The problem is you end up paying More for what you want because what you want doesn't align with everyone else. These cars are massed produced, so anything deviating from the popular norm ends up becoming custom and costing more, even if the custom design is less complex then the popular design.
Given that everyone else wants those bells and whistles, ironically you get more by paying less which means logically more bells and whistles is the better deal.
A logical person would in turn want the cars with "too much stuff". That is unless you're willing to pay more for less stuff.
> Given that everyone else wants those bells and whistles
I'd argue that almost nobody else wants all those bells and whistles, but most people want a couple of them. So you wind up with all of them, because people will walk away from a vehicle that doesn't have what they want more than walk away from a vehicle that has too many things they don't.
I like/use all of the features that the parent listed. There are _some_ dumb features, on my car, but most of them I quite like and are a large part of why I bought my car and not a cheaper model/trim.
And manufacturers have gotten really good at spreading the most popular features among multiple upgrade packages. You want heated seats and blind-spot monitoring? That's going to be two separate packages that include tons of features you don't really want.
There might be an option to only add the two specific features but that means a custom order that will take months to arrive and probably won't end up saving you much money anyway.
Nah... it's like with dumb SUVs - do you think that everyone wants them? Or the demad was created because it was better for the makers to make them (with relatively lower increase in cost they can charge more for the end product)? Tied with and thanks to Corporate Average Fuel Economy…
In my circle I don't know anyone wanting "infotainmant" - just a regular car to which I can connect my mobile hassle-free without dumb TV screen smack in the middle of the car...
Same goes for mobile phones - most of the people I know want to have regular sized phones (~5-5,5") but now... it's easier to smack ~7" screen to the roof-tile (that they call "phone") and sell at a premium...
SUV's are very popular among women - 43% of buyers. The industry research says that women feel safer driving them - the size makes them feel more protected, and the ride height lets them see the road much better. (Lest it go unsaid, women are on average less tall than men)
These are the reasons my wife cites preferring her Honda Pilot to her previous cars.
I'm sure nothing I have to say is news, but it bears repeating that the common excuses for driving an SUV are either selfish or irrational.
The only advantage SUVs offer in safety is that they're likely to flatten the other car in a crash. Aside from size, the characteristics of an SUV make safety worse—they handle badly, tend to roll, and their design is unsafe to pedestrians and cyclists—so buying an SUV makes the roads as a whole less safe. People buy SUVs to avoid being killed by SUVs. It's a negative-sum arms race.
SUVs have atrocious visibility, and this has its cost in blood. They are so high off the ground that it's impossible to see what is near to the vehicle. Thousands of children are injured every year from drivers not seeing them over the hood. Hundreds are killed. This kind of incident has a name: the frontover.
SUVs are a major cause of poor visibility. The need to see over other cars mainly exists because cars are so stupidly tall. Buying an SUV to see over other SUVs is another negative-sum arms race.
When I'm driving on the road, I'm totally cool with being selfish.
Driving is statistically one of the most dangerous things we do in life, and someone else being drunk/high/distracted/overly tired can end your life, or the life of a loved one, in an instant.
I don't feel bad driving a larger vehicle than other people. I will prioritize my safety.
The problem is that a good chunk of those drunk/high/distracted/overly tired are in the same type of vehicle, and cause disproportionate damage to those who do not or cannot afford a similar sized tank. Your point is a valid one, and I think it is more of a reflection of failure on the end of car companies and legislation...
Wouldn't the failure there be with the drunk/high/dusts/tired driver? Car companies are in the business of selling whatever makes shareholders the most money, and you can't legislature away bad decisions.
> Car companies are in the business of selling whatever makes shareholders the most money, and you can't legislature away bad decisions.
You can ”legislature away” socially bad decisions, at least at scale, by sufficiently shifting incentives. You can also “legislature them in” the same way.
E.g., you can create a light truck loophole in safety and economy regulations nominally intended, but not carefully bounded, to exempt vehicles with commercial use, and thereby incentivize manufacturers to expend enormous resources on propaganda to create demand for a new class of personal vehicles that fit into that loophole, shifting the market so that even after the loopholes don’t work the same way, the demand remains.
My point wasn't that legislation has no impact, of course it can move the needle. Many people will follow the rules simply because they prefer to, and others will because the legal punishment is enough of a deterant.
My point was that jumping from some people have wrecks because they drive drunk/high/distracted/tired to we need more legislation doesn't make any sense. If we want to inform the public of the risks of driving impaired we absolutely can do that, it doesn't require laws and punishment to help educate people.
Assuming we can legislate away bad decisions is effectively agreeing that we'd prefer the state is powerful enough to take away any decision we may want to make but that they disagree with. Why not just expect the government to help research the risks and inform us, trusting us to make the best decision for ourselves?
I don't think the assumption is that government is legislating away anything. The decisions are still up to the people, but the reward or consequence will be the byproduct of the legislation. Get a DUI, lose your license for 10 years. Have an incredibly good driving record, get great benefits(not the 5% off your insurance premium).
At best that legislatures away the car makers' bad decision of selling cars without seat belts and airbags.
My point was that you can't legislate away drivers' bad decisions. At best you can leverage the fact that many people would rather follow the rules, and that punishment will compel more to comply.
Yes, we are all helpless and changing anything is just too hard to actually do. 100 people die every day in car accidents, but literally nothing can be done about this without changing something so that means literally nothing can be done.
I'm kinda really fucking sick of this particular American mindset towards cars, school shootings, gerrymandering, corporate greed, and basically everything else that sucks about our society.
I never said nothing can be done. I'm raising the view that solutions, and even government intervention, doesn't have to mean legislation.
Research and education is a huge help, for example. What I can't get behind is the idea that we're all such helpless children than only government punishment can keep us from ruining everything. What happens when the authority given to that government lands in the hands of a person or pay with whom you fundamentally disagree?
Of course the ultimate accountability would be with the driver, but a) there is little to no accountability left on the road anymore and b) changing widespread behavior patterns is usually a top down thing. You can certainly legislate in a way that either rewards or punishes types of behavior(good/bad driving), or nudges car makers to scale down models/increase safety. Higher gas prices were enough to get me out of a big truck.
Similar to a separate thread here, I just can't get behind the idea that we as a society are helpless without governments "nudging" us in what they see as the right direction.
First and foremost we need to educate or population better, but from there the government should rarely need to go beyond good faith research and trusting it's people to generally make the best decision for themselves.
I understand being afraid of a car crash. I can understand doing the wrong thing out of fear. Driving an SUV is wrong, but hardly an unforgivable sin.
But I don't think you can be let off that easy. You seem to have come up with some way to technically admit you are in the wrong without really confronting it. What is "totally cool" supposed to mean? Does being "totally cool" with something mean it is moral, or does it just mean you don't feel angry about it? Why would you defend a decision based on whether or not it makes you "feel bad"? These words are weaselly. They dismiss the moral element of your actions without really addressing it.
If you're in the right, prove it. If you're in the wrong, admit it.
That's not how it works. You can't prove morality the way you can prove math. Not unless everyone involved accepts an infallible point of reference, like a book or a pope--and even then there are differences in interpretation.
All moral questions, like, "is it moral to drive an SUV?", are variants of the Trolley Problem. Whichever choice you make ends up hurting some people and helping some others. But different people have different moral axioms about how to calculate the balance of that equation.
For example, I could probably save 5 people right now by sacrificing myself and giving away my organs. The fact that I don't means that I value my own life more than those of 5 strangers.
In the same way, driving an SUV to reduce one's own risk is not surprising.
Your own morality may lead you to different choices. That's OK. My whole point is that there is no "correct" morality.
You can try to convince others to adopt your morality (which we call "proselytizing"); you can say that some beliefs are unpopular in this society (and thus demonized); you can even look down on people who don't share your morality (we all know people like that). But you can't say that they are objectively wrong. That's not how morality works.
That attitude is the exact reason roads in the U.S. are much less safe. Cars are oversized, heavy and completely lethal for any pedestrians or cyclists. It's just a very dangerous trend that will cause more people to die.
Idk why you're being downvoted. It's well documented and obvious fact that SUVs and tracks are lethal to pedestrians and cyclists because of their hostile low visibility design.
By choosing to drive those in populated areas you're signalling a total disregard for lives of others.
Personally I rather die than kill a child, and SUVs are far worse in that regard. Despite making up 15% of accidents in this[1] study, they represent 25% of fatal accidents. A child is 8 times more likely to die if struck by an SUV according to the same study. Empirically, SUV front blind spots are crazy and if you have a young child ask them to stand in front of your car with measuring tape while you’re in it. Very easy to imagine pulling out without seeing them and crushing them to death. The problem is even worse if you have a short partner. I felt blind when I drove my dad’s.
Even if we go for the selfish perspective, rollover rates for SUVs are intrinsically higher, and it looks like the Hilux in particular hasn’t bothered fixing this design flaw in 9 years[2]. And that additional braking distance can be the difference between a massive headache from rear ending, or worse.
Driving defensively will increase your odds of survival per mile far more than any additional metal will.
And also, only 5% of all accidents are two rolling cars collisions, and a not small part of that are parking collision.
The average number of death per km was decreasing until covid in Europe and countries that did not buy into the SUV trends, but started increasing in the US in the early 2010s and correlate with the percentage of SUVs.
That's we need regulation. We are slowly approaching "let's drive a tank" territory. SUVs make the world dangerous and scary for people outside of cars: pedestrians, cyclists, other small personal vehicles users.
It's very sad to see people being cool with that but I understand it's rational. You will likely not go to jail if you kill someone because of low visibility. The victim blaming culture will even try to convince you it's not your fault that you haven't seen a pedestrian or cyclist from the vehicle you have chosen to drive.
> SUVs make the world dangerous and scary for people outside of cars: pedestrians, cyclists, other small personal vehicles users.
Unfortunately the way a lot of American culture works means that this is actually the desired outcome. Cars today are basically advertised on their pedestrian killing prowess and, unsurprisingly, have even been used as weapons of terror quite frequently recently.
My annoyance with it is that this mentality is exported outside. I'm "totaly cool" with Americans driving tanks on the roads and killing each other, I'm not fine having to deal with this shaite outside of the USA...
>the common excuses for driving an SUV are either selfish or irrational.
I don’t know if you’d call my Subaru an SUV or not, but daily I’m transporting multiple kids, a cello, football gear, groceries, various things for work - there are lots of reasons why people need larger vehicles.
I have a VW CC. Four door sedan with huge trunk space. I've driven cross country multiple times, hauled lumber in it, 30 bags of mulch, you name it. The idea that you need an SUV to carry a lot of stuff just doesn't match reality.
The other major safety advantage of the SUV is in the single-car crash (hitting a tree, pole, etc). SUV weight provides a significant safety margin here. The single car crash is nearly 1/2 of all crashes and responsible for the majority of auto crash deaths!
So your statement about SUVs making the roads less safe is demonstrably false. SUVs are the safest class of vehicles on the road, and if everyone drove an SUV, there would be fewer auto crash deaths overall.
Also, the newest SUVs have lower rollover death rates than the newest cars.
In terms of pedestrians, we should implement policy changes like more sidewalks and elevated crossings, lower speed limits and traffic calming features in pedestrian areas, tougher distracted driving laws and enforcement, and pedestrian air bags on all vehicles.
How are you going to implement elevated crossings in a suburban neighborhood, where the soccer moms in their monster SUVs can't see squat, and routinely speed? Kids are crossing multiple places; we can barely get ADA type curb cuts at the crossings.
Oh, and "pedestrian airbags" only help you avoid hitting the windshield. On most trucks and SUVs you don't even make it that far. You're just squashed like roadkill on their grills.
I think the elevated crossing is the type where the crosswalk is raised and forms an effective speed bump requiring drivers to slow regardless of whether a pedestrian is present or not.
Heavy marketing was done to make them popular, and once they reached a certain threshold, their size created an arms race, since they blocked visibility for everyone not also in an SUV.
> Weird that heavy marketing would finally penetrate my brain the same year we had our first kid.
Nah, but that marketing, and the financial incentives which motivated it, and the arms race from a critical mass of larger vehicles affecting visibility because of it are why minivans and SUVs (the former popular first and then the latter later because of when each worked as a regulatory dodge) bevame the choice for those needs, which were once filled by station wagons.
I’m an SUV owner myself for very similar immediate reasons to the ones you cite. Nothing about that interferes with my ability to understand that the market context within which those preferences call for that result is a product of specific, well-documented interplay between regulation and profit-seeking business behavior over several decades.
You sound like you know what you are talking about but I am not following. As a consumer I had a choice of vehicle (I could have bought a sedan or a station wagon or a minivan) and I picked what I wanted.
You are not following because you are looking only at your decision at the moment of buying, and not everyone else's decisions over the past 35-ish years that have shaped, (even if we assume for a minute that the massive marketing investment has had no direct impact on your personal preferences):
1. The set of vehicles on the road and thus what your experience in different vehicles will be like, e.g., in terms of road visibility, and
2. The mix of specific vehicle models and features of each that are actually manufactured and available at the time you made thaf decision.
As uncool as they are, as a former minivan owner they are the most practical thing ever. From hauling kids to hitting home Depot for some DIY (with the rear seats removed), having two sliding doors and being able to swallow 4x8 sheets or a washing machine -they are hard to beat.
> and the ride height lets them see the road much better.
Ah... and then everyone will get a SUV with similar mentality and then we will get SUV-extra even higher and "sturdier" to feel even safer?
FFS... world is not hostile, riding in compact city-car is not harmful. At best it's the mentality that "everything outside wants to kill me" o_O Get a tank maybe?
I do the same with my Honda Fit. Desks, doors, 2×4s, bicycle, 44U rack… It's true I can't fit a whole sheet of plywood, but most SUVs have the same skinny-door problem.
> most of the people I know want to have regular sized phones (~5-5,5") but now... it's easier to smack ~7" screen to the roof-tile (that they call "phone") and sell at a premium...
This has to do with the power they're trying to cram into the phones. We've pretty much gotten transistors as small as we can, but manufacturers still need to sell new phones and the way they've done that for years is increase compute and camera power.
AFAIR the CPU/APU size is quite small. What takes quite a lot of space is battery. And because things are less and less optimize we need more computing power which needs more juice. What's more - bigger screens require more power as well.
Why those big phones popular? Because CPU efficiency doesn't sell well but number do, so we have a race: more storage, more ram, more MP camera... and bigger screen. Those are the most visible and easiest to adjust things. And many people associate size with being "better"...
Does everyone else want those bells and whistles or have we come into that impression through some misinterpretation? I don't know anybody that wants all that shit. For those who do, upon the misadventure whereupon they are informed of the costs of overcomplicating I suspect there is a large proportion of people who won't want it in short order. I also suspect a large contingent of people who buy into the marketing and upon facing reality, are silently disappointed. And finally people who are somehow insensitive to cost, and disappointment.
most people want a significant portion of those features but not everyone wants the same set of features. As a result all features as wanted by a significant portion of the customers.
This is why there are so many white cars being made and delivered to dealerships in the US. With production still extremely constrained, manufacturers are just limiting what colorways they ship. They know anything new will sell since the lots are so empty, and buyers will just take whatever comes in the latest shipment. Having been new car shopping (and ended up buying used), I'm amazed at how much the car buying process has changed for new cars. You used to be able to order a color and trimline, with factory options without any issues. Now dealers laugh at you and say "Here's what the factory MIGHT send us in the next 6 months. Want to put down a deposit?"
The only thing I like about this change is that there seems to be far less high pressure sales going on.
Not completely. Adaptive cruise control is becoming more common. Some Toyota's have it in all versions for some models. Mercedes A class you have to pay additionally for the basic models.
These studies aren't done wholistically and only done from a business perspective. That's why these studies are garbage they fail to account for the feedback effect.
Employers pay money to workers so that workers in turn can buy products from employers.
These studies only account for how much money Employers save when they get rid of workers and pay less money to workers.
Well when you get rid of workers or pay them less there's less money going around for workers to buy things from employers. These studies fail to account for this feedback.
It's the tragedy of the commons. If one company utilizes generative AI to reduce labor costs that company benefits. If all companies collectively do this, then everyone loses. It's the aggregate behavior of all companies acting in their own interest that ultimately causes them all to act against their own interests.
How is this any different from farm machinery 200 years ago or industrial automation 50 years ago? More production with far less people.
The same concerns that tithes would lead to massive unemployment. Instead, the economy and global living standards shot up and completely new fields opened up.
> How is this any different from farm machinery 200 years ago or industrial automation 50 years ago? More production with far less people.
The skill gap for in-demand labor was less back then. For instance, when farm machinery took off, unskilled farm labor could shift (at massive scale) into unskilled factory work.
You're not going to have a massive shift of low-end or midrange labor into high-end ML jobs. A lot (most?) people are just plain not capable of that. These technologies just kick a bunch of people down then pull of the ladder. Poverty, precarity, and inequality will increase. It'll be great for the ultra-wealthy, who will be able to keep more money (power) in their own pockets without sharing with the plebs.
But who knows, maybe that concentration of elite power will open up promising opportunities in the entertainment industry for the plebs to play squid games.
> You're not going to have a massive shift of low-end or midrange labor into high-end ML jobs. A lot (most?) people are just plain not capable of that.
People focus too much on job types. The reality it's actually worse. Even if eliminating one mid-range job[0] would create two more same-level jobs of different type - that is, the total number of jobs available would double - and even if the people automated away from the former were fully capable of retraining for the latter, they'll still be in a world of hurt, because this still means their entire career progression suddenly got reset.
In simple terms: your average Jane and Joe, 15-20 years in their mid-skill career accumulated some skills, experience and promotions, which allows them to get a mid-level salary. They built their life around it - bought a flat or a house sized right for their income, in the area sized right for their income. They started a family, and are caring and educating their kids in a way appropriate for their income. Suddenly, their entire occupation disappears, and they're forced to retrain. They manage to do that, and find new jobs in the new field. Guess what level those jobs are, and how much they pay? That's right, they're starting at junior level, with junior pay. Suddenly, their entire life is way too expensive for their income levels. The house, the area, the schools, the car - and by proxy, their social life, their kids' education - all of these need to be cut down. What didn't change, however, is their age and associated health problems.
As for the kids, they too are unlikely to benefit from the newly-opened fields, because they'll be too busy working their way out of poverty.
--
[0] - And note that unlike some earlier techology-induced job shifts, AI is threatening to displace the high-skill jobs first. Generative models won't displace your barber or the local handyman or the policemen on patrol. They are going to displace artists, clerks, possibly medical and legal techs, testers. They'll sooner displace programmers and lawyers and doctors before they'll be able to impact blue-collar jobs.
This is a nice story that omits one crucial detail of every such transition: the people who get automated away and the people who benefit from improved economy and standards of living are not the same people.
For the former, this is not a story of temporary hardships compensated in full by everything getting better few years down the line. For them, this is a story of life permanently derailed, their hopes and dreams destroyed, and the future of their kids taken away. They do not get to enjoy those promised benefits - they're too busy trying to salvage what little they can from their lives, after being suddenly dropped one or two levels down in socioeconomic class ladder.
The benefits? Sure, they come some years or decades later, and they're great for everyone else.
>How is this any different from farm machinery 200 years ago or industrial automation 50 years ago? More production with far less people.
The economy will for sure eventually get into some sort of equilibrium again. Things will become normal sort of like how the giant wealth inequality gap is super normal right now (likely caused by the same automation you're describing).
But there is so much different now then before. Additionally the velocity in which this replacement is occuring is much higher then industrial automation. Given the differences we cannot fully know the outcome.
It's easy and convenient to allude to examples in the past to predict the future, but that is not a data driven or logical conclusion. We don't know what will happen, and to ignore the possibility of a bad outcome is folly.
My wild guess is that there will be a temporary period of destabilization and this temporary period could last between one to two decades all the way to several generations. By then all the "problems" will be normalized; sort of like how the wealth inequality gap has been normalized and how it's basically become normal to see tons and tons of homeless people living in RVs in the bay area.
Except I'm sure that book fails to mention many examples where the long tail worked and instead focuses on where the long tail failed and biases it's own story around that.
Jetbrains suite of IDEs are basically long tails and they have huge utility in many areas that exceed other editors.
It's barely useable. I rely a lot on code completion, search capabilities and syntax checking while I code. It just saves a lot of time from having to execute the compiler and wait for it to check everything.
With good "plugins" or "features" all of these things happen async.
Like Godwin's Law, every discussion of Vim on HN will inevitably tend towards complaining that it doesn't have features that it has shipped with 10-30 years.
It doesn't have code completion. You can install it as a feature, but vim itself doesn't have that feature. There needs to be a law for someone either flat out lying or not knowing what they're talking about because godwin's law doesn't apply here.
Additionally installing these features on vim is a nightmare for various reasons. It can be done, and I've done it, but the experience is not as good as the more clunkier GUI IDEs. I'm all for a TUI IDE if the experience was as automated or seamless as jetbrains or M$, but such a app doesn't exist yet.
Sometimes it's faster to fix the code where the bug is, rather than trying to recreate it in your cushy dev environment. Sometimes that means driving somewhere and working through at 9600 baud over an RS-232 cable. Do this a couple times and you'll find that vi is quite usable--you just have to want it to be.
>Sometimes it's faster to fix the code where the bug is, rather than trying to recreate it in your cushy dev environment
Sometimes, but with single powerful IDE solutions from companies like jetbrains, setting up a "cushy" environment is barely any work.
>Sometimes that means driving somewhere and working through at 9600 baud over an RS-232 cable. Do this a couple times and you'll find that vi is quite usable--you just have to want it to be.
Of course if your network connections completely fail you have to use the serial console to fix it. There's no going around that. But the majority of developers don't even need to do this or don't even know what you're talking about as they only interact with cloud services nowadays.
Additionally a "cushy" environment doesn't preclude you from using serial console or using vim to do edits everywhere. VI in this sense is barely useable, it's basically the baseline necessity. You need it when all else fails. But it's not good to have it as your daily driver.
> Sometimes, but with single powerful IDE solutions from companies like jetbrains, setting up a "cushy" environment is barely any work.
I promise, installing a Jetbrains product on a traffic controller (which is what I was thinking of re: the field trip) would be a tremendous amount of work.
> The majority of developers don't even need to do this or don't even know what you're talking about as they only interact with cloud services nowadays.
Yes, and they're one geomagnetic storm away from being entirely useless. It might not be for everybody, but there's value in being able to work with a lean toolset.
>I promise, installing a Jetbrains product on a traffic controller (which is what I was thinking of re: the field trip) would be a tremendous amount of work.
Jetbrains isn't installed on a traffic controller. It's installed on your local machine. Both VSCode and jetbrains have something called "remote development" which allow you to develop on a remote machine as if it was local. It's similar to ssh and vim.
>Yes, and they're one geomagnetic storm away from being entirely useless. It might not be for everybody, but there's value in being able to work with a lean toolset.
A geomagnetic storm will render everything useless, I don't see how a vim user will be more protected then a vscode user.
Not everything, just things hooked up to long enough wires to induce significant current. Pretty much just the power grid and the copper communication networks. For instance, I've got a raspberry pi hooked up to some solar panels handling some gardening stuff for me, it'll be just fine.
Editors are irrelevant to that conversation, but people who are accustomed to relying on stacks with many dependencies will definitely find that they struggle more without the internet than people who keep their dependencies minimal. And it's not a cherry picked example, there are all kinds of cases where minimal dependencies = resilience. It doesn't mean you have to go around using punch cards or something, it's really just the emotional attachment to complex tooling that I'm calling out as a hazard here. You end up cultivating skills that are easily invalidated.
That’s your preference, which is fine. I started using extensions earlier this year, they were a little annoying to set up and don’t add much, I probably won’t do it again if I change machines.
That's because they call you "Daddy" in the bedroom.
There's actually sort of a real reason for this. In the traditional monogamous or even polygamous relationship throughout human history it's usually the Male taking care of the female. Women when seeking a relationship are sort of searching for a caretaker that has sort of father like qualities of having enough resources to take care of them, taking a dominant role... etc.
The relationship most similar to it is father and daughter I can sort of see why the linguistics have sort of merged.
Obviously, in the last century, things have changed and the etiquette of relationship dynamics need to be spoken of in a way that's more egalitarian.
But you can't completely deny millions of years of human anthropological behavior. If men usually played more dominant/caretaker roles in relationships in the majority of civilizations, then along that timescale certain behaviors become a bit ingrained biologically through natural selection. It's not surprising to see these attributes creep into language.
Poppycock. until recently, in agricultural societies, families (usually men) were choosing families to cement relationships with by trading children. what the woman (and frequently the men) wanted was mostly irrelevant. see https://scholars-stage.org/against-human-sexual-selection/
If "daddy" is a thing, it's because of frequent age differences, since pregnancy is extremely hard on your body (fatality rates as high as being a soldier in a warzone until the advent of modern medicine).
This language is unconventional for business even in the 90s. Additionally men wouldn't talk this way in front of women in Any time.
The difference now is it's less culturally accepted to talk like this even in casual situations even when just among men.
Plenty women objectify men by wealth and status and they refer to men this way even publicly. The cultural change is mostly one sided, skewed more towards not offending women.
For example, referring to men as Hunks or Chads is just not offensive at all. In fact it's a compliment. I feel it's almost entitlement if a girl gets offended by being called a babe.
This shows an inherent lack of understanding. Some men, starved of affection, feel nice when treated similarwly to women. I'd they have their ass grabbed, or they get car called, of whatever - it feels like a nice confidence boost.
However, it entirely overlooks the fact that for many women, this behavior is non-stop, and comes with the very important difference that men are inherently much stronger than women, which means that they constantly feel a lot more threatened and unsafe than men do in the same situations.
JS was designed in a week. He's completely right, it's just poorly designed. Javascript will always be around because of technical debt and habit. But that doesn't change the fact that Douglas is right.
Also nobody really uses javascript anymore. It's completely insane. We compile Typescript into javascript then run javascript. That should tell you something about javascript.
Which turns out to be exactly what you need to be productive writing software. People who obsess about type systems and try to solve everything within them create a whole new bag of problems.
StandardML is a counter-example. It has sound types but keeps them utilitarian and simple enough so people can’t easily overdo the typing. I’ve become very sick of the “type palaces” people construct (they remind me of “enterprise java” where people do stupidly complex stuff because they can).
I mean I could say C++ is just python with memory management macros.
We're getting into the domain of opinion here. I would say TS is different enough such that it's two different languages.
Programming with type checking and programming with plain JS is really different. A programmer without experience in types (ie plain JS) won't be able to pick up types that that quickly on average. Things like enums, Generics, sum types, product types, recursive types, really change the game by restricting what functions can do.
Typescript's devs define it as simply JS with types to the point that they even have a proposal to add those type constructs into JS at which point the syntactic difference would be very small indeed.
> Things like enums, Generics, sum types, product types, recursive types, really change the game by restricting what functions can do.
If only that were true. The reality is that if you can write it in JS, you can add TS types no matter how horrible or anti-pattern the code happens to be. The constructs you mention don't restrict what functions can do in any way at all.
> A programmer without experience in types (ie plain JS) won't be able to pick up types that that quickly on average.
The average JS dev seems to have a Java/C# background where types exist. Further, they seem bent on slowly transforming JS into one of those languages.
>For every single researcher, there are 10 other graduates and staff who would be willing to do their job for a fraction of the cost.
This is what unions are supposed to fix. If the researcher and 10 graduates are under a union the company has to literally pick the best one, not the cheapest one because the union guarantees reasonable pay.
Software engineers should do this. We got complacent with the high pay but we were never really in control. Recent layoffs would be less likely to happen were it not for unions.
fully agree - I've been mulling this over a lot recently, actually. It seems like the writing is on the wall in a couple ways (recent layoffs being a big one)
Given that everyone else wants those bells and whistles, ironically you get more by paying less which means logically more bells and whistles is the better deal.
A logical person would in turn want the cars with "too much stuff". That is unless you're willing to pay more for less stuff.