This might well be a stupid question, but bear with me. People seem to have a ton of love for petroleum powered vehicles even today, despite many gradually waking up to their harmful effects. You’ll see unrelated products from computer software and hardware designers to finance companies making references to terms like “turbocharger”, “octane”, etc, and even in the higher performance electric cars, you often get references to conventional gas cars despite electric cars having none of that hardware. For a Lemmy specific example, Lemmy uses a Rust package called “Diesel” as its ORM and database interface.
I’m not sure how to feel about this personally. On one hand, they’re just words, and they’re also not slurs or anything, so should anyone actually care? On the other hand, I feel like it helps validate the petroleum industry which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. What do you think? If you had a stake in naming something, would you ever be okay with using these kinds of references?
Petroleum vehicles are here for probably at least another decade, and combustion tech will remain relevant long after the last oil burners go out of service. Fuel burning piston engines are loud and dramatic in operation, and there is a lot of specialized skill involved in their use and maintenance. I think all kinds of technical people twnd to romanticize their fields and auto mechanix and enginerds are no different. Meanwhile, electric motors are inxreasingly ubiquitous and low key. Sure they can do burnouts, but where are the roars, the pops, and the flames? That’s where the romance is, for some. Me, i like ebikes, and for drama i like videogames.