this is such a wild comment -- there are countless products where regardless of purchase -- the user is still served advertisements. i have no idea what reality, or timeline, this comment belongs in.
broadcast television, paid streaming entertainment is just straight up the most glaringly obvious example of a paid service overflowing with advertisements.
paid radio broadcasts (xm/Sirius).
operating systems (windows serves you ads any chance it gets).
monthly subscriptions to gyms where youre constantly hit with ads, marketing, and promotions be it at the gym or via push notification (you got opted into and therefore have to opt out of intentionally after the service is paid).
mobile phones, especially prepaid come LOADED with ads and bloatware.
Those are hybrid subscriptions/subsidies. Not paid in full.
If you are being exposed to ads in something you paid for, you are almost certainly being charged less money. Companies can compete on cost by introducing ads, and it's why the cheaper you go, the more ad infested it gets.
Pure ad-free things tend to be much more expensive then their ad subsidized counterparts. Ad subsidized has become so ubiquitous though, that people think that price is the true price.
this seems like semantics and corporate hand-waving -- that's not what is conveyed to the user in what i have observed as the context of paid services and the promises asserted around what a purchase gets a customer.
in the subsidized example, xm/Sirius is marketed to users as an "ad-free paid radio broadcast"; the marketing literally attempts to leverage the notion of it being ad-free as a consequence of your purchase (power) in order to highlight its supposed competitive edge and usefulness, and provide the user an incentive to spend money, except for the fact that the marketing is false. you still get served promotions and ads, just less "conventional" ads.
i go to a football game and im literally inundated with ads -- the whole game has time stoppage dedicated to serving ads. i guess my season ticket purchase with the hopes of seeing football in person is.. apparently not spending enough money?
i see this as attempting to move the goalposts and gaslight users on their purchase expectations, as a way to offload the responsibility and accountability back onto the user -- "you don't pay enough, you only think that you pay enough, so we are still going to serve you ads because <insert financial justification here around the expectations we'e undermined>.
why then is there any expectation of a service being ad-free upon purchasing?
who the hell actually enjoys sitting through 1.5 hours of advertisements and play stoppage?
over time users have been conditioned to just tolerate it, and over time, the advertising reclaims ground it previously gave up one inch at a time in the same way people are price-gouged in those stadiums -- they don't have much alternative, but apparently the problem is the user should fork up more money for tickets so as to align their expectations with reality? while they're getting strong-armed at the concession stand via proximity and circumstance and lack of competition, no less.
are you really trying to tell me the problem there is, they need to make... more money? and THEN and only THEN we can have ad-free, paid for entertainment otherwise known as american football? is this really about user expectations, or is this about companies wanting their cake and eating it, too?
uhhh, while covid affected things this certainly has not been the case for my life at all.
the last 7 years of my life have been filled with nothing but community. from skate diys and meetups, and other outdoor activities to, skate diys, bars, live music, and gym communities (once regular programming resumed post covid).
if you feel this isolated i am inclined to ask -- what is it about your life that seemingly lacks these things? i have somehow managed to find community wherever i go and wherever my interests guide me.
what experience of yours caused you to arrive at "they actually don't"?
people in my city are always out and about and socializing and walking their dogs or getting drinks or coffee or working remotely or at work spaces or in offices or whatever. they go out on weekends and drink and eat and hang with friends.
i recently went to berlin and as an american i could not get enough of the summer vibe, the sparkaufts and casual communal hangs and byob bars.
my recent experience with flash and using it to prototype a c++ header i was developing:
- it was great to brainstorm with but it routinely introduced edits and dramatic code changes, often unnecessary and many times causing regressions to existing, tested code.
- numerous times recursion got introduced to revisions without being prompted or without any justified or good reason
- hallucinated a few times regarding c++ type deduction semantics
i eventually had to explicitly tell it to not introduce edits in any working code being iterated on without first discussing the changes, and then being prompted by me to introduce the edits.
all in all i found base chatgpt a lot more productive and accurate and ergonomic for iterating (on the same problem just working it in parallel with gemini).
- code changes were not always arbitrarily introduced or dramatic
- it attempted to always work with the given code rather than extrapolate and mind read
- hallucinated on some things but quickly corrected and moved forward
- was a lot more interactive and documenting
- almost always prompted me first before introducing a change (after providing annotated snippets and documentation as the basis for a proposed change or fix)
however, both were great tools to work with when it came to cleaning up or debugging existing code, especially unit testing or anything related to TDD
programmers, and good ones imo, are almost always polyglots on some level, and i tend to think have a better than average ability to even pick up natural languages.
programming languages have a small, manageable and finite set of vocabulary, idioms, and constructs that most languages share but express differently depending on their intended use. a programmer fluent in programming will be able to pick up most languages. how those pieces are cobbled together to form more complicated abstractions becomes the skill obv.
that does not mean they'll be an expert right away, but it does mean they are usually competent enough at minimum to dive in and work with it just like any other tool -- they know they'll need a screwdriver, maybe a hammer, so they look up what it looks like and how it is used.
my daily drivers are python, cmake/Makefiles, c++, and c, with a sprinkling of bash, powershell.
i've worked with microsoft stacks C#/SQL, JavaScript, and i've written a ton of Lua. i've studied concepts and swe fundamentals in languages i don't really write code in and transcribe into code i do intend to write code in. i learned mostly using Lua first, then i picked up c++.
these are just the tools of my job overall. my main skill is communication and learning imo, and knowing which tools are better suited for a task at hand depending on requirements and limitations (mine or technical or both).
because i work on a legacy project that is coupled to safety regulations and other quality guarantees, and we cannot just simply roll out a solution ported to c++ on the next release, or even tenth, so perhaps we make it work until we can.
however we can set a standard and expectation for new projects to use c++, and we do and set an expectation to target a specific std.
i see this sentiment quite a lot on hackernews -- feels like a lot of people saying "git gud" -- i would expect a lot more nuance applied here.
While using old compilers in certified domains is a common problem, unless we are talking about stuff like PIC, the choice of reaching out to C++ compilers is a given, even if what they might support is between C++98 and C++11.
i work in an embedded space in the context of devices and safety. if it were as simple as "just use c++ for these projects" most of us would use a subset, and our newer projects try to make this a requirement (we roll our own ETL for example).
however for some niche os specific things, and existing legacy products where oversight is involved, simply rolling out a c++ porting of it on the next release is, well, not a reality, and often not worth the bureaucratic investment.
while i have no commentary on the post because i'm not really a c programmer, i think a lot of comments forget some projects have requirements, and sometimes those requirements become obsolete, but you're struck with what you got until gen2, or lazyloading standardization across teams.
they are contextual expressions often emphasizing an abstract though equally shared reality -- emotional states. sorta like how "doch" functions in german sometimes. and i definitely will debate it being universally understood semantics, esp for native english speakers.
do you know many people who interpret the emotional weight of "that's fucking stupid" versus "that's stupid" as the same?
anecdotally everyone in my worldview would react differently to both, and further reactions will depend largely on how it is said -- not because of some ambiguous meaning collectively (mis)understood.
i have always found people who want to wipe clean the slate of language and all its slang and "offensive" words in favor of established definitions and order -- contextually or otherwise -- often lack a lot of emotional expression in their correspondence.
people emote. physically and verbally. and we have all kinds of mechanics to capture the nuances in contextual languages -- slang is one of the best features, and the nuances can run super deep, nuances a lot of formal writing or correspondence can lose in its rigor and strictness. especially not withstanding cadence and emotion.
youre going to have vastly different experience reading stevenson and then say twain, for example. even speaking it aloud -- but i encourage you to spot a common denominator.
their dialogue often reflects the character, the context, and the emotional state, and largely not formal. and there's a heft amount of literature that utilizes formal writing in its dialogue, and one of the first things lost in the narrative is cohesion, and therefore immersion, bc that's not how most people speak -- only a distinct subset talks like that culturally and even then it is still not totally real life.
humans are very rarely strictly formal in correspondence in practice -- we only established professional dialogue as a norm to separate the haves from the have-nots, and then made it a moral high-ground to keep the "peasants" in line.
express yourselves. say what you mean. stop letting people convince you that you should be scared of saying something like "that's fucking stupid" bc it means more for you to say "that's stupid" for the sake of arbitrary professional standards.
that's called breaking and entering, and generally frowned upon -- by-passing the "closed sign".