The time/attention it takes to engage with written content can be a barrier for me. The hands-free experience of listening to something is so convenient, I find I engage with audio far more often than written text.

The only major downside of audio is the challenges around notetaking, and recording the snippets of info I want to hold onto.

Elon said himself that busses have 5x the operating cost of robo-taxis (1$ vs 20¢ per hour), but failed to mention that a typical bus carries 25x people. Presumably the cost delta is due to payroll for a human operators & janitors, so if busses already have 5x max throughout per $ in a worst-case comparison, why not put more energy into driving down costs on the more efficient modality?

I imagine it would be an easier problem to solve too, as you could could define constraints on your operating environment. Dedicated travel lanes, rail, and preprogrammed routes seem like they'd massively reduce the complexity of the problem.

I could also envision a decent financial argument for moving from a customer base of general-consumers to one of cities & local govt. If a 5x operating cost reduction is feasible, I could see "public transit automation" making for a pretty compelling capital project.

Most mapping apps seem to blend navigation & discovery into a single experience that winds up being worse at both.

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Full/Hybrid
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Ruby/Rails, Go, JS/React, AWS, Terraform (all used professionally) w/ hobby experience in Elixir & other BEAM languages
  Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/3L7xdq7
  Email: contact  henrynelsonfirth  com

Full-stack engineer with nearly a decade of total professional experience, and 2+ years of experience working in each of the following domains:

- Front-end React projects w/ an internal npm package repo

- Back-end Ruby/Rails monoliths

- AWS/Golang serverless microservices

- Engineering Management

I also have a strong interest in Elixir and other BEAM languages, and have been staying active as a full-stack Elixir hobbyist for 5+ years while bouncing between different languages/domains professionally.

While open to all opportunities, I am particularly interested in using Elixir professionally full-time :)

(Edited for formatting)

https://pkl-lang.org/index.html

In these situations, giving me something that doesn't work (even if I wind up being forced to rewrite it) is actually kinda helpful. The faster I get my hands dirty and start actually trying to build the thing, the faster I usually get it done.

The alternative is historically trying to read the docs or man pages and getting overwhelmed and discouraged if they wind up being hard to grok.

Like many things in America, the government is lobbied to create an unnecessary problem by private companies who aim to profit off of solving that problem.

When stresses of work/life pile up, the inability to free myself from the unceasing car noise to find some tranquility can feel downright overwhelming at times.

This is possibly (if not likely) moreso a result of creating our terraform modules in a suboptimal way due to insufficient expertise than a shortcoming of Terraform itself.

It is also largely a result of having a backlog of scheduled redactors that is longer than I'd care to admit.

I see much more clearly how something like this could be extremely useful.

After reading the title, my assumption was that Pkl was yet another newer, better configuration language (a la TOML), but now that I've read the article, it sounds like it's more a language for _generating_ config.

Unless I'm mistaken, it sounds like an abstraction on top of your config files meant to help you build & re-use configuration in a more standardized way, rather than yet another config language into itself.

A problem space I'm familiar with is having a bunch of Terraform or Cloudformation configuration you want to share/repeat in multiple projects. Doing-so can get hairy quickly, as the path of least resistance is to copy-paste a bunch of config you barely understand from some other project, and then perform trial-and-error surgery to find and change a couple of lines to suit your project.

Is Pkl designed to help address that sort of problem? Or am I missing something?

Namely, I wonder if the tethered battery and lack of dedicated controller exists to prepare people for a future where their headset plugs into an iPhone (or iPad or Mac), which then serves as a battery, co-processor, and input device.

With iPhone & iPad, you had products that people could very easily imagine using. The iPhone was the combination of three technologies people were already familiar with, the iPad was the iPhone, but bigger.

It is really difficult to imagine using a VR headset if you haven't used one before -- there simply isn't a frame of reference. And even if you have used an Oculus or a SteamVR headset, an interface built around eye & tracking is still completely novel.

I think a lack of mass-market appeal is something that is inherent to a product like this, which makes it a very different product from a marketing perspective than iPhone or iPad.

It makes sense to me that, rather than trying to copy-paste the iPhone or iPad launch, Apple would instead put out an exclusive halo product early, allow a few years for the public to build familiarity with it and settle on the core use-cases, all while they observe and iterate behind the scenes on a more accessible version for a wider audience.

Jose's elixirconf keynote this year did a great job providing details on how how this new type system works:

https://youtu.be/giYbq4HmfGA?si=ZYf1g_GXr4LmHQ3H

Admittedly I had the same reaction you did as I was reading the article. All I could think was how poorly these approaches would scale when the need arose for even modest ly complex state management.

While the body of the article doesn't address this, IMO the title does. I think it's generally good advice to suggest only reaching for the tools intended for complex environments when they become necessary, not before.

Shifting car-centric suburbs and exurbs to a walking-friendly lifestyle is a massive challenge, but that only covers 20% of the population.

The remaining 80% of the population already live in urban areas that, in many cases, are already very livable car-free, and are a few small policy changes away from taking a massive step forward.

Even a couple large municipalities legalizing accessory dwellings, abolishing parking minimums, and rezoning to allow business conversations of existing residential properties could have a sizable impact.

Additionally, many of the most expensive areas in the country are ones that are designed specifically to support walkability, which is a strong indicator of unmet demand for such areas.