Yeah. I mean, I think "connecting deeply" gets oversold too, but my experience of a place (whether it's "authentic" or the country's biggest tourist trap or even the next town over) really isn't best summarised by how many facts I can recollect about it.
I'm also amused by the suggestion that Japanese Bach fans understand German culture more deeply than Germans (does this mean Westerners with moderately large anime collections understand the many nuances of Japanese culture better than the Japanese?!). I mean, I don't actually think most travel does connect deeply with foreign culture, but few travellers are left with such a shallow first impression of other countries they legitimately believe they've obtained deeper insights into a country than the average person who lives there by attending a performance of some cultural artefact from that country's history.
Also, for many people, travel is fun. If you find travel not fun, or reading about a place more fun, then more power to you. Some people find sex and relationships messy and inconvenient too, and if they prefer collecting stories and pictures that's fine - just maybe inadvisable to blog about how much more they've learned from the internet...
Agreed, I did a month long cultural homestay in northern Japan and got to deal with a bunch of mundane bits like laundry, grocery shopping, and trash day.
Indeed perhaps the most valuable lesson from travel is returning with the realization of just how poorly the generalizations and statistics describe the messy reality of a place. Everywhere has every sort of person
The trivia approach doesn't even work for most people - ask the wikipedia reader and the person who travelled to Turkey about it a year later and see who has actually retained some knowledge.
Connection is not education. It doesn't matter how deep your emotional connection is, it won't rise your education about it on itself. If you want, or need the education, you have to search for it, and you should do it from reliable sources, not just random locals telling who knows what.
The bigger problem here that many people are building opinions lacking education, and this often can lead to harmful descicions, especially in how the world is developing today.
For me the debate never reaches the end because different kinds of developers build fundamentally different kinds of products.
If you are building a website, a forum, or a generally document based application with little to no interactivity (beyond say, “play media”) then absolutely make a server rendered html page and sprinkle it with a bit of JavaScript for accordions.
If what you are building is a complex editor (image, text), is highly interactive (with maps, and charts and whatever) and users will generally spend a lot of time navigating between almost same pages. Basically when there would be no expectation that this should work with JavaScript disabled… then just build a purely client rendered application in the framework of your choice.
To me the dispute comes when one bleeds to another. I also think that mixed modes are abominations unless you truly have actual performance gains (maybe if you have 1B+ customers), which I’d argue is true for almost no one.
> For the life of me I don’t understand why people absolutely insist on using JavaScript to render HTML. Backend frameworks do HTmL just fine.
There’s an entire universe of front-end developers who don’t even know JavaScript. React is the only thing they’ve ever touched and they’re completely helpless without it.
You can't write React without Javascript. Even the most basic React demos require you to write JS, if only to increment a counter.
Perhaps they don't really "know" the entire monstrosity of Javascript, but that's a tall order. JS is such a big language, with so many redundant features, that most developers will use only a fraction of it.
Morphing the web user agent into something akin to an X11 server made total sense to me when I started doing such in 2000. If we developers had demanded a true distributed windows system, then we would have been spared this bag of hurt.
I remember demoing the Andrew Window Manager to colleagues in 1989 and them feeling like they had glimpsed the future. Alas, that future never came.
Cmd+~ switches windows of a given app in case you didn't know (not disagreeing with you but it is one shortcut I find super useful and it helps switch windows).
This is why I regard ChromeOS with fear. Because it really does feel like everything is just converging on the browser as the OS, and a browser is not a goddamn OS.
I have a non-ANSI keyboard so tilde is in a super weird place for that (next to left shift). I swapped the shortcut to Option+Tab, makes much more intuitive sense.
It's been like this for a while. It has been assumed that Congress doesn't have that power anymore but the president does. Here is a letter that President Obama wrote on the subject that explains it a bit (but if you want to hear more about this check 99 Percent Invisible podcast on the latest constitution breakdown series).
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Hotwire (Turbo, Stimulus), Hotwire Native (iOS & Android), BDD/TDD. I build web + mobile apps from a single Rails codebase using Hotwire Native.
About:Senior Rails engineer / engineering leader (20+ yrs; Shopify, Circle Medical, Mirego; founder with exit experience).
Comfortable as the first engineering hire: translating product ideas into an MVP quickly, especially for non-technical founders, then building and mentoring the team post-MVP. Strong preference for Rails + Hotwire Native and early-stage startups where speed, ownership, and long-term maintainability matter.
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