While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.
The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.
That's an even more evil ad than the obnoxious and irrelevant variety because something related to my interests has a higher chance of successfully manipulating me.
It's a distraction from the content that I actually want to see and I should not have to spend the bandwidth on loading it or the battery on rendering it.
Yeah I think that might be a worse statement than the one daydreaming about eliminating their remaining market share by abandoning the only thing keeping anyone around. It’s a gross premise to operate from. And bullshit.
The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
> You wouldn't calculate the expected RoI of killing adblockers if killing adblockers was never considered.
I agree, although if someone isn't the kind of person who would calculate that, they're probably not the person who will become the CEO of a company that size in the first place. I don't think organizations have the right incentives in place to push people with those values to the top.
Thanks for the clarification. I've read about Gleam here and there, and played with it a bit, and thought there was no way to directly access OTP through the Erlang libraries.
This can be just my lack of familiarity with the ecosystem though.
Gleam looks lovely and IMO is the most readable language that runs on the BEAM VM. Good job!
The writing is really succinct and easy to follow.
One thing that could be improved is that the author could break down some of the commands, and explain what their arguments mean. For example:
> mknod rootfs/dev/console c 5 1
Depending on the reader's background, the args 'c', '5', and '1' can look arbitrary and not mean much. Of course, we can just look those up, and it doesn't make the article worse.
For anyone curious: "c" just means that it's a character device.
There is also "b" for block device (e.g. a disk, a partition, or even something like a loopback device) and "p" for FIFOs (similar to mkfifo).
The two numbers are just identifiers to specify the device, so in case of `5 1` it means the systems tty console, while `1 8` would mean "blocking random byte device" (mknod dev/random c 1 8)
Brazil has an insane number of 'illegal' immigrants as well as people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state, so I'm curious how that works. I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID they've registered under the auspice of foreign controlled business.
Immigrants can request a CPF (the 'national ID'). I don't think being in the country 'legally' is a requirement, that isn't enforced the way it is in the US.
> people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state
Most people get assigned an ID at birth. And people who live in a favela often have to work outside it, and they interact with most companies/state services that aren't utilities as usual.
Utilities OTOH often get MITM'd by militia/narcos these days though.
> I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID
No need for anything fancy like that. The poorest people are willing to work based on verbal agreements, as the alternative is either starving, or hoping the public social security network has your back. And in case your employer requires one, that's a non-issue because, except for rare circumstances, everyone has one.
Digital banking, install payments and general smartphone usage is widely popular, including favelas.
It doesn't need to be written by a human only, but I think generating it once and distributing it with source code is more efficient. Developers can correct errors in the generated documentation, which then can be used by humans and LLMs.
> maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.
25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices.
I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.
25k annually (before taxes) is $12/hour with a 40 hour work week, how many software developers in the first world are working for that? There are probably some, but I’d be surprised if there were “many”.
Good question, hard to say, but I think it's mainly because of Zig. At its core Zig is marketed as a competitor to C, not C++/Rust/etc, which makes me think it's harder to write working code that won't leak or crash than in other languages. Zig embraces manual memory management as well.
> At its core Zig is marketed as a competitor to C, not C++/Rust/etc
What gives you this impression?
I directly created Zig to replace C++. I used C++ before I wrote Zig. I wrote Zig originally in C++. I recently ported Chromaprint from C++ to Zig, with nice performance results. I constantly talk about how batching is superior to RAII.
Everyone loves to parrot this "Zig is to C as Rust is to C++" nonsense. It's some kind of mind virus that spreads despite any factual basis.
I don't mean to disparage you in particular, this is like the 1000th time I've seen this.
More broadly, I think the observation tends to get repeated because C and Zig share a certain elegance and simplicity (even if C's elegance has dated). C++ is many things, but it's hardly elegant or simple.
I don't think anyone denies that Zig can be a C++ replacement, but that's hardly unusual, so can many other languages (Rust, Swift, etc). What's noteworthy here is that Zig is almost unique in having the potential to be a genuine C replacement. To its (and your) great credit, I might add.
>> At its core Zig is marketed as a competitor to C, not C++/Rust/etc, which makes me think it's harder to write working code that won't leak or crash than in other languages. Zig embraces manual memory management as well.
@GP: This is not a great take. All four languages are oriented around manual memory management. C++ inherits all of the footguns of C, whereas Zig and Rust try to sand off the rough edges.
Manual memory management is and will always remain necessary. The only reason someone writing JS scripts don't need to worry about managing their memory is because someone has already done that work for them.
Well if anything take as a compliment. As a C, C++ (and some Rust) who lately is enjoying Zig, I think Zig is the only programming language positioned to convince system programming die hard C programmers to use another programming language with simplicity and power backed in.
But completely agree. Its a perfect replacement for C++ and I would say the natural spiritual successor of C.
I gave up using Rust for new projects after seeing the limitations for the kind of software I like to write and have been using Zig instead as it gives me the freedom I need without all the over-complication that languages like C++ and Rust bring to the table.
I think people should first experiment see for themselves and only then comment as I see a lot of misinformation and beliefs more based on marketing than reality.
I agree with your general idea. I'd add it also looks very similar to what typical GNU/Linux have in practice: blessed packages from the distros' repositories, and third-party repos for those who want them.
Debian also has something 'in the middle' with additional repositories that aren't part of the main distribution and/or contain proprietary software.
> and thus ad-supported
What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.
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