would be addressed. Sometimes you could even fix them yourself, given enough time and the relevant skills. Bug bankruptcy was still a thing. Teams would simply throw away all the SWE-years that had gone into documenting and reporting issues in their systems. But there was some possibility you'd get action, at least if you were a squeaky enough wheel and used the right back channels. But now that I'm outside the plex, there's basically no mechanism to report issues unless you're a tech vlogger with a large following inside Google or a >= $100,000,000 customer. Most other companies are much the same. They're not just blind to bugs. They're deliberately putting bags over their heads to keep from seeing what users are telling them.

Fun post. Enjoyed it.

Haha it’s just that the things these devices enable for us are so valuable. But life is full of suboptimal things just because that’s how it is. Some other constraint causes it.

I was at Oren’s Hummus years ago with a friend and I remember thinking that there was this heat lamp outside by the window that was very close to the glass. We were halfway through our meal when we heard a loud snap and a large crack formed in the glass. Error in process, my failure to report it, and costly consequence. Bug, eh?

It’s just that the world is full of detail and things are full of interactions. And complexity is something we’re all constantly grappling with.

Every time I do the 5 finger gesture to bring up launchpad (I think that’s what it’s called) on a Mac the text field doesn’t focus fast enough for the text. Every time I type then backspace backspace backspace and type again. That’s just life. Somewhere someone shipped something that does this. It didn’t use to be this way but it is now. I can’t really change it so I just live with it.

The world of software is complexity upon complexity created from the fact that the virtual world admits arbitrary amount of interaction at much lower cost than the physical world. Yep, the world is full of bugs. But you really have to care a lot to stop them and no one really wants to pay you to do that.

> Almost nobody objected to my characterization of Google and Bing search results, but people told me that I was wrong about Kagi.

Paying for a product makes you defensive, especially if there are free alternatives.

Unnecessarily long post. It could have been 4x shorter and conveyed the same message better.

From the article: “For well over a decade, the reliability data that exists (and I think this is backed up by the anecdotal experience that mechanics who work on Volvos have) is that Volvo reliability is mediocre to poor, but of course Volvo forums are full of people who insist that Volvos are among the most reliable cars and that the data are all wrong.”

The author mentions one explanation, which is that most people driving a Volvo won’t experience a breakdown (and then generalize from that). Another one is of a very different kind known as post-purchase cognitive dissonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Consumer_...).

> On the topic of Michael's comment, I think it's easy for programmers to not notice ads. Almost all programmers I know use an ad blocker and, in real life, their eyes seem to just skim over ads and not notice them.

How do you write this article and not notice that this should be the topmost example of people adapting to buggy software that doesn't at all work for its users without workaround cognitive hacks?

Just a general pitch - please everyone use LLMs more to fix bugs and polish software to make it better for users.

It feels like too much of the benefit from it has been optimising, rushing new features/markets, tripping over ourselves with new processes, vibe coding things just for ourselves. When maybe it could actually make things better for most people using software in their daily lives.

> I get that people who are fans of things tend to be blind to the thing's faults.

Wow, there's Obsidian, Kagi, and Apple in a nutshell.

I do think a lot of these are not Bug Blindness, but a bar for acceptable quality standards.

A low bar means people walk past without realising it, a medium bar may take notice but it doesn't bother them and tends to get throw out within min or seconds. A high bar gets insane irritation that some may even call OCD.

And unfortunately, these spectrum follows an S curve. If you have a high bar, you are likely in the single digit percentage monitory. And the same is across all things not just software.

What I see a lot is working with developers who believe the goal is to write software that can complete the task. They demo it, release it and watch it immediately fall apart with first contact with the user.

What they should be doing is having a goal of software that cannot fail to complete the task.

I find the ad blindness and bug blindness similar but on opposite ends: I also notice bugs easily, but I also notice ads (instead of skimming — when ad blockers do not work or apply), yet I consciously make an effort to not be tricked and sometimes explicitly decide to not buy the product if the ad is obnoxious or really abuses the psychological findings for business' gain.

This hits. Ive had an annoying issue with Codex VS Code extension for weeks if not months when queuing up a follow up. Often it just disappears, I think it's just a UI glitch is actually queued but I can't click steer if the UI doesn't update and I find myself automatically going CMD+A, CMD+C before sending a follow up message.

I’m really anal about the Quality of my own software, and tend to be hard on others’ software (doesn’t make me too popular).

> I've had multiple jobs where directors/VPs/execs/etc. sometimes ask me to evaluate something when they want an actual opinion from someone who is relatively likely to notice issues (and fix them or drive fixes for them if necessary).

I’ve had the experience where I need to be asked, and even then, if my opinion isn’t “ist güt,” it’s often ignored.

When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.

Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.

I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut, and if the situation calls for it, start quietly preparing for when the wheels fall off.

I have also learned to never say “I told you so,” as that is a petty and vindictive statement. Doesn’t help at all.

I think at least half of the software developers out there simply don't test their code in the final product (or at all). And why would they when their revision is being reviewed in a pull request?

Hah in the AI era I noticed the agents are worse than the average person at noticing bugs. Agents use their own scale to decide if something is a success even if the output is broken. Agents are bug-blind to their own work. The consequence is that spotting bugs is now the key reviewer skill. The human’s job shifts to catching what the agent is blind to in its own work.

Reading the first part of the article I thought it was about real bugs and I was like "Wow we are surrounded by hundreds to thousands of bugs a week, but are blind to them somehow".

> humans have a high ability to ignore negatives in things they're a fan of, including (and often especially) their own work

I thought this is due to the "backfire effect", because humans perceive criticisms of things they like as threats.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

I feel cursed with the opposite of this. I can't seem to go 12 hours without finding a bug in software which it's not my job to test. It's all so awful. I waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to report these bugs, because they offend me.

Just once I'd like to believe, for a little while, that this industry has produced something worth being proud of.

Did I write this?

I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.

"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.

I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.

I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.

I agree quality blindness is curable. Many communities (e.g. Japanese, Swiss, Yemeni, Peruvian etc) have shown attention to detail is just a learning and, most importantly, social status process. Bugs are just the opposite of caring, and caring is at odds with hustle culture. I think Apple is a great example here - used to be meticulous and now every day the amount of tiny defects is just infuriating (just now I realised, for example, that Photos can't scroll with a mouse).

> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for.

I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.

> Bug Blindness

This is why I find that it is better to wait a couple of months before actually do the final test before shipping your own software.

Is there also a thing called Readability blindness?

That’s how perception works. We only see what we want to see, and discard or explain away the rest.

An interesting version of this is when a team basically internalizes some issues in the software they work on and it turns into something they accept as a fact of life or even turn into a joke. „X failed again? Don’t bother, it’s been a shitshow for years.” What?!

A few years ago I started leading a team working on a product that had a lot of „legacy” quirks like that. It took me a good while to set a strong quality bar, both mentally and technically. I would frequently point out where the mindset was wrong, prioritize certain fixes over project work, fix a lot of issues myself, fight with other teams to fix their stuff, run silly contests such as „who solves the most support tickets this month gets a prize” and sometimes even „stop the world” for a few days until we got something in order.

Some people might be prone to think their team will never have the time to do that (and some may be right) but in my experience quality pays back. Often fixing a small bug takes about as long as discussing if it’s important, properly filing it in JIRA and then communicating to the outside world it’s not the priority. And eventually you reach a point where you have way more calm and focus than before because nothing is burning.

Is that why your blog is plain white text on a black background, so it's less buggy?

Some developers treat their software like a baby when they test it or show it to others. Tapping cleanly and slowly, giving animations time to finish, scrolling slow and smooth, etc.

I like to beat the shit out of my software when testing. Constant erratic scrolling and zooming, multi-touch shenanigans, pressing multiple buttons as fast as I can, using back gestures and the browser back button (if it's a web app), changing the window size and orientation frantically, and just all kinds of rough usage.

If your software can't cope with these things then you're doing a disservice to your users.

What does the author have a against a text size that’s readable?

Does having a website with no set-width and unusable without reader mode counts as bug blindness?

Great post. Pins the tail on the donkey. As a lifelong Unix and Linux user, when I was forced to use Windows at work, this kind of thing struck me profoundly. Windows users just didn't notice how crippling the whole experience was. They'd write it off as "user error" when Word autocapitalized strings weven if auto caps was turned off, things like that, similar to "natural running motion".

A bit of perfectionism helps with esp UI bugs. A little flash, slight unusual pause, trying different ways to break the code..

Long ago I realized I had the ability to see race conditions in source code, at least more easily/accurately than others on average. It was helpful when reviewing the code of others, esp more junior. And I once briefly considered getting a custom T-shirt made with the words "I see race conditions." (in the spirit of the famous scene from The Sixth Sense with "I see dead people.") and wearing it to the office during formal code review meetings. But a friend talked me out of it when he pointed out it might get misinterpreted as being something racist rather than having to do with threading and concurrency.

The whole "I see bugs where others do not" reminded me of that same phenomenon.

> Who else uses the Shift key to end the screensaver, because in case the event goes through to an actual program it's least likely to do have unintended effects?

Hahaha. Yup. That's me :) Not the screensaver in my case. I leave my desktop "suspended to memory" overnight, and when I come back in the morning / afternoon, to wake it up I press the Shift key.

But, more on the subject, I kinda find it disappointing that the post doesn't try harder to analyze why this happens to the developers. The explanation doesn't feel satisfactory to me.

This was my experience working on a product that was virtually universally believed by its programmers to be of good if not excellent quality, while, in reality it was atrocious. Just to give you a taste of the quality: Jenkins landing page didn't work because it would take too long for it to load and various timeouts that happen when it fails to load would kick in and just mess it up so much it wouldn't have been useful anyways. Jenkins tests were generated from some horror-show templates written in YAML (some RHEL tool, forgot what it's called) and because there was no other way to test what the template generated other than to deploy the new test into the actual Jenkins server, the server was full of dysfunctional "orphan" (no longer tied to any template) tests that were never deleted. The only way to navigate to the test results of the job you were interested in where to memorize the way the templated name would expand into the URI components of the Jenkins job URL, have some other test results bookmarked, and then modify the URL of the bookmarked page to get the URL of the job you want.

The CI/CD team, however, decided to combat this situation by developing their own server which collected data from Jenkins and displayed a table with the most recent results for select jobs. Green and red being used to indicate whether the job succeeds or fails, the table was mostly red most of the time, with some jobs being continuously red for many months.

Initially, I was hired into CI/CD team, but when I remarked on the desperate state of events in CI/CD department... they wanted me fired, but the company was going through acquisition and they wanted a higher headcount, so, they kept me, but transferred into the least relevant department where I would be as useless as possible: the quality control!

My life as SDET (because QA is a curse word nowadays) exposed me plenty to the situation described by the author. The aspects that the author didn't touch on is that programmers working on such a product that I've experienced a lot are:

* Unwillingness to accept that a large proportions of the product is bad. People have this intuition that some parts might be bad. After all, that's why QA exists: they find a few things, things get fixed, and everyone moves on. And this is how it works in passable quality products. But the situation when everything is on fire and is going to hell in due course sounds alarmist to the people who are on fire and are going to hell in due course. After a certain amount of complaints, all further complaints are dismissed.

* Unwillingness to accept the existence of strategic mistakes. The QA simply is not allowed to voice their opinion on product or feature design. The only way a tester can initiate a fix is if they can create a test that illustrates the problem. Saying, for example, that "our error reporting is bad because it's useless to the customer and it cannot be meaningfully reported back to the developers" was dismissed as "nothing to do here" (but, actually, meaning: it's above your paygrade).

I don't believe either of these would've been fixed by "simply pointing out the bug", as the author claims. Our industry came to a particular way of doing things that are pathologically bad. The way QA works is OK-ish, when the product itself is of an OK-ish quality. When the product is really bad, the QA is powerless to initiate a fix. QA isn't trusted enough, and, usually, is perceived as a liability, and furthermore, stuffed with engineers nobody else wants. Unless this is changed, the pathologically bad products (like the Blackboard) will have no hope of ever improving (eventually, they will just die either under their own weight, or replaced by something else).

> so the non-LLM options here are some posts that are much sloppier than my normal posts (in a human slop kind of way), or almost no posts.

I'm a little confused, but as far as I understand this is a LLM-written post, isn't it? That would explain the very big length of it. Or maybe I've understood things wrong, in which case my excuses to the writer (which, in that case, could reasonably be called a writer).