Great point, but if the 2% are served graceful degradation rather than a broken site, that's probably okay.

> 98% is great for exceptionally good things, like dramatically increasing someone’s quality of life, but very low for basic expectations, like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them.

this is your brain on data science. so absurd that i laughed out loud when i read "like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them" like what is that phrase doing in this sentence and argument

I like to think it depends on what the actual topic is. Even the article's examples reinforce this.

98% market share? Amazing. 98% browser support? There are 15 billion screens in the world. 2% of that is 300 million. Hardly a number we can ignore. Edge cases for those 2% should be considered and implemented

If a plane did not crash 98% of the time, you wouldn't step on it.

I think this single fact is a major source of enshittification in large software products, especially in the era of ML/AI. If your quality is 99%, it sounds like "you have solved your task", but in reality there is a long tail that over time affects nearly every customer.

I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboard panes load normally (so a dashboard with 20 panes is broken in nearly 1 in 5 loads), and so on. If your LLM gets 99% of tool calls right, nearly every session will contain a malformed tool call.

Probabilities are hard for humans, probably.

Nice in theory, in practice I remember having to support Internet Explorer about 4 years ago. Hard to justify the investment sometimes, at least polyfills gave use some sanity back. The only reason to do it was: Rich old enterprise customer who can't install chrome due to policies created by Dinosaurs.

Websites are surprisingly hard to maintain long term, specially for a broad audience of devices. Developer Experience can lead to better UX, the easier it is to build/maintain, the more likely we're to do it.

Given how bad AI is at design plus all the unstoppable slop train, I expect websites to become much, much worse.

Some things are measured from 0, some are measured from 100. Depending on Expectation.

When expectation is 100%, telling me 98% success rate isn't enough. An example where the argument happens on Reddit, Macrumours and even on HN. When Apple's butterfly keyboard have issues. Apple Supporter was quick to dismiss the issue and point out the double entry is such a small issue because it is working 99.9% of the time. What they don't realise keyboard before that was practically 100%. That 0.1% error rate is infinitely more than 0%.

Another example is Internet connection When you are used to perfect Internet connection, just a small beep in disconnecting turns to be major annoyance. There are plenty of these examples especially with DOCSIS Cable modem. The modem theoretically is working 99,95% of the time, hence cable companies won't fix it. But Disconnecting 10 to 30 seconds every day is annoying enough.

I am not sure if there is a word or terminology for it so this could be better explained to people.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things where 80% is good enough, or doing above and beyond at 96% by getting 80% out of the original remaining 20%.

I used to try to make the point with non-tech people using the salesman analogy: If you were a salesperson who worked inbound calls from potential customers, would you be willing to handle 1 out of every 50 calls by picking up the phone, yelling "fuck you" into it, and hanging up? That's pretty much what you're doing to your customers when your software works for 98% of them.

1% failure rate of a hundred might be acceptable. 1% failure rate of a million is not.

Isn't that a named law?

It's just mathematical expectation.

Don't look at the simple probability - look at probability * value.