The entire business model of "outsourced" developers / shops is to overbill people - "we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects).
Even if the engineers themselves are cooperative, their managers / business owners will resist close cooperation and enforce work at arm's length (e.g. 1x weekly calls).
Ask me how I know. I once spent £300k (fortunately not my money) on an outsourced team of developers, and they delivered nothing at the end. Most of the time it was simply about aligning the work! We (me and my partner, we together had some idea of what we actually wanted) tried repeatedly to make sync-s more frequent, to better align the efforts, but their managers kept resisting. It's the "consulting" business model!
For remote jobs, the incentives are reversed. You're literally a full-time employee, there's no management layers to impede communication, and (unless you're lazy or a fraud) you probably want to work on interesting problems and not be bored!
> "we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects).
Largest such scam[0] I've heard of was "we have 11 senior engineers working on this project" (actually three, two of whom were actually junior-to-mid-level).
Depends how billing works, but it's pretty rare to see terms that say we'll deliver exactly what you asked for, on a fixed price and fixed timeline, and take all the liability for failure. To some degree or another you are paying for time and effort, which are easy to misrepresent.
I think the reading has been on the wall for some time for products that are not subscriber-funded due to enshittification. We should vote with our money and switch to better products that are customer-oriented and not advertiser-oriented.
Growing up as a teenager and young adult, I remember fondly browsing Newgrounds and being thankful to those who were paying to keep the servers running; I swore that once I got my footing and had some cash to spare, I'd be paying it forward and have been doing so for almost ten years now (took me longer than expected).
So, what I'm trying to encourage is to normalize THAT (Having X% amount of paying customers that make it possible to keep it free for those who can't pay, or to support growth), because I'm pretty sure dozens of thousands of successful careers in programming and animation were launched — or at least inspired — by wonderful sites like Newgrounds and I think that has been very much a positive net thing for society.
(1) you can cast between any pointer types (no UB - assuming they're aligned), but accessing memory through a wrongly-typed pointer is UB
(2) the only exception is char*, which allows you a "byte view of memory"
(3) calling a function through a pointer requires the parameter pointer types to be compatible, and none of these are: int*, struct foo *, void*, char*
Which is adjusted to compensate for inflation of fuel prices every few years, so they would eventually have to raise that to cover the increased prices.
In Slovenia, fuel prices have been regulated since, like, forever.
A few years ago (or last year? not sure) they were deregulated on the highways (i.e. to make tourists pay more) but then the government changed their mind (several times, IIRC).
They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.
Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.
> The centralized server must be trusted not to violate ballot secrecy,[7] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing trust amongst several stakeholders.
> The ballot auditing/reconstruction device must be trusted to ensure successful ballot auditing (also known as cast-as-intended verifiability),[7][16] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing auditing checks amongst several devices, only one of which must be trusted.
