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It’s so laughable that we care about whether a generated string contains some temporally relevant profanity. We truly are still barbarians, and will be viewed as such by history.


It highly depends on what the purpose of the string is: if it can be clearly seen by the user, has to be read, or worse typed, then it's not just a random string in a database.

If the string is a url, imagine sending https://somesite/wanker to your client, when it actually could also be https://somesite/ay3ugd


Well, given that we have a more than 5000 years old habit of looking for omens in random data to divine the future (whether that random data is scattered bones, laid out animal entrails, tea leaves, coffee grounds, tarot cards or so many others), it's unfortunate but not surprising.


It's not that stupid. People will send the shortened link to other people, who might not understand that the string was randomly generated.


"Hello Richard, your access key is URAC0CK"

It's random, I swear!


If you generate an identifier for an important client that contains "knobhead," they won't think it's a randomly generated string, but that someone at your company is deliberately insulting them.




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