My Beliefs

Veganism is morally superior

Let me start by saying that I am (regrettably) not vegan — I don’t eat animal flesh, but on occasion I will consume other animal products. I do, however, BELIEVE in veganism, and am slowly working to eliminate all animal exploitation from my life. Yes, the dissonance hurts. Yes, the animals hurt worse.

For many trying years (since ~2012) I was “vegetarian for the environment”, and SURPRISE it never really stuck — I would always regress after about 6 months, and try again in 8. It’s hard to care about the “environment” when you come face-to-face with the futility of your efforts. Which breeds the BIGGEST demon in the “green veggie” moral superiority complex: it is WAY TOO easy to say “Oh it’s just a little chicken, it’ll be thrown out otherwise” or “Gee what’s one burger gonna do? It’s local meat after all!” Blink again — you’re roasting a lamb over a spit (sadly, speaking from experience here).

Then, there was the “plant-based for health” era (less of an “era” and more of a “my doctor told me to do it to lower my cholesterol” type beat). I ate nothing but plants for 6 months, it wasn’t too difficult, and then it…actually worked. Much to my surprise. My cholesterol levels were in the normal range for the first time since I was at least 5 years old. Aaaaaaaand then the “in moderation” demon struck again, I blinked again and this time found myself roasting a pig.

Then I got cats.

You don’t actually like capitalism

You don’t even know what it means.

Paper is better

And this is why I created poof.

Tailwind is good

The fact that people defend the esoteric idea of separating styles and markup always baffles me. Like yeah, you don’t want to send a massive dump of crap in 1998, and CSS is a nice enough way to extract out a design system yet keep things small. But come on its $CURRENT_YEAR. IMO DiasyUI is basically the logical conclusion of how far you can take a CSS design system, while being as ergonomic as possible. But it is what is: a hack. And if you want to extend every possible minor variation as it’s own semantic variant class defined in some god-forsaken stylesheet, please go for it. But I will be using utility classes bc it’s the closest thing we have to sanity in web styling.

And yes you could make a number of small classes by yourself to augment these one-offs. But what do you get when you keep pushing down that road? A worse version of tailwind that you had to make yourself bc you’re too stubborn to just use it.

If an analogue to the style attribute was created that was as performant and extensible as CSS, and there was a bombproof implementation of properly composable markup tags to replace what we could consider a “class”, I have no doubt it would be lauded as a great improvement. Like it or not, CSS-in-JS is popular for a reason, despite the fact that it is a MASSIVE hack and very complex.

Emacs isn’t better than vim

I am typing this in Emacs. I love Emacs. I live in Emacs. I’ve been hacking on Emacs for nearly 15 years. And still: vim is just as good. So is Zed. So is VSCode (ethics aside…). Sure it would probably be prudent to “learn your tool” or whatever, but if you’re a hotshot programmer pigeon typing in Notepad++ then do your thing. Use what you like, not everybody wants to paint the bike-shed.

HOWEVER, if you have zero opinions on our trade — a favorite editor, library preferences, little tricks you swear by, functional or OOP, whatever — I probably won’t work with you.