None of the points you make are wrong, it’s just a lot more uphill for hydrogen looking at the total picture. With almost every issue there is a way forward for hydrogen, but EVs are already significantly farther along the curve. It’s hard to overcome that kind of snowballing. Only time will tell!

It is great tech, but there are serious downsides too.

• storage and handling: Hydrogen is a tiny atom, so it leaks like nobody’s business. Even liquid hydrogen is terribly low-density which makes pretty much a hard limit on storage density, unlike battery tech which can at least hypothetically dramatically improve. Pressure vessels suck. They have to be crazy sturdy and roughly spherical which places major design limitations on vehicles that use them.
• distribution: EVs can limp by on sparse fast charging stations and home charging while better infrastructure builds out. Electrical supply is already ubiquitous. Who’s going to want a hydrogen vehicle (which you can absolutely already buy, nobody’s stopping you in the US at least) with so few fueling options? The upfront investment to bootstrap a market with hydrogen stations to the point of even competing with crappy EV charging is enormous.
• no onboard energy recovery: Regenerative braking is an incredible benefit on its own.
• industry synergy: EV manufacture benefits from tons of other industries investing in battery tech. The tide lifts all boats.

There are solutions as with any tech, but the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs. The least worst option tends to win.

And the whole human body, brain and all, can run on ~100 watts. Truly astounding.

Nope and yep. It’s an incredible tool, but it’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.

Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it’s just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.

Holy shit I think I have the same problem, mesh network and all. I assumed it was a driver issue; thanks for the pointer!

Don’t give Java the credit of inventing bytecode, it’s a much cooler concept than that

Bad code, yes, calling it ‘shit’, no.

Stuff like this is a big part of why software circles are seen as so hostile and unwelcoming to outsiders.

You can be completely clear and frank without resorting to insult, mild though it may be. Just because you and people most like you understand that calling their work ‘shit’ doesn’t reflect on them personally, doesn’t mean it’s not significantly exclusionary.

Now, obviously you can get to know your reports well enough to understand whom would take ‘shit’ well, but that doesn’t mean it’s not generally important to temper criticism with kindness. Kindness never has to mean holding back criticism, just avoiding stooping to insult.

“You’re dumb” is disrespectful, but “your code is shit” isn’t? How does the latter not reasonably imply the former?

Being respectful is taking the time to moderate “your code is shit” to something like “your code is not acceptable”. You might even go a modicum further into kindness with “there are aspects of your code I need you to improve”.

All express the same idea, some will leave the listener more open to internalizing the criticism.

That was before people had experienced consumerism. It doesn’t make sense to compare people existing without knowing of consumerist luxuries to asking people to give them up. Not saying it’s hopeless, but it is human nature. It’s animal nature. We’ve just moved ourselves into a world where those advantages have become disadvantages.

Yep, 2020

I suppose I don’t see what is conceptually challenging about chords; they’re just physically annoying and require memorization. Most people are used to control key chords at least, so emacs benefits from that. Whereas vim requires a deeper shift in thinking.

Memorizing chords is conceptually simpler than taking on a modal mindset. I sure got pissed at insert mode plenty of times while I was learning vim.

Thankfully this was during my college masochistically-acquiring-skills-that-make-me-feel-cool phase where I was also learning LaTeX, so I just focused on the future gainz. I’m so glad I did on both counts.

Sign language is speech, it’s just non-verbal speech.

Oh D-VHS, we didn’t deserve you.

The repair cost is ultimately the most significant, that’s true.

We’ll have to see how statistics play out in the long run: that’s where the non-anecdotal evidence for Toyota’s supremacy comes from.

Cheap cars definitely are more reliable if you pick the right brands. On all the other points it just doesn’t make enough of a difference to me to justify the enormous cost increase.

Our $10k used Camry is still kicking ass over ten years later and hasn’t ever needed work more extensive than replacing leaking struts. The reliability truly is astounding.

EDIT: But, let’s not talk about my camera-buying habits lol

For podcasts and audiobooks and even incidental music listening $10 panasonic buds go the distance for me.

When I’m sitting down to enjoy music at home, then it’s the $80 sony studio monitors. Still excellent value.

Give me my headphone socket back, phone makers :(

What do you mean? Payment isn’t anti-FOSS at all, it’s just a lot harder to make money when the source is libre.

It’s good exercise.

What’s being discussed here is the hiring of engineers rather than consumer choices. Hiring an engineer is absolutely an expression of trust. The business trusts that the engineer will be able to concretely realize abstract business goals, and that they will be able to troubleshoot any deviations.

AI writing code is one thing, but intuitively trusting that an AI will figure out what you want for you and keep things running is a long way off.