> Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.
I would definitely not pay money to a site that wanted to show me ads, regardless of my preferences, as a subscription member. Full stop.
That is incorrect. A TV is a display panel optimized around a 10’ interactive distance. A computer monitor is a display panel generally targeting 2’-3’ at most.
So, you say you don’t know why people are upset with these devices, but people are telling you why and you’re just not accepting it. You literally told the other guy that he’s optimizing for the wrong thing, as if his priorities are somehow yours to determine.
It’s totally fine that you have different priorities and values than us, but that doesn’t invalidate ours.
Hmm, maybe more like “recommend me a manual transmission vehicle” and the answer you get back is why you really want an automatic, and here are some nice models you can buy that are all automatic.
> and not being able to play music or look at photos using just your TV?
I… I don’t do these things with a TV?
Basically, you’re saying that TVs were useless 20 years ago? Why they hell did every household have one?
I literally just want something where I can hook up a few consoles and a stereo system, maybe an HTPC if I feel like it. It should have good, responsive controls, be solid and dependable, and large enough that I can comfortably view content and read subtitles from my couch.
> TV does _tons_ of processing to display SDR content (24fps pulldown
I keep hearing this. How did we do it in 2005? Because I was definitely watching HD SDR content on large displays in 2005, and we didn’t have the monster SoCs back then that we do today.
In fact it wasn’t until modern “smart” displays started coming out maybe 10 years ago, Cable switched over to HD content, etc, that I started noticing major issues with jutter, lag, etc.
Just how “underpowered” are we taking here? I’m having a really hard time imagining a chip which cannot render a menu in non-fractional fps. An 8088 can do this…
Small number of people? You’re right, the average user doesn’t care about all of these details. They just care about the big picture they create, and how that’s terrible.
Uh… no, none of that, actually. What the hell? In fact, I actually don’t personally know anybody, of any technical level or age group, who uses any of the features you mentioned. So, maybe the market is not as small as you think.
> good price/feature ratio
When the features aren’t useful to you they don’t increase the price/feature ratio. When the features are anti-features, you could even consider the ratio to be getting worse…
I mean it needs a tuner to actually qualify as a TV. The bit about latencies and form factor, as well as the pricing for such, is also critical. As is the remote.
If he truly doesn’t care about any of those things, then I doubt he’d be here complaining about it. So imo at least some combination of the above is implicit.
> I don't like the idea that our goal is always to make the most efficient code possible. It's not, it's to deliver business solution as efficiently as we can with the resources available. Just like you wouldn't want to pay for a mechanic to spend a week making your car more fuel efficient if you took it in to get new engine mounts. His job is not to make your car work for you, not work the best it possibly could.
If he could get me a 1000x gain in fuel efficiency, like you often see when software when performance overhauls are done, I would sure as hell give him his week. But this is less about maintenance and more about how the car/software is built the first time around.
In that vein, I do expect that if gasoline prices drop to $0.20c/gallon in a decade (hah), that fuel economy on new cars does not drop to 3mpg to match. That's essentially what seems to have happened in software --- the hardware got really fast, so software got really slow.
> It's not, it's to deliver business solution as efficiently as we can with the resources available.
This is true; I guess what I take issue with is externalizing hidden costs to the customer. We keep paying for faster and faster hardware, and have to because that old hardware which is still working perfectly fine can't run the new software, which is much slower. And often, even on new hardware, the software is just this side of "tolerable". If you're writing your own in-house tool and nobody cares, do whatever suits.
> That said most of the time you do want to be writing efficient code.
Yes. That's all I want. Reasonably efficient. Not balls-to-the-wall speed demon witchery like we saw back in the demoscene heyday, just not to be sliding backwards all the time to erase all the gains our hardware got us.
---
EDIT: I get where you're coming from with the business incentives, I really do. But I'm saying I have a lot of issues with the end result --- as is often the case, maximal profit for the business is wreaking havoc elsewhere, in a sort of tragedy of the commons effect. And there are no realistic ways for me as a consumer to alter business incentives. A lot of software, especially the type that people get paid to write is closed source and closed protocol.
An excellent example is Discord --- it works well enough, when it works, but it's kind of a big heavy behemoth. It doesn't run well on older computers (I frequently see it burning a whole core just sitting in a voice channel). Right now, it's using nearly 1GB(!) of RAM, and frequently climbs to 2 or more if I leave it run long enough. This is a program whose core functionality was essentially available to me in 1999, and it struggles if I try to run it on a 4GHz machine from 2012. The search function sucks imo, and various other complaints. Screensharing with audio is broken (because electron), and probably always will be.
And I can't do a damn thing about it. I can't use a different platform, because the platform I use is determined by the people I want to talk to that are already using it. I can't improve or fork the program, because it's closed source. I can't (realistically) use a different client, or even write my own, because it's a closed protocol. So I'm just stuck with this pig of a program, and no amount of rage or frustration that I feel will alter the company's business incentives.
But it's just one program, right? Okay, I've got the cycles to spare, and the RAM, well, I overprovisioned this machine, so (in the case of this one, relatively modern machine), it's not the end of the world... right?
Now add Spotify. It's the same damn problem, so now the problem is 2x. Add a web browser (I mean, one who's job is actually to browse the web). I manage to draw the line there, mostly, but a lot of people are stuck with a lot more (VS Code, etc). It all adds up to a nightmare. And yet, all the time, I hear how "performance doesn't matter" (not exactly your words, but a prevalent developer sentiment).
Also worth noting what his idea of a "small efficiency" was; he goes on to note that, say, 12% efficiency, easily gained, is not small at all!
He never says to throw all ideas of performance out the window when writing your initial run of code. It's just not worth it to dig down into the weeds and micro-optimize everything ahead of time, is all.
But people just take this quote as liberty to completely ignore all notion of performance in their code. Maddening, and a total disservice to Knuth.
I would definitely not pay money to a site that wanted to show me ads, regardless of my preferences, as a subscription member. Full stop.