This is about as useful of an argument as when people say taxpayer funded services aren't free.
Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-free. This is also a good thing.
We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.
So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.
> Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
And what if there was a company (let's call it Google) that was extracting huge sums of money out of this social security/welfare system? Would this make you think that perhaps something was wrong about it? And that the system could be more efficient without this company?
There are inefficiencies with both. In a perfect world, yeah, it'd be more efficient to not have capitalism. You'd just have to get around inefficient labor allocation, increased fraud, etc.
At least for capitalism, the amount extracted by ad companies is known and taxed.
It's not fair to compare things in practice (captialism), and in theory (whatever you're suggesting).
"I am not scared to go back flipping burgers again."
You should be - in all likelihood you'd have to work 3 burger-flipping jobs to make enough money to pay rent and buy food. Inflation and housing issues have hit a lot harder than most people who make 6-figure incomes realize. It's really tough out there right now. I am very, very grateful for the income I have and don't take it for granted.
> As a big tech programmer, it's almost never that simple...
I'll be fair and agree that I'm being a bit facetious here. But let's also admit that if you are unable to dedupe entries in a calendar with identical names then something is fundamentally broken.
I did purposefully limit to holiday calendars as an example because this very narrow scope vastly simplifies the problem, yet is a real world example you yourself can verify.
You're right that edge cases can add immense complexities but can you really think of a reason it should be difficult to dedupe an event with identical naming and identical time entries, especially with the strong hint that these are holidays? Let's even just limit ourselves to holidays that exclusively fall over full day periods (such as Labor Day).
Do you really think we cannot write a quick solution that will cover these cases? The cases that dominate the problem? A solution whose failure mode results in the existing issue (having dupes)? Am I really missing edge cases which require significantly more complex solutions that would interfere with the handling of these exceptionally common cases? Because honestly, this appears like a standard table union problem. With the current result my choices are having triplicate entries, which has major consequences to usability, or the disabling of several calendars, which fails to generalize the problem and also results in missing some minor holidays. Honestly, the problem is so bad I'd be grateful even if I had to manually approve all such dedupes...
If not, I'd really like to hear. Because it really means I've greatly mischaracterized the problem and I should not be using this example. Nor the example of a failure to FIND contacts with identical names, nicknames, phone numbers, birthdays, and differ only on an email address and note entry. Because I have really been under the strong impression that the latter is a simple database query where we should return any entry containing matches (failure mode being presenting the user with too many matches rather than a lack of matches. We can sort by number of duplicate fields and display matches in batches if necessary. A cumbersome solution is better than the current state of things...).
I'm serious in my request but if I have made a gross mischaracterization then I think you'd understand how silly this all looks. I really do want to know because this is just baffling to me.
If I truly am being an idiot, please, I encourage you to treat me like one. But don't make me take it on your word.
That's a lot of words, but I think it boils down to: you're making an assumption that two calendar events with identical naming and identical time entries will always have a desired behavior of being deduped.
- Maybe you want to separately invite people to the same thing and have different descriptions, now you're increasing the number of things to equate.
- Maybe a user creates one event that is simply a title and a time, and they then want to create a second one for another purpose. However, it keeps getting deduped and they don't know why. Now you have a user education problem that you have to solve.
- Now you might think: well just make it a toggle in the settings! Okay well now you have to add a new setting and that expands the scope of the project. Do you make it opt-in or opt-out? If it's opt-in, what if no one uses it? Do you maintain the feature if there's a migration? If it's opt-out, you still have the above problems.
I could go on. And this is mostly an exercise of not underestimating a "simple" change. Calendars (and anything involving time) in particular can get very complicated.
> will always have a desired behavior of being deduped.
Okay, let's say people like repetition. Optional flag. Great, solved.
> Maybe you want to separately invite people to the same thing
To a... holiday? Sorry, I already cannot invite people to a holiday in my existing calendar. I have no ability to edit the event. This capacity does not exist in my Apple Calendar nor Google Calendar and I'm not going to check that Outlook Calendar because the answer doesn't matter.
> Maybe a user creates one event that is simply a title and a time,
Again, no need to auto-dedupe. But having collisions and requiring unique name entries is not that uncommon of a thing.
> And this is mostly an exercise of not underestimating a "simple" change
Except to introduce your complexity you also had to increase the scope of the problem. Yeah, I'm all for recognizing complexity but come on man, we're talking about fucking Apple who makes you do it their way, by visiting 12 different menus, or the highway. We're talking about the same company who does not have the capacity to merge two contacts and only has the option "find duplicate contacts" but is unable to find duplicates despite multiple matching fields.
So what's your answer? Keep the bullshit and do not provide an option to allow merges or dedupes? Literally all the problems you've brought up can be resolved by prompting the user with a request to merge OR just giving them the ability to do so. You really think triplicate entries is a better result than allowing a user to select three entries, right click, "merge entries"? Come on...
> While we recognize that assault weapon legislation will not stop all assault weapon crime, statistics prove that we can dry up the supply of these guns, making them less accessible to criminals.
Charity's been running honeycomb.io, a SaaS startup with millions of dollars of revenue, for 9 years now, after being an early-stage engineer at Parse, a mobile backend-as-a-service startup that powered half a million mobile apps. She's talking about what she's made a reality at her company and its clients.
Deploy to what? Staging on every merged PR (commit to stg), and prod deploy on every commit to main? That sounds reasonable to me, and I've done some variation of it on most projects for the last 10 years or so without issue.
Yeah, what happens when Team A makes a change and Team B makes a different, seemingly unrelated change, and they both get merged and pushed... only to have a dozen customers discover that if someone is using Feature X that Team A just worked on and Feature Y that Team B just worked on while they have Uncommon Option Q enabled, then their backend process server will crash taking down their entire instance.
Who's fault is that?
Asking because I have been the customer with Uncommon Option Q enabled.
Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-free. This is also a good thing.
We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.
So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.