First off, I agree with the point made, though I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru. The people I know who have to deal with excessive snow or mud on country roads commonly opt for that. Of course there’s the “men” who compensate for their lack of buldge with 350s, dualies, etc. If you don’t work a farm, those whips are dummm.
That was a good perspective though- I grew up hearing Citroen makes garbage.
Side note- The vast majority of pollution is from industry. By a lot. That is where the finger needs to be pointing. Pointing the finger at SUV drivers distracts from the real issue and keeps us blaming each other.
> I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru
Yeah, I get this is tongue-in-cheek but if you're going to try to convince Americans of this idea, you need to use units we understand, and a car we've heard of.
Maybe that's why Subarus are stereotyped as a lesbian car in the US. Instead of grandstanding, they "get the job done" (as the Chappell Roan song goes).
Unless you’re in the Pacific Northwest, in which case, they are issued to every new resident (myself included). Traded in my Ford Explorer for a Subaru Outback and could not be happier.
AWD has regulatory advantage in Washington state (you're allowed to go over the mountain passes without snow chains in most conditions, even though a RWD or FWD vehicle with snow tires would be just fine in the same conditions), and Subarus are all AWD. I think that's part of it.
When I bought a new car last year, I made sure to get AWD -- not because I have any specific need for AWD performance, but because of this stupid special treatment in Washington law.
FWIW I bought a couple pairs of traction control cables for the Outback, just in case. I don’t know that I’ll ever need them, but better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them.
I’ve used them on 2WD vehicles in the past and they’re way easier to install than old-school chains, since they’re self-tensioning. Super Z cables, if anyone is interested.
> 100% remote is also a tough ask. I've noticed increasingly job roles are listed as 2-3 days in the office as companies awkwardly transition back to the office.
Keep in mind that at some places this is general policy, and that tech is given an exception. For example, my company has 2-3 days in-office, but everyone in tech is allowed to be 100% remote, even though that’s not written anywhere.
I was a studio recording engineer for about 7 years. I switched to software, and now I work in industrial global logistics. Job attributes I optimized for over the years: insulated from manufactured stress, autonomy, control over working hours, good relationships with my boss and coworkers.
My reasons for initially dismissing it is because to me it felt like it was taking the fun part of the job. We have all these tasks, and writing the code is this creative act, designed to be read by other humans. Just like how I don’t want AI to write music for me.
But I see where things are going. I tried some of the newer tooling over the past few weeks. They’re too useful to ignore now. It feels like we’re entering into an industrial age for software.
I do this with my friends sometimes. It’s definitely fun. But it’s even more low-key than what the author describes. There’s no big group chat or lighting talks, which would be weird cause we all know each other so well. And I don’t think we get together as much as the author. And there’s no main organizer. We didn’t even have dinner with others the last time. Just meeting at different beaches/parks/forests. Maybe a hang at a house one night.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
I see new frontend developers using <div> for building buttons, and I've even seen people using <div> for doing titles! Us greybeards don't know how much apparent knowledge we're sitting on, it seems.
In 2004 I was at a company that dedicated a team of people to rebuilding a bunch of tables (lots of financial data) in to styled divs because... "tables are depreciated". The fact that they couldn't pronounce or understand the word "deprecated" should have been enough of a clue to ignore this person, but they were the 'lead' on the web team, and... had been there longer than other people. Obviously they must know what they're talking about. Weeks later after having converted dozens of spreadsheets to divs (instead of just using tables) they were 'done', but it was a tremendous waste of time that ignored all the semantics of tables. I was asked to 'help out' on that project to meet the deadline and refused, citing that it was not just stupid, but a big waste of time and against web semantics.
"table" was never deprecated in HTML at all, but was discouraged for general layout (we were aware of this even in the early 2000s). But for representing tabular data - like... data in rows/columns from spreadsheets (with column headers and such)... HTML tables were absolutely the right (only?) way to present this.
I recently discovered our frontend widget library draws an SVG to implement Radio instead of using <input type="radio">. I was looking at it because they forgot to add a "disabled" attribute.
Best case I'm hoping it's because they were required to get an exact design, but they really should have pushed back on that one if so.
And for the ones that remember to implement middle-mouse click to open new tabs, forgets that one can also do CTRL+click to open in new tab, or vice-versa.
Seems to me that we have redundant mechanisms for specifying semantics: tags and attributes (and classes as a specific attribute). Seems to me that tags are really just syntactic sugar for things like roles. Tables in particular are easily abused.
Of course I use the tag names, because they're idiomatic. But I feel like a newbie who identifies divs as the only true structure builder has a proper developer's intuition for separating presentation from content.
As long as you think about semantics and accessibility and does the extra work to add those things, then not really.
But why add those extra things when we already get those for free by doing <h1> and then customizing the style? Everything you'd need to manually add, automatically works fine then, so seems like a no-brainer to avoid putting more work on your table.
div-as-button/link leaves a lot of default interaction behaviour on the table. You'll need to handle all the keyboard interactions yourself, all the accessibility markup, etc.
For the longest time I railed against the fact that I am mortal, and my time is finite. I wanted to squeeze everything I could into my days, and I would feel guilty about projects I didn’t get to. This is despite having a wife, kids, house, full time job.
Eventually I burned out on programming-based side projects. I switched to activities that do not require staring at a screen. So I build analog electronics, study music.
Then I had a heart attack. My mortality and the fragility of life was never more clear. I accepted that I could die, and let go of all the mental baggage I was holding onto.
I’ve felt ‘cured’ ever since. I don’t recommend anyone get a heart attack. But I do think people fall into patterns, and get stuck inside of them. Sometimes a “pattern interrupter” can break us out.
That was a good perspective though- I grew up hearing Citroen makes garbage.
Side note- The vast majority of pollution is from industry. By a lot. That is where the finger needs to be pointing. Pointing the finger at SUV drivers distracts from the real issue and keeps us blaming each other.
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