It's a cost-benefit analysis like many other things. There are limited resources, they should be spent on investigating cases that have a chance of getting closed.

Cold cases might get reopened because of advances in technology or other changes over time.

Not saying please or having to be polite is often simpler.

Knowing and using etiquette is often more effective.

Nothing in the article suggests forgoing politeness or etiquette. The grace with which a communication is delivered is orthogonal to it's explicitness.

If we're comparing notes, I traded in my Model 3 for a BMW i4 and I couldn't be happier. It's a nicer car and more fun to drive!

JD Power and Consumer Reports both rate BMW above average.

BTW, my impression of BMW maintenance from prior decades is expensive and not great reliability. I care about it less now with EVs because there is so much less regular maintenance. No oil changes, no brake pad changes, etc.

Yep. EVs are a once in a lifetime chance for EU and Chinese manufacturers to catch up again or even leapfrog Toyota. Until recently Toyota was 20 years ahead wrt reliability and upkeep.

Soon, battery weight and performance will be the main differentiator of vehicles.

That is no more true than it was for ICE vehicles.

Steering, braking, balance, suspension, Infotainment, UI and controls, and internal materials will all still vary widely for brands and manufacturers.

Not sure they care all that much about reliability. Just being cheap enough is enough

> Soon, battery weight and performance will be the main differentiator of vehicles.

People don't buy Corolla for performance. And even low-end EVs are "enough" thanks to the power coming on from the very lowest RPM. Aside from range all the characteristics are not performance based. It must be big enough, have expected comforts and look nice.

Sorry, I should clarify, I mean battery weight and battery performance. The other components won't be a major differentiator. They can be cheap and still be reliable enough.

The specs that we compare when EV shopping are mostly just how well the battery works (range, charge time, peak output, lifespan, power to weight, cold weather performance).

Counterpoint. After driving my Model 3 in 2022, a colleague bought his first non-BMW: a Tesla Model 3. His only complaints were the seat and the handling. Everything else he liked better about the Tesla.

This from someone who owned three or four BMWs.

You can get a BMW for $40k or $120k. Big spectrum. As another datapoint, I have one of those higher tier BMWs and even the top trim Lucid's interior feels like a downgrade compared to my car. The $50-80k BMWs also feel cheap and crappy to drive when I've tested them. Tesla can't compete on anything except their ADAS which is superior.

If you're transitioning from a barebones 330i then yeah the Tesla is probably better. But it's not even close when you compare to the top end German vehicles.

Thanks for the counter counter point. I actually don't know which models BMW were in this guy's past. The last one was either a 5 or 3 series, four doors, not an M.

Late reply, but did your colleague go from ICE BMWs to an EV Model 3? For me, zero maintenance and no more stopping at gas stations (you need a charger at home) were HUGE advantages to switching to an EV. So I also really liked switching from ICE to Tesla EV.

But I also much prefer my EV BMW to my previous Teslas. Nicer to drive, nicer features (better sound, HUD, sunroof), hardware controls, door handles that you can open with either hand, better in weather (no rain in the trunk).

My family complains the i4 has a smaller cabin, but the driver's seat feels just fine to me. :D

I would hope a car that costs ~$30k more is nicer and more fun to drive.

You said: alcohol can be an amazing way to clean screens.

It's still true that: alcohol is a very good way to destroy the old glossy screens.

"Universal design" or "design for accessibility" will give you lots of examples of constraints that are not "commonly" needed ending up having much wider application and benefiting many other people.

Some oft-cited examples are curb cuts (the sloped ramps cut into curbs for sidewalk access) and closed-captioning (useful in noisy bars or at home with a sleeping baby).

There are many examples from the web where designing with constraints can lead to broadly more usable sites- from faster loading times (mobile or otherwise) to semantic markup for readers, etc.

Ah, this raises 2 important nuances:

- How severe is the impact, and

- How close is the default state to the constraint

Kerb cuts help everyone. Kids, the elderly, disabled people, and anyone distracted by their phone are all less likely to fall on their face and lose a tooth.

Web accessibility helps websites go from unusable for disabled people, to usable.

On the other hand, when a dev puts a website on a diet it might make it load in 50ms instead of 200ms for 99.9% of users, and load in 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes for 0.1%.

So it doesn’t impact anyone meaningfully for the site to be heavy. And for that edge case 0.1%, they’ll either leave, or stick around waiting and stab that reload button for as long as it takes to get the info they need.

As shameful as it is, web perf work has almost zero payoff except at the limit. Anyone sensible therefore has far more to gain by investing in more content or more functionality.

Google has done Google-scale traffic analysis and determined that even a 100ms delay has noticeable impacts on user retention. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, over 50% of visitors will bail. To say that there is no payoff for optimization is categorically incorrect.

The incentives are there. Web developers are just, on average, extremely bad at their jobs. The field has been made significantly more accessible than it was in decades past, but the problem with accessibility is that it enables people who have no fundamental understanding of programming to kitbash libraries together like legos and successfully publish websites. They can't optimize even if they tried, and the real problem for the rest of us is they can't secure user data even if they try.

This test was a while ago - it’d be interesting to see if it’s still the case and if the results reproduce. But still let’s consider that Google is Google and most websites are just happy to have some traffic.

People go to Google expecting it to quickly get them info. On other sites the info is worth waiting an extra second for.

At Google scale, a drop in traffic results in a massive corresponding drop in revenue. But most websites don’t even monetize.

They’re both websites but that’s all they have in common.

If you are a hobbyist hosting your own website for fun, sure, whatever. Do what floats your boat, you're under no obligation for your website to meet any kind of standard.

The vast majority of web traffic is directed towards websites that are commercial in nature[1], though. Any drop in traffic is a drop in revenue. If you are paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to provide a portal wherein people visit your employer's website and give them money (or indirectly give them money via advertisement impressions), and shrug your shoulders at the idea of 50% of visitors bouncing, you are not good at your job. But hey, at least you'd be in good company, because most web developers are like that, which is why the web is as awful to use as it is.

[1]The only website in the top 10 most visited that is not openly commercial is Wikipedia, but it still aggressively monetizes by shaking down its visitors for donations and earns around $200 million a year in revenue. They would certainly notice if 50% or even 10% of their visitors were bouncing too.

I think you're thinking about git as a separate thing from the IDE.

I love using IJ + git because there are no seams in between edit and commit. For instance, with IJ, I could easily split every other line of a change into separate commits.

Maybe there's a way in git to stage only certain parts of a diff, but I'd have to go an learn another flag or command that I'm going to forget by the next time I need to do it again.

Also with IJ, I just glance at my main branch tab and the highlighting tells me what commits aren't in my checked out feature branch.

Two small examples but there are many more and it adds up.

git add -i is the thing you'd have to learn.

I do that at the CLI most of the time and I'd say I'm quite experienced with it, but I still prefer IntelliJ when it gets complicated.

I felt really silly that the answer is just adding a "-i".

But then I tried it and...WHAT?! Git is an endless rabbit hole of complexity.

You're right. A good postmortem/root cause analysis would START from "unwrap" and continue from there.

You might start with a basic timeline of what happened, then you'd start exploring: why did this change affect so many customers (this would be a line of questioning to find a potential root cause), why did it take so long to discover or recover (this might be multiple lines of questioning), etc.

The diffs are the biggest reason I use it (beside the 3-way diff, I can't live without: blame, optimize imports, all the editor functions inside the diff, diff files/commits/branches).

Beyond that: separating into change lists (staging changes by line inside a file) and the graphical presentation and filtering of the commit history (highlighting what commits are in/out of your branch, show the git history of a section or line of code, show repo files at a commit)

I don't think the distinction is animate/inanimate.

Submarines sail because they are nautical vessels. Wind-up bathtub swimmers swim, because they look like they are swimming.

Neither are animate objects.

In a browser, if you click a button and it takes a while to load, your phone is thinking.

Even potluck parties tend to be better on average when someone or a few people are "in charge". In my experience, even when people are just getting together for dinner out, there are people who step up more to organize.

Are you sure there aren't certain people driving these "informal" parties?

In Brazil, you are expected to bring food or drinks when you are invited as a guest to a party. If you stay until the end, you are also expected to help clean up the place. Guests will often take over certain parts of the party without even asking, such as preparing drinks, taking care of the barbecue, serving people, or going to the store to buy more drinks.