I bought Maps.me Pro in 2012, used it while traveling then and was happy. Fired it back up for a similar trip this year and in spite of having paid for it already, I don't have Pro features and I get aggressive "Sale ending in 4 hours!" popovers every time I launch the app.
> the same people, who created MapsWithMe/Maps.Me app
Ah, the same people who I bought Maps.Me from in 2012 - that when I went to use it recently now bombards me with "sale ending in 4 hours!" pro subscription ad popovers in order to restore functionality (more than 10 offline map areas) that existed at the time I bought the app? No thanks.
It seems like ... it's not illegal to find exploits, it's illegal to use them. Enforcement should start there, not the nanny state approach that you might do something bad with information. It breaks down a little bit because it means there will be a period of disruption while the bad guys use exploits - but that's already illegal, and the good guys have had time to use the tool & fix things before it went public, right?
The big initial hump I recall was syntax for writing main and what to #include, then header guards. That, and getting clang up and running in a docker on windows so I could use new C++ features and flags that were blowing up with whatever compiler I got started on. Once I was able to iterate things started coming back quickly.
For context, I was working in C++ when C++0x was considered exotic and a bunch of actually useful stuff was in boost, basically making boost mandatory - and the headache of setting up a project and tooling to do that was enough to push me to other languages for small projects.
When I picked C++ back up, I had a greenfield project I wanted to work on and I landed on this as a reference: https://github.com/AnthonyCalandra/modern-cpp-features. I just started working on my project and every time I ran into something where I knew other languages or libraries covered a gap, I would look through that guide and use it as a reference to bring it into my code. Smart pointers, auto types being two big ones. That, and threads, concurrency primitives - I remember hitting those and being like wow, you don't need a bunch of #IFDEF's to be cross platform anymore!
I also found there were header only libraries that were easy to vendor for things like json parsing, image processing, and thread pools. That saved me a lot of headaches, and created new ones! ha.
Coming at this as someone who has stepped away from coding more than once for multiple-year long stints due to various career choices - I think the concern of "skill rot" is overblown.
I stopped writing C++ professionally in the early 2010's. I came back to it in the early 2020's and it was extremely easy to pick up. Less like riding a bike, more like driving a car. The car got better over the last 10 years, but it still takes a bit of time to fully meld with the machine. The skills didn't rot, they just fell behind, and catching up wasn't a big deal.
I think the only "skill rot" people are facing today when coding by hand vs by agent is that you know you're doing something the hard way when you know there is another path of least resistance available - and that creates internal resistance to doing it the hard way. It's a mental block, not skill rot.
The one area I do find myself questioning is that my low level tech skills aren't growing - I'm building bigger projects that do more stuff across more areas, and as a result I'm touching lots of new technologies from a birds eye view and directing the agents to do stuff with them. I'm not personally gaining that experience of using those technologies, whereas if I were doing things the old way I would be deep in the weeds and have to know them in depth. But if I were doing things the old way I probably wouldn't be building such ambitious projects as a solo dev either.
IMO it's more like digging out the foundation with shovels vs using an excavator. You don't lose the shoveling skill by using the excavator, but you sure feel like a chump using a shovel when there's an excavator parked and ready next to the job site.
Yes, just like the "don't say HN is becoming reddit" rule. If you think it's AI downvote or flag and move on, reading "this is AI" over and over all over the internet without any substantiation is tiresome.