You give them cash for food, then see if they can pull that off more than once.

If you truly had a week of above average days, by the end of it you'd probably be threatening to put the local KGB recruiter's head through a Starbucks window.

(Maybe be happy if they do a little art thing in your cortado rather than overanalyze. every. little. thing.)

Maybe someone decided to exploit one of the myriad of security vulerabilities they noticed there the last time they visited... a decade plus ago.

(It's gonna be a big suspect list. Good luck to... Scotland Yard or whatever.)

It's called "email".

Dear Doctor so and so. Hi, it's me, your old coauthor. Something something science. (And then... here's the hard part: don't attach a photo of your genitals... just a PDF of your CV).

LinkedIn is bad opsec, use the IM feature to take things offline.

Thanks for your counterpoint parent.

Just before Mike Nelson shit himself in the car on the way home last night, I pointed out to him that what his generation calls "Easter Eggs" are often just security flaws that can be used to fingerprint the internet traffic of dissidents, and that his cavalier attitude towards data privacy is why they had to close the Russian Consultate in Seattle.

(Or maybe the above is creative nonfiction, and your hands deserve to shake if you make this poster explain the joke.)

If I'm not a "power user" (learned rudimentary bash as teenager, stuck with it on MacOS through college) is it worth it to learn a new shell?

I respect the craftmanship, but if I'm more of a "software carpenter" why should I invest the time?

I always recommend fish to anyone who doesn't (yet!) have strong opinions about their shell.

Immediately seeing if you misspelled a command because the color changes is a huge benefit if you're not super familiar with the command line.

The auto-complete and suggestions are also miles better than bash - they are automatically generated from man pages, so most commands have a usable set of completions.

The web-based config lets you easily tweak settings that would otherwise be an incomprehensible soup of PS1=3!@*(!@!@ gobbledygook.

Also, it mostly "just works" out of the box, so you really don't have to waste any time setting anything up if you don't really care.

Sounds promisingm, especially now that macOS defaults to Zsh... I very rarely see any documentation where that is the default.

For me, fish made my life instantly better without any real investment coming from bash. There are some incompatibilities, but I felt productive right away.

Yes, it's worth it! Fish is especially great for users who have found learning bash troublesome or uninviting. It's simpler and easier to learn, and plus it has very pleasant defaults and builtins. If you get started with Fish, you're much more likely to learn advanced functionality because the journey is more enjoyable than with bash.

I used zsh for years with a moderately elaborate configuration that grew into a pain in the ass to manage. I started using fish a few months ago with no configuration of my own. I'm still not sure if I'll stick with it in the long run, but if nothing else it's a welcome reprieve.

Fish to me is like writing a document in Word. Bash is more like writing it in Notepad. (or whatever Linux equivalent you want to use)

Though I still write my scripts as bash scripts (with shebang as the first line).

The auto-completion alone is worth it IMO. I've been using fish for 6 or 7 years now, and having it hint ahead some obscure command that I only use once a month saves me so much time reading MAN/searching online.

Pair that with tldr and it's a really good experience.