I really wanted to pull the trigger on the Lightning, but it really was Too Big (won't even really fit in my driveway). Instead I picked a PHEV Escape SUV that'll become my wife's in 4-5 years (so we retain gas ranges on at least one vehicle) and I'll reevaluate what I can get in electric then. The Escape PHEV, however, has all the other advantages except the instant torque; I've never had a vehicle so able to finely control power and the eCVT smooths out the kind of lagging a conventional transmission has on hills and the like. Using zero gas for an hour-long drive is a nice plus, too.

The future of cars, including and maybe especially fast cars, is exciting.

That's revisionist, both in terms of "for quite long" (food insecurity was common in America until about World War II, and massive food surplus available at consumer-cheap prices begins a little later; other countries still suffer from food insecurity today) and that people haven't grown fat when able to do so. Being wealthy enough to the point of being able to be fat has been A Thing for a thousand years. We know this because the medieval Catholic Church felt that they had to preach moderation; if they had to preach it, it's because it wasn't happening as a universality.

Advertising absolutely works on you regardless of how smart or educated you are.

How it has to work to do that can change, but the idea that advertising only impacts dumb people is pernicious as shit.

As for performance on my iPhone 15, on a 5G (not 5GUW) network, it loads in a second and a half; I just checked. I have some complaints with what RN does in terms of affordances but performance isn't a problem.

Trump's running as hard as he can (which isn't very, he isn't convincing) from the proudly published (and terrifying!) Project 2025 stuff, but they aren't running from him, and there are reasons for that.

Coupling that genuine brevity with the ability to avoid serious backwards-compatibility problems makes this charge feel pretty outlandish, TBH.

Caveat: I don't live in the Bay Area, though the Boston area isn't exactly cheap.

It's very hard to find something with the build quality and affordances of a Mac. Razer makes a good machine but tbh I'd be embarrassed to bring one to a meeting, and I don't like how newer Thinkpads feel and I don't trust Framework to exist in a few years. It's then complicated while seeking reasonably comparable specs--and I'm not a "oh Apple Silicon sounds warmer" sort of person, amd64 is just fine with me, but AMD's high-end IGPs generally keep pace with base-model Macbooks, and start to fall behind pretty significantly when you move up to a Pro or a Max. You can add a discrete GPU, but, me, I like battery life, and mobile dGPUs are a mess of compromises anyway.

Even if you get over that hurdle, I think Windows feels bad when you're using a touchpad. They haven't cracked that one despite how long they've had to work on it. I wouldn't want to work on a Windows laptop without an external trackball; I carry one with my Mac but rarely use it unless I'm going to be working for a pretty long stretch and I want to save my hands.

Windows is still generally my pick for desktops for a lot of reasons (I don't even dual-boot Linux right now!) but this kind of sneering is weird and uncalled-for.

I've built systems that exist today both ways. There are reasonable arguments for both. Please don't be weird.

I think it's almost exactly the opposite: I'd rather use cloud-specific tooling on clouds but k8s is a Better OpenStack on bare metal. It provides a standardized layer upon which generally-reasonable tools can operate without thinking about it much. There is a cost factor--it doesn't need to be a high one, though, and it's also a forcing function into stuff like "actually thinking about redundancy" ahead of time.

I've deployed in production everything you described and unless I was optimizing, as you are, for cut-to-the-bone opex and personal stress when it breaks bad (which is not a judgment call but it is certainly not the only reasonable decision to make; investing more in operations to have more "bounce" when things goes bad is not a bad thing), a reasonably thought-out k8s environment is going to be easier than shell scripts from the 90s once I need to have anyone who isn't me take over a problem.

The Percona Everest operator doesn't look as full-featured for Postgres, which is the only database I typically use, so this isn't for me, but might be a little better if you're a MySQL user (though that's just me guessing).

I'm not sure that's really true. I ask, verbatim, "what sucks about this job?" to everyone in the interview loop and I frequently get high-signal responses from it. What you're saying might be true in some places and for some (probably earlier-career) roles, but that's signal too.

> Comes off very insecure and gives you no useful information.

This one is true to a point, and probably depends on how it's asked (and whether you actually are insecure). Working mostly in smaller companies and startups, interviews have generally ended up at the CEO level, and a "what's your funnel look like for this role?" has never gone poorly while getting me pretty clear signal on whether I should toss this one in the trash or not.

(ULID representations also are shorter because they use a wider character set, which is nice though not critical.)