Correlation does not equal causation. I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Before Christianity took off there was plenty of “bad press,” to put mildly. Yet here we are.
I guess another way I might restate my point is to invoke the Streisand effect, or note the haters “doth protest too much” or similar notions. YMMV but repeated cathedral burnings and church and synagogue massacres had a remarkable effect on my perception of good and evil. Shooting toddlers at their morning mass; if that ain’t evil then nothing else makes any sense to me.
> I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.
Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.
My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.
Wokism, if there is such a thing, is like a “me religion” —- it has no group consensus so to one person being properly woke means murdering a CEO in cold blood, to another it means feminism, to another it means bringing your own shopping bag to Trader Joe’s.
Surely that's more Western philosophy than Christianity. If anything, Christianity impeded social progress. Even now, the most vocal Christians would contend that moral truths owe to scripture than reason.
I suspect, as with programming languages, some people think in a way that makes it easy for them and others think in a way that makes it hard.
Personally -- and I'm no web dev, so I probably don't count -- I think CSS is hard (maybe more irritating than hard, but in any case I wouldn't call it easy). In large part because the syntax is ugly, but also because it just doesn't "mesh" with me. If I'm reading it or writing it, I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.
Maybe that's also why some people are attracted to being web devs and others aren't?
As a user, nothing would thrill me more than if web pages just stopped using JS, though, so I am very happy that there is a feasible alternative to doing that that web devs could enjoy!
> I suspect, as with programming languages, some people think in a way that makes it easy for them and others think in a way that makes it hard.
No that often isn't the case. What is usually the case is that people don't bother the learning the basics. CSS is very easy. You can literally mess about with it on the fly in the browser and instantly see the result.
It is easier now than it has ever been. Since all the browsers for the most part implement the standards properly. Safari is the only standout and all the issues with that are well known.
> In large part because the syntax is ugly, but also because it just doesn't "mesh" with me. If I'm reading it or writing it, I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.
It is probably because you haven't learned the basics.
Whenever anyone has issues understanding CSS, they haven't bothered learning the basics and think they can flub their way through doing it.
I don't understand what is ugly about the syntax.
<some element selector> {
property_1: <some value>
property_2: <some other value>
}
It is about as straight forward as it could be. The difficulty with CSS is organisation as the web app becomes larger. There are well documented strategies on how to do this.
> As a user, nothing would thrill me more than if web pages just stopped using JS, though, so I am very happy that there is a feasible alternative to doing that that web devs could enjoy!
Non-trivial functionality requires JS. Basic Websites rarely require JS. So I am not sure what you are trying to say here.
Honestly the best thing I tell people to get some decent css basics is try to build a few stylus themes.
You can instantly see the results in devtools. I can't think of any other language that does that besides html, and even then you have to save and refresh.
Css is pretty easy to pick up in the chrome devtools at least because it has built in autocomplete. Showing you exactly what you can set the values too etc
I don't understand how that is the case when you say you can figure out much more complicated programming languages. It strains credulity.
I am a former front-end developer that managed to figure out AWS, Go, C++, C#, JavaScript, Python, OpenGL and have done a LFS build. I am not some sort of mega genius. I just had to go through and read the correct material and learn the basics.
CSS is easy, but it's not simple - it's enormously complex. Imagine the worst sins you could commit in a Ruby or Python codebase, multiply that by 100x and that's a normal CSS codebase.
It probably seems easy to you because you are already familiar with the pitfalls. For me, CSS felt like an endless minefield of unexpected interactions. When you say that "CSS is easy", do you perhaps mean only the syntax and the basic language structure? I would agree, but that doesn't get you very far; actually trying to use CSS frustrated me so much that I simply don't touch anything related to the web at all anymore.
I learned the basics in maybe a day almost 20 years ago now. I could make a page template with PHP and style that in maybe a day. This was back when IE6 was dominate, I don't think Firebug was even a thing.
At that time I was a novice, didn't know what a debugger was (I printed everything out the the console / page) and didn't know what an IDE was (I think I was using Notepad++). I managed this feat by following the tutorial.
The biggest problem I had was that I couldn't understand why centre, and colour didn't work. Once I realised that I had to spell everything in American English, that problem quickly went away.
I too learned the basics of CSS back in the IE6 era, and I had no trouble following the steps of the tutorials, using similarly primitive tools. If I'd had an experience like yours, I suppose my career might have gone in a different direction. Instead, though, as soon as I tried to take what I thought I had learned from those tutorials and make something of my own, I smashed into a wall of chaos; nothing seemed to be predictable. I knew the browser could do what I was imagining, because I had been making it do that for years already via tables and repeating GIFs and all that, but trying to do it with CSS got me nowhere.
> I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.
Those languages happen to be "imperative"? – the few backend devs I know who at least sort of vibe with CSS are all used to declarative programming. I think that might be at least one of the reasons?
I've been building https://www.webring.gg . It's a webring creation and management tool that lets members vote new websites (and website owners) to join the ring.
I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.
I've been building https://www.webring.gg . It's a webring creation and management tool that lets members vote new websites (and website owners) to join the ring.
I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.
1. Browser navigation overlapping website viewport in iOS Safari. What is the real height of the viewport?
2. Floating side panel on macOS: necessitates needless extension the app body. Also, the App close button is in the side panel, which is floating IN the app body. This seems like a betrayal of their so called structure philosophy.
But Reddit in particular is nasty about this. I think HN does a bit of a better job but the issue here is that the majority of users are generally well off. This skews the discussions.
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