articles like these almost always strike me as sour grapes, people trying to make vibe coding look bad, because of job security. Is vibe code good? I would argue, for the vast amount of BS little corporate IT projects out there yes, and it's just going to improve. Is it good enough for anything serious...hell no, but it might be soon.
As a European (dutch), why are our roads so small, that normal sized cars look like "monsters". I have often thought, that Europe will have a problem in the future with roads, as they are just too small, and expanding and making them more safe, is unlikely to ever happen and often times impossible. Not everyone can get by with a small little hatchback, some of us need a big pickup (I own a building company). And for the people that do not need it from a commercial point of view, have you ever considered that people have hobbies and some hobbies needs a fair amount of space in a car? Or families with multiple kids doing sport need the space for all the gear?
I am worried that in the future, more and more european cities will just address the problem with a disguised "we are making the cities car free, and thus greener and safer". What that means for the average citizen out there is, that any building related work, will just become more expensive, as people will just charge more to get over the hassle of getting into the cities then.
I'm glad the roads are small. Smaller roads cause slower driving (well researched). As for the cities, it is unsustainable to use cars as the primary mode of transportation within cities. We do want to make cities greener and largely car-free, because cars for individuals simply do not make any sense in a city. We still need roads for deliveries and occasional transportation of heavy or large goods, but transporting yourself within a city should rarely be done in a car. See Tokyo for an example of a large metropolis which functions well and which would completely break down if everybody tried to use a car to get somewhere.
I grew up in a family of 5, albeit a decade after my siblings.
When I visited London with my parents, we went by train. When I was in the cub scouts, one of my memories was a group trip by train. When I went to middle school (years 4-6), it was easy enough for me to walk alone at the end, though mum did go with me at the start; when I went to secondary school (7-11) there was a bus, though eventually I found I liked the (3 mile!) walk.
Today, I find that my local bus route within Berlin to a nearby mall takes me past 2 schools, and at certain times of day the bus will fill with kids and adult supervisors. Sometimes I see people taking Kinderwagen on the bus.
This argument does not work when society is build towards roads and using them. I live in the Netherlands in a village, and not using a car is impossible with a few kids. The city is different.
Can and want to or being efficient are different things. I "can" travel around in a city using public transport with 3 kids and all their sporting equipment, do I want to, no. Would any sane person want to? No.
see, this is the narrow minded view of so many europeans. Well just go to a closer sports club....is not an answer to the problem that thousands of people experience with small cars, and small roads.
Many more thousands have no issues with small cars or going to a closer sports club.
If the roads in cities are wide enough in cities for literal trucks, then they're wide enough for your car. Widening roads and making cars bigger makes pretty much everyone less safe.
Don't get me wrong, you're free to live in the boonies and drive 400km to your sports club, but don't call me narrow minded because I can load up 5 people in my VW passat and drive 500km for a 10 day vacation, or because I prefer not to get bulldozed by a car with a higher hood than me while walking to my local sports club.
That’s a bit of a strawman argument. Most journeys don’t consist of three children and all their sporting equipment.
As a practical example, in the UK, on average a young g child lives 1.7miles away from their school.
That is an easily walkable distance for most children, yet lots of parents choose to drive it because they feel the streets aren’t safe to walk on in rush hour.
If by redesigning streets to make active travel more appealing, you could reduce the number of cars on the school run by 10%; it would improve the traffic situation for the ones who still need to drive. Win-win
Some people need more space, but the road problem is something that can't be retrofitted without demolishing buildings.
As a Dutch person, surely you've seen that Amsterdam decided that the city's car problem in the 70s was unfixable and decided to switch to cycling. The building and delivery problem is real, but I don't think even a 10 euro/day charge for work vehicles would register given how expensive building work is already.
Land in cities is very expensive. Why should vehicles get to use more of it for free?
And...I could not care less. Garmin needs to fix their software, I am a long time garmin user, from using garmin head units on mountain bikes for the last 30 years, using garmin watches, I have had 4 fenix watches over the years, I swapped to a Apple watch ultra this year, and as a ultra distance trail runner and mountain biker, I could not be happier. Yes, the garmin units are more rugged and can handle more abuse, yes, their battery is light years ahead, but, it does not really matter anymore, the apple watch ultra is tough enough and the battery good enough, and the software is so much better. I can download multiple different running apps, and follow a training plan with it (runna workoutoutdoors, or one of the many other ones), I can do my cross training using one of the lifting apps, like heavy or strong, I can use it with golf etc. yes, the fenix range can do all of that aswell, but the experience is just so much nicer on the ultra. I struggle to see, how garmin can compete software wise, as a single company battling the army of independant developers out there building iOS/watchOS apps. And more importantly, my ultra never crash, my fenix went through a phase, where it would randomly reboot, until garmin pushed a fix. Bugs happen, I get it, but...it's been happening now for years with garmin.
Their bike GPS range is...not good. I've owned two (Edge something?). Both were completely unusable for bike navigation. They're basically overpriced odometers with a shitty map bolted on as an afterthought.
Updating the maps was an exercise anger management, involving setting up accounts and syncing data to their cloud (why would I want to do that to update a map???). The maps turned out to be woefully out of date even after updating.
I managed to flash recent OSM data to one of the units, but the map rendering is so awful, cluttered, and so slow that this turned out to be just as pointless.
> my fenix went through a phase, where it would randomly reboot, until garmin pushed a fix
This is something that just can't happen for this kind of use case, and the fact that bugs like this repeatedly happen with Garmin is mind-blowing to me. This company makes glass cockpits- if you ask me, they need to borrow someone from that team to show their consumer electronics team how to test their product and have a sense of urgency when things break.
reply