- My understanding is that while wool knitting may have been a later invention (and that's disputed) and gloves a need for colder climates than the majority of the Roman Empire (assuming just function over fashion, and the Romans didn't seem immune to fashion), the Romans still had some forms of knitting (and/or "nalbinding" if you want to get extremely technical, but knitting seems a useful enough catch all word), it was just mostly knitting of things that weren't wool. One of the related theories I've seen is that the dodecahedrons may have been for knitting gold and surviving gold necklaces with intricate knit patterns do exist. (That theory maybe also helps explain why the dodecahedrons were often found among "jewelry boxes" and gold stashes.)
Also, even if the Roman Empire had wool knitting a lot of it wouldn't have survived archaeological records (textiles rarely do, which is a shame in general, and also arguably why there is so much bias against certain types of textiles in "historical records") and it seems hard to entirely dismiss the Roman Empire from having wool knitting given the extent of the Empire and how deep the history of wool knitting in the British Isles goes, at the very least, to which the Roman Empire had contact and trading.
- On the subject of (1) I wonder if a complication in this specific case might be a variant of the clbuttic Scunthorpe problem that the last name on the account that redeemed a bad gift card included the word "Butt" and an algorithm or underpaid reviewer (or both) flagged it also as a suspiciously named account.
(2) and (3) remain great questions without enough good answers.
- What's your decision tree for when you feel you need a SPA in 2025?
At least some of what you may not be getting in this space is how many developers right now seem to be hugely deprioritizing or just dropping SPA from their decision trees lately. Recent advances in CSS and ESM and Web Components such as View Transitions and vanilla/small-framework JS (ESM) tree-shaking/"unbundling"/importmaps give MPAs more of the benefits of a complex SPA with fewer of the downsides (less of a "mandatory" build process, smaller initial bundle load). It is easy to feel less of a need for "complex SPA" to be on your architecture options board.
- There was a similar, maybe apocryphal, story recently of academic archaeologists stumped about an ancient tool until a person pulled out a crochet kit to fidget with their hands near the exhibit and it became obvious that it wasn't a lost tool they just hadn't put it in the right context.
- "Dance your PhD" exists for several reasons, but one of them is to point out that the divorce between scholarship and art in some academic fields isn't "required" but an accident of how we separated colleges and how hard it can be to do multi-disciplinary work.
You can do both: prove the base case and reach across the aisle to the art college next door to see if someone is interested in the follow up "creative exercise". You can present both "here's what we can prove" and "here's an extrapolation by a skilled artist of what additional layering/contouring might have done".
- I don't have actual statistics, but some factors I can think of:
- New car leases sometimes require dealership-only maintenance.
- Car warranties sometimes imply upcharges may be allowed (such as labor fees) during warranty services if non-warranty maintenance wasn't handled by the dealership.
- New cars sometimes come with discount plans or service subscriptions for maintenance at the dealership.
- Maintenance at a single dealership still sometimes gets reflected in resale value, including trade-ins to that dealership and also some people and auctions will pay a small premium for "single owner, dealer maintained" cars.
Yeah, dealers are an interesting experience at times, but there's an interesting web of reasons that people still use those services.
- V2V (vehicle to vehicle) charging is a standard option supported by CCS and NACS. So far implementations are limited, with most of the current focus on V2H (vehicle to home) or maybe V2G (vehicle to grid). The Ford F-150 Lightning supports V2H but not V2V today. (Interestingly, the Tesla Cybertruck does support V2V.)
- The point of mentioning the driving modes is the reverse of "baby the pedal", let software do that for you. EVs are software-defined cars. They have modes that say "don't worry about efficiency, just waste as much energy as I want" and modes that say "balance efficiency with raw performance". In both you can pedal about the same and the car determines how to balance raw torque versus battery efficiency and regen breaking versus friction braking for you.
Many EVs are just as fun to drive in "balanced" modes as they are in "sport" modes, but your efficiency goes way up. Rental cars seem to think you want "sport" modes that are more inefficient because you want to rev that 0-60 more than you want better trip range. That's maybe a good way to sell the EV as fun to drive, but it's not a great way to sell the EV as useful for long trips.
The trick is the EVs already offer both experiences in their software (because they can, because that's how they work), you just unfortunately need to learn the manufacturer-specific ways to change driving modes to get the most of what you want out of a rental car rather than what the last customer wanted or what the rental company thinks you want without asking you. (If you want both experiences knowing how and when to change modes is even more critical.)
- The article points out that apparently Ford's plan for Europe is rebadging Renault's EVs, which sounds like just giving up on Europe in all but (brand) name.
- From my experience (driving one for more than a decade) an EREV is a step back at this point, and a worst of both worlds. Focusing on EREV models isn't going to keep Ford relevant in competition to Tesla and Rivian, much less most of what is going on in Europe and Asia today.
- Yeah, per the article Ford seems to have indeed decided that the current state of US politics mean that it can keep kicking the can down on the road on EVs, rebadge Renault's EVs as Ford to not entirely give up on Europe (but, uh, very much giving up on Europe manufacturing in everything but brand name still seems like giving up to me).
Ford presumably isn't going to also give up on the Mach-E, at least not it is not mentioned in this announcement, but yeah this signals a lack of confidence in America competing with the EV market.
(Ford's recent breakup with SK On, splitting custody on plants, presumably dropping the volume of batteries they are capable of producing, presumably is an influencing factor as well on giving up on the electric F-150.)
- The Volt was only "parallel" when running from gas. It was still serial in that when running from battery it only ran from battery, then switched to gas generating electricity, with some mechanical assisted torque in edge cases (usually only past highway speeds or "mountain climbing").
That was mostly because the electrical conversion from a gas generator is still so relatively inefficient and slow compared to a modern battery. The mechanical efficiency of gas engines is relatively better (which is why ICE has survived as a category for so long). Batteries are far more efficient at delivering high power on demand as needed for torque than a gas generator.
Any EREV is going to have that problem and experience those trade offs. It's a unfortunately defining part of the category. It's also why Chevy has said there's no real future in EREV power trains because they are a worst of both worlds situation with too many unfortunate trade offs to consider, such as needing to be parallel in gas-only operation edge cases to make torque requirements.
- Dealers certainly make less profit on EVs. The Dealer model was built around regular, required maintenance schedules as profit centers. EVs have far fewer moving parts and fluids with regular maintenance schedules.
Dealers are incentivized to sell more ICE than EVs for the good of their own profits. Ford and GM unfortunately can't cannibalize their relationship with dealers under current American regulations and so will feel a lot of pressure to somehow keep EVs "luxury" and low volume/high margin deals for the dealers so they feel less bad about the loss of maintenance profits.
At one point Ford was teasing building their EV division as a mini-startup with direct-to-consumer sales and no pressure to meet dealer needs/demands, because that would be the only true way to compete with Tesla and Rivian and others. That probably would have been the best interest for Ford EVs, but obviously just floating those rumors was enough to stop it by the number of dealers that are also shareholders in Ford. (A problem for Ford all the way back to Ford v. Dodge Brothers.)
- Level 1 and 2 charging are something of an equivalent to siphoning gas, and maybe too easily overlooked. Carry a wall plug and dryer plug adapter and you can plug in just about anywhere. RV plug in the camping area of a national park. Utility plug on the back of a work shed in the middle of nowhere.
Won't charge you fast, sure, but can be the difference to charge you enough to make it to the next stop, in some cases.
- It might have been affected by the driving mode you were in?
For instance, one pedal modes (across manufacturers) tend to much highly favor regenerative breaking over friction brakes. Of the models I've driven such modes often seem to give you better feedback in the sweet spots of the pedal curve when you are just rolling and not braking/accelerating.
Additionally, in my experience rental cars are more likely to be in sports modes when you pick them up (I think some of the rental car places may even do this as policy to make customers happier when they rent them?), and down shifting them to more balanced energy modes (Ford's is called "Engage") can mean a huge difference in practical range.
- You are forgetting "soccer moms". For some dumb reason America decided there were two genders "masculine" trucks and "feminine" vans. It still makes no sense, but it certainly seemed to sell a lot of trucks to misogynists.
- I find Web Components aren't as much of a pain to write if you ignore the Shadow DOM. You don't need the Shadow DOM, it is optional. I don't think we are doing ourselves too many favors in how many Web Component tutorials start with or barrel straight into the Shadow DOM as if it was required.
- Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey to help make that pinnacle Windows Phone keyboard. It's too bad SwiftKey itself became mostly a vector for ads for Microsoft.
- It's extra fun because the account it needs is a Microsoft Account because Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey for the lovely Windows Soft Keyboard in Windows Phone 7/8/10 and still accessible in Windows 11 even as form factors that make good use of it continue to disappear and people also don't learn that you can still switch it to "phone mode" for one hand swipe-typing because they don't have a device where they regularly need to type on a soft keyboard.
The big reason after years of SwiftKey use I finally uninstalled it is because it became too much of an ad vector for "you should use Mobile Edge and have you tried our new Bing Mobile app yet". I also haven't used it in a couple of years, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't have some Copilot button or buttons somewhere now.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...