ugo

As a dev, I had to fix an O( n! ) algorithm once because the outsourced developer that wrote it had no clue about anything. This algorithm was making database queries. To an on-device database, granted, so no network requests, but jesus christ man. I questioned the sanity of the world that time, and haven’t stopped since.

Thank you for the explanation, now I understand the context on the original message. It’s definitely an entirely different environment, especially the kind of software that runs on a bunch of servers.

I have built business programs before being a game dev, still the kinds that runs on device rather than on a server. Even then, I always strived to write the most correct and performant code. Of course, I still wrote bugs like that time that a release broke the app for a subset of users because one of the database migrations didn’t apply to some real-world use case. Unfortunately, that one was due to us not having access to real world databases pr good enough surrogates due to customer policy (we were writing an unification software of sorts, up until this project every customer could give different meanings to each database column as they were just freeform text fields. Some customers even changed the schema). The migrations ran perfectly on each one of the test databases that we did have access to, but even then I did the obvious: roll the release back, add another test database that replicated the failing real world use case, fixed the failing migrations, and re released.

So yeah, from your post it sounds that either the company is bad at hiring, bad at teaching new hires, or simply has the culture of “lol who cares someone else will fix it”. You should probably talk to management. It probably won’t do anything in the majority of cases, but it’s the only way change can actually happen.

Try to schedule one on one session with your manager every 2 to 3 weeks to assess which systematic errors in the company are causing issues. 30 minutes sessions, just to make them aware of which parts of the company need fixing.

Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.

My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?

You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.

While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.

They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.

So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are

1. What kinda dev doesn’t know how hardware works to at least an usable extent?
2. What kinda hardware are we talking about?
3. What kinda hardware would an IT person need to know about? Network gear?

It’s one thing to pay, and another to be squeezed dry.

When ads were mostly static banners on websites almost nobody was blocking them, because they were mostly unobtrusive.

However, they would often link to shady websites that would install random crap, so the usecase for blocking them was already there.

Then they became animated, and they multiplied. It was one at the bottom of content at first. Then a couple. Then two vertical banners on the sides too. Then more rectangular banners here and there for good measure.

Then they became unkillable javascript popups, then proper new browser windows. Then autoplaying videos with audio were added. And this is just the visible stuff. Add tracking pixels, tracking cookies, browser fingerprinting, and tons of other spying technology deployed under the guise of “but the content is free”.

After every step the use of ad and tracking blockers became more legitimate as serving ads moved further and further away from paying for free content and squarely in the space of selling user data collected without consent for huge profit margins.

If ads and subscriptions were enough to just make a normal amount of profit, very few would be blocking ads or pirating content, because the amount of ads or the price of subscriptions would be reasonable and affordable.

But since everyone wants to make a 1000% markup on the content they generate, they will drive their very own paying customers away.

Youtube could have served me a couple ads per video and I would have kept using it forever. Instead they served me a minimum of 20 ads per video, so now they will serve me zero, forever.

Netflix could have gotten 12 euros every month out of me for their dwindling and dwindling content selection. Instead they wanted 14 after a while. And 17 after a while. And 19 after a little while more. All the while refusing to serve me the 4k content I paid for.

So instead they now get zero too.

I am very happy to pay for content, and a lot of people like me. But the comment you originally replied to was in reference to youtube increasing the price of their subscription by ludicrous amounts. You replied there content isn’t free, and I replied that youtube has no problem making money. The increases are not to keep youtube afloat, is to make youtube make 10 billions in profit rather than 8 next year.

It’s not about paying a fair amount of money for content, it’s about making you pay all that you can give and suck you dry.

So to your question “how do you pay for content/services in general?” I answer “with money”, but that is not what is happening here.

Youtube revenue in 2023 (before these price hikes) was 31.5 billion USD.

The revenue for the entirety of alphabet in 2023 was 307 billion USD.

Youtube alone generated 10% of the entire revenue of alphabet’s portfolio in 2023.

Yes, revenue is not profit, but I could not find profit figures for youtube.

Alphabet’s operating income for 2023 was 84.3 billion USD. Assuming a similar proportion of revenue to operating income (I know, hella extrapolating, but again no direct sources for youtube) that would put youtube’s operating income in the ballpark of 8 billion USD.

It’s not that they aren’t making money because people are “stealing” as you say from poor little indie company youtube. It’s just that they want more more more MORE MORE MONEY.

Because of course they do. It’s never enough.

Edit: because I forgot to link my source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204424000014/googexhibit991q42023.htm

The entire studio behind Life by You has been liquidated and everyone in it fired.

Better hope Paralives and InZOI are good, otherwise Sims will be without a competitor for 20 more years.

Seems like a bad idea unless she’s very familiar with the projects she would help document. Documentation is notoriously not something that can be produced by a newcomer, because it requires experience that a newcomer doesn’t have.

I guess the best way for a newcomer to help would be to try to use the product and ask every little question they have to make sure they receive the correct answers and context and, at the end of the process, enough knowledge would be gained to contribute at least one piece of documentation. But the bulk of the knowledge would still come from people that already know the product, so in terms of efficiency it’s way worse than having the authors write it.

Of course, if the authors are unwilling or unable to write good (or any, even) documentation, having someone that has the will to gather the scattered information into a central place and work on it so it’s digestible and high quality is still unbelievably useful.

But yeah, my point being that documentation is far trickier than it seems as far as open source contributions go.

Ah, no idea about live streams as I don’t watch those. I would imagine they have a different format for those as two ads every 2 to 5 minutes wouldn’t work for those.

Now that I think about it, it may be because I don’t have an account so maybe google has less data to harvest and sell and so I get more ads. Unfortunately they might think that this would make me think “I should make an account” or “I should buy youtube premium”. Instead, I just think I need to avoid that place as much as possible.

Except 10 to 20 seconds of advertisements play every 2 to 5 minutes. It’s not a matter of patience

It is genuinely infuriating to the point I simply uninstalled youtube on my iPhone and switched to using web-based alternatives. And yes, no need to lecture me on apple, I only have an iPhone for reasons. I’d rather have a linux phone instead.

2 ads play every time you start a video. Maybe you’re watching a playlist and realize 5 seconds into the video that you already watched this one, so you click the button to go to the next video.

Two more ads, no matter that you got two ads literally 5 seconds ago.

Looking for a specific video that you don’t quite remember the title of? That’s right, two ads every time you go “hmm no, it wasn’t this one”.

Two more ads are also guaranteed to play within at most minute 2, usually just after 60 seconds. So that’s a minimum of 4 ads in the first or second minute of any video you watch. After that, the amount of ads varies, but in my experience it’s not less than two every 5 minutes, and they happen randomly.

So every 5 minutes at most you get 10 - 20 seconds of advertisements in the middle of a sentence. Wanna go back 10 seconds to refresh the context that was lost by the jarring interruption? No problem, have 2 more ads. Sometimes as much as 3 times in a row.

The worst offender I had was a 30-ish minute video where, and I swear this is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole, two ads would play every two minutes, for the whole video (it’s also the video where I got two ads playing when I scrolled back 10 seconds, 3 times in a row). So overall on that 30 minute video I must have got around 45 to 55 ads (2 at the start, 2 every 2 minutes, 2 almost every time I scrolled back 10 seconds).

There are plenty of pasta dishes and sauces that use cream, and while sour cream is not used in italian cuisine I think it tastes amazing :)

So I can absolutely see sour cream working in pasta

I am always amazed by how the japanese are often times very willing to experiment and be inventive in terms of melding their own culinary culture with foreign ones, considering the isolationist and conservative history and reputation they have overall as a people.

To me, that simply says that food really is one of the universal languages.

I’d love to try this dish if just for experimentation, although I suspect it wouldn’t be something I’d have more than once lol