The only place I've encountered where they are visible by default and do get in the way is bash filename completion, and you can change this via the readline config file:

  # ~/.inputrc:
  set match-hidden-files off

Is this kind of test - many short questions - a standard thing for math in your country?

My university exams were pretty much all "2-question", in 90 minutes.

The first half was an essay where you have to reproduce a lesson from the curriculum, in your own words.

The second half was "the formulas" - you have to develop one or two formulas from first principles.

I once got an A- even though I got "the formulas" half very wrong. As the teacher explained later, I simply chose the coordinate system beginning at not the same place the textbook did. And this was supposed to be a bad teacher - he actually gave Ds to almost all of us (180 people). This was a makeup exam.

You will hear only crickets.

Adding the slightest friction, and making potential drama 1:1 only, demotivates most people.

You might miss out on an occasional good feedback, though.

Using different delimiter for opening and closing is a good idea on its own, too. I think it makes parsing simpler and unambiguous wrt nesting.

I've imagined something like this:

  `(monospace)
  _(underline)
  /(italics)
  ~(overstrike)

The proposed solution:

> Instead of loading secrets from a file, you use a wrapper script that fetches secrets from a secure store and injects them as environment variables into your process

Now they sit "on disk" as plaintext, in /proc/self/environ, still readable by any process running as your user.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave

Sadly, yeah. And will do anything only if they believe they can actually be caught.

An EU-wide bank I used to be customer of until recently, supported login with Qualified Electronic Signatures, but only if your dongle supports... SHA-1. Mine didn't. It's been deprecated at least a decade ago.

A government-certified identity provider made software that supposedly allowed you to have multiple such electronic signatures plugged in, presenting them in a list, but if one of them happened to be a YubiKey... crash. YubiKey conforms to the same standard as the PIV modules they sold, but the developers made some assumptions beyond the standard. I just wanted their software not to crash while my YubiKey is plugged in. I reported it, and they replied that it's not their problem.

Which key bindings are you referring to?

It's not a trap, I promise! Just fishing for ideas.

>Citation needed.

https://sgx.fail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions#List...

> If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

> https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-...

This is a case of Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - https://indieweb.org/POSSE

If it's too long, it gets truncated, though.

I would expect the command to work in any directory. Try a few different directories on your computer and you'll see that it won't work in some of them.

  ls -l | cut -c 35-41
  
  6 Nov 1
  6 Nov
  6 Nov 1
  6 Nov 1

Even you remember the flags, cut(1) will not be able to handle ls -l. And any command that uses spaces for aligning the text into fixed-width columns.

Unlike awk(1), cut(1) only works with delimiters that are a single character. Meaning, a run of spaces will be treated like several empty fields. And, depending on factors you don't control, every line will have different number of fields in it, and the data you need to extract will be in a different field.

You can either switch to awk(1), because its default field separator treats runs of spaces as one, or squeeze them with tr(1) first:

  ls -l | tr -s' ' | cut -d' ' -f3

What happens when everybody comes to the job with their own utility library and start working on the same codebase?

Would you like it if you had to get up to speed with several utility libraries your coworkers developed for themselves?

A common set of tools, like the Unix commands, makes it easier for people to collaborate. They were put in an official standard for a reason.

It costs me more effort to read and understand a screenful of unfamiliar code than the equivalent "sort -k 1.1" or "uniq" while skimming through a shell script. This adds up.

It's not the only culprit, of course. There's still room to at least design a layout that is predictable, and with buttons that are easily reachable.

Some UIs make me think the designer was an alien invader in a human body. It thinks nobody can tell, but when it designs a UI that can only be called "intuitive" if you have 7 fingers, the 2-nd and 5-th longer than the others, and the 3-rd one a tentacle... I got you, motherfucker!