A codebase that's formatted notgivingashittily is an accessibility issue. It's not just deranged control freakism.
Maybe Yelp's codebase was otherwise clean, but aside from golang projects (and the Linux kernel) I've come to associate tabs with unreadable slop code. Maybe your experience is different.
Forcing a single opinionated tab width is an accessibility issue -- a real one, not a weird heuristic that boils down to "tab fans can't format". I've read multiple accounts from people who need either very small tab widths (to accommodate unusually large font sizes for eyesight reasons without cascading off the side of the screen), or very large tab widths (to accommodate difficulty in seeing indentation differences, again for eyesight reasons).
I'm confused. how does handing control of the reading experience over to the reader = accessibility issue? isn't it the other way around? accessibility issues come in many different forms, and you can't accommodate them all yourself.
Then you decide if the positives outweigh the negatives and unfollow them or not.
This particular situation is why the only thing I miss from Twitter at this point is the ability to mute an account's reposts rather than the full account.
I have memories of a similar escalator, probably at or near Downtown Crossing.
I don't remember it being made of wood, but I remember it being narrow and slanted downwards and kind of scary. Come to think of it, the station in general was very run down and a bit frightening to ~5yo me.
This would have been in the early to mid eighties.
But are these truly exceptions? Or are they the result of subtler rules French learners are rarely taught explicitly?
I don't know what the precise rules or patterns actually might be. But one fact that jumped out at me is that -mal and -nal start with nasal consonants and three of the "exceptions" end in -val.
No, like parent says, with many things in French, grammar and what we call "orthographe" is based on usage. And what's accepted tends to change over time. What's taught in school varies over the years too, with a large tendency to move to simplification. A good example is the french word for "key" which used to be written "clef" but over time moved to "clé" (closer to how it sounds phonetically). About every 20/30 years, we get some "réformes" on the topic, which are more or less followed, there's some good information here (the 1990 one is interesting on its own) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography
Back to this precise one, there's no precise rule or pattern underneath, no rhyme or reason, it's just exceptions based on usage and even those can have their own exceptions. Like "idéals/idéaux", I (french) personally never even heard that "idéals" was a thing. Yet it is, somehow : https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/idéal/41391
Errr. French is _not_ based on usage but has an official rulebook that is maintained by L'académie de la langue française. Obviously nobody is coming after you if you don't respect the rules but there absolutely is a defined standard. This makes French useful for international standards and treaties because the wording can be very precise and leave much less to interpretation.
To my knowledge there aren't that many languages that are managed as officially as French is.
The Académie tried to codify what was used at the time (which varied a lot) to try and create a standard, but that's why there's so many exceptions to the rules everywhere : they went with "tradition" when creating the system instead of logical rules or purer phonetical approach (which some proposed).
There's a bunch of info on the wikipedia link about it, and how each wave or "réforme" tries to make it simpler (while still keeping the old version around as correct).
Each one is always hotly debated/rejected by parents too when they see their kids learning the newly simplified rules.
Recently, the spelling of onion in french went from "Oignon" (old spelling with a silent I) to "Ognon" (simplifying it out), and event that one made me have a "hmm" moment ;)
I've never heard of such a rule (am native), and your reasoning is fine but there are many common examples : cheval (horse), rival, estival (adjective, "in the summer "), travail (work, same rules for -ail words)...
If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.
I didn't understand this part, specifically how you could beat today's air freight. Why wouldn't airships be subject to the same (ahem) overhead at either end?
Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.
Airships don't require a runway; a century ago they could moor to skyscrapers, or ships at sea.
If (big regulatory issues here) you can deliver directly from one site to another, you eliminate trucking goods to the source airport & from the destination airport. A 3 hour dirigible flight is slower than a 45 minute cargo plane flight, but buffering at a warehouse to loading / unload a truck (twice) could easily add 2-3 days latency.
Whenever this comes up, I'm reminded of section 5 in https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html which among other things says "Don't parse" and "there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces".
If I were were to teach a class about programming in the medium (as opposed to in the small or in the large), I think I'd assign my students an essay comparing and contrasting these suggestions. Each has something to teach us, and maybe they're not as contradictory as it may seem at first.
My main backups are on rsync.net, though.