The and Wonderful Evolution of the Waterproof Jacket

27 pointsposted 3 days ago
by surprisetalk

23 Comments

fmajid

7 hours ago

They should have mentioned Tyrolian (Austrian) loden, a densely woven and felted wool that is reasonably water-resistant. Since that comes from the weaving, it does not require regular reproofing unlike a waxed cotton trench coat. I have a coat that is the best of both worlds, loden with a Gore-Tex membrane.

I also have a lighter weight Ventile raincoat by Private White VC that is absolutely phenomenal. I wish more brands would adopt it and democratize the fabric.

l23k4

5 hours ago

> I have a coat that is the best of both worlds, loden with a Gore-Tex membrane.

Until the goretex delaminates and becomes impossible to repair, of course.

cwmoore

3 hours ago

What can we anthropomorphize next?

“Think of it like this. Imagine you have a room full of people on one side of a door, and an empty room on the other side. Open the door and people will naturally drift toward the empty room. That’s how Gore-Tex breathes.”

justinator

8 hours ago

People are moving away from Gore-Tex, especially as the new jackets simply work worse than the previous ones that have poisoned our water. It's just simpler materials and mechanical venting (pit zips). Simple, strong, lightweight. And they don't cost $400.

usrnm

8 hours ago

Waxed jackets and especially Barbour are also having a comeback, I see a lot of them around. Not the best jackets for sports, but for a casual stroll in a light rain they work very well and they look much better than Gore-Tex

barbegal

9 hours ago

Interesting but I can't deal with the AI generated prose. Sentences like "This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was ..." show me no human has proof read or edited the text.

defrost

7 hours ago

LLM or human,

  World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.
is a clunker of a sentence. (NB: didn't say 'clanker')

Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.

adrian_b

an hour ago

Wars have accelerated technology for 2 reasons.

The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.

During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.

The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.

Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.

margalabargala

an hour ago

Thanks, Claude.

The premise was never unclear, the complaint is about sentence structure.

adrian_b

an hour ago

You are delusional if you believe that you can distinguish AI-generated texts from human-generated texts, because obviously you can't.

margalabargala

24 minutes ago

I didn't try to, I just make assumptions about long walls of text that manage to entirely miss the point.

Assuming you actually put time into what you wrote would be the less charitable interpretation.

tunesmith

8 hours ago

It was the "honest" stuff that hit my radar, but maybe Claude is just ruining that word for "honest" usage.

cwmoore

4 hours ago

If Claude does it, people already did.

dwdz

7 hours ago

I don't think it was written by AI but rather edited with help of AI. There are just a few obvious AI lines in the text. Not great, not terrible but it immediately caught my eye.

Arainach

8 hours ago

.....what?

Seriously, people are looking for reasons to get offended. Have you read anything written between 1990 and 2023? Plenty of people talk and write like this. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.

iammjm

5 hours ago

Funny how in the 1800s they got rid of the hood. I assume hats were the reason? As in: everybody wears hats anyway, so why do we need the hoods? And then the hats mostly went away and thus the hood returned.

gingerlime

4 hours ago

I wonder about hot environments where it rains, like tropical countries. Any tips or insights on what works best?

joe_the_user

7 hours ago

Bizarre that simple leather garments aren't mentioned. I'm pretty sure leather was the go-to solution to rain and cold for much of human history.