I disagree. I see shell syntax as an “inversion” of normal quoting rules. Normally quoting is the default but to achieve anything special you have to use an escape. Conversely, in shell, quoting is not necessary but any special character will likely have unwanted behaviour unless you quote.

This is handy for quick scripting as a natural extension of a command line interface. A counterexample might be an equivalent script using the Python subprocess module. For a simple script, the required extra quoting overhead is not worth the trouble. For something complicated it’s essential and a shell script is no longer suitable. For something in the middle, a carefully crafted shell script (eg. one that passes shellcheck) may be the most suitable solution depending on the situation.

Both cases have their place. It’s about using the right tool for the job.

One consolation is that you can use proprietary cloud based AI to make software that you can run locally and then depend upon. As long as you ensure that the software meets the quality standards you had before this revolution in terms of (non-AI-based) maintainability etc, you are in no worse a position than you were before, and your software development is massively accelerated as long as the proprietary cloud based solution is available and without lock-in.

> Notable are the endorsements, which are balanced over all three options...

I don't think this is notable. The process requires five seconders, so you're just seeing the set of people who seconded asynchronously before there were obviously enough that others didn't bother. The culture is to avoid unnecessary noise and leave it for the vote.

A bit of topic, but does the word "seconded" still work when five are required? Isn't there a more generic term?

Depends on your rules of order. Under Robert's you can have multiple seconds but seconds aren't recorded. In model UN there are multiple seconds. Second'ing a motion is not generally an endorsement per se, it's just saying you support a vote on the matter.

n’th’ed?

Email seems like an odd choice for sensitive messaging where you're in the position to manage the technology on both ends. Private XMPP or Matrix with E2EE has better privacy properties.

Please could you share the name of the manufacturer, so the rest of us know who to be wary of?

Volkswagen Group for example. Most of their brands are like this, Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda. Carplay/Android Auto is in the head unit but you have to pay 200-300€ to unlock unless it’s part of the trim level you choose.

That's interesting, thanks. For me this feature is mandatory, and I won't risk buying a car (second hand usually) unless I see it working with my phone first. I drove 200 miles to buy a car once and walked* away because of this. The seller acted surprised.

* drove

> Revocation should come with full refunds.

That's not enough. If I purchase something, I expect to rely on being able to keep it. Its value to me could well be much higher than just the purchase price.

Revocation should come with consequential damages together with the cost of recovering them.

I agree. I honestly think it's strange that it's often viewed as "good enough" to get a refund.

If I paid $5 for a movie, I did that because I want the movie more than the $5. If I didn't, I would've kept the $5. You giving me $5 and taking the movie away is just replacing the thing I value more with the thing I value less.

The other issue is that, if I paid $5 for a movie 10 years ago, that's now more than $5 due to inflation. If you give me $5 back, you're short.

It should be refunded with interest.

I like using a date of birth of 1 January. It's plausible but also hopefully suspicious how many people seem to be born that day if others do the same.

But if an attacker gets your fake birthday and uses that to successfully reset credentials on another site that uses the same fake birthday?

At some point it becomes your birthday of record as far as the internet is concerned. Doesn’t matter what the actual record says.

The purpose of the fake birthday is not to protect random website credentials. It's to prevent someone with that data from walking into my bank and impersonating me. I started giving a fake birthday after being shocked by how little info some organizations needed to authenticate me.

“My voice is my passport. Verify me.”

No service should use date of birth for password resets.

If an attacker can do that, they could also do that with my real birthday had I used that. My birthday isn't a secret against anyone who wants to look hard enough. Therefore this method doesn't provide any kind of security against attackers gated only on knowing my registered birthday. I never claimed that it did.

I use the 1st of my birth month. Slightly less suspicious? It's at least a little easier to remember. Generate fake profiles and identities usually is easier when you have bits that are rooted in your actual reality. Like, you have the same zodiac sign either way in this case, so you don't have to remember two of everything. Or if you're talking about a birthday trip, or related birthday thing from the past, details about the weather would be consistent, etc.

I heard from a number of Syrian refugees that this is actually very common in countries like theirs, where births may not be recorded, records are lost or destroyed. Some people don't even know their exact date of birth and they would typically enter January 1st on forms like this too.

Same, my D.O.B. is 1/1/1970 for anything that doesn't justify having the real deal.

That's also great for integration testing their systems, if they have any code in a language where datetimes are a value type.

What if you have young kids? It might be worth the suffering for their benefit.

Perhaps don't have kids in your 40s. It's pretty mean to have kids at 50 because of the high risk of sickness or death while they're teenagers (or younger). Plus the risks of genetic faults in children rises dramatically for dads or mums much over about 40. After 40 kids will often miss out on having grandparents.

Our society says parents can make whatever choices they like, but having children is one of those places when we should be thinking of others (the kids) not ourselves.

I decided against having kids when I reached 40ish for the above reasons (along with some other reasons).

I think this is a backwards way to set up VMs. "Installing a guest" is the wrong concept. Use a VM image pre-prepared from your favourite distro to skip that step. cloud-init is the standard way for it to specialize to your use case.

Adding contraints makes it take longer to deliver a result. I probably cannot install today's engines SDKs and related tooling for example. I'd have to write my own. Doable, and would make me a better programmer, but you won't see results for a long time.

As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.