It's unfortunate but it's not as bad as Twitter/other forced logins for features. The difference is that making an account is free, you don't have to pay anything and there are no ads, whereas Twitter has incentive because it needs ad revenue and wants to look like it has more people on it
I think inventing a new screw would be a design thing? In a perfect world a screw that is easily replaced and allows them the design they want would be used.
However if that doesn’t exist, as an engineer, I am aware of the concept of tradeoffs and ever since that company has existed they’ve always biased towards design.
They would rather 1mm of thinness or an angle a specific shape and if that means that this normally standard screw won’t fit, then “oh well”. Like I said above, it’s an opinion. My FairPhone has the opposite opinion where everything in the design was made around repairability.
Both of them have different, diverse, opinions on what design is. Neither are right or wrong, per se. That’s why the market is so awesome, go to the stall that fits your need, don’t try to make all the stalls make the same thing.
The “security” feature is the serialisation of said screws, no? Even if they were standard and freely available, the serialisation would still cause this issue. Unless it’s somehow not possible to serialise a standard screw but I don’t know how that would differ from the process of doing it to custom screws.
Google Trends [0] indicates that sqlite is about as popular as usual. There's been some recent growth in the last year, but that's after a bit of a dip. A regression of the time series would be fairly flat.
I suspect popularity here comes in waves through a Katamari Damacy effect. People start reading about a topic, and start posting, thus more people read, research, post, etc... until a saturation point, a cooling off period, and then a rebuild.
[0]: obviously not the same as whats happening on HN, I'd love to see someone pull these numbers from the HN API!
They were talking about it being a fad here on HN, in terms of submitted (and upvoted to FP) posts per week/month/year. It's always been a topic getting the incidental FP attention, but the number of times something relating to SQLite makes it to the front page here seems to have increased considerably in recent months.
Actually I was not threatened that I was stealing if I didn't wire! I wish I was though because that would have definitely given it away. The receipt of my bank deposit they asked me to take a picture of just had more than enough to pay! I remember double checking the receipt in-case it had too much personal information and even was aware that I didn't want to show my balance but something in my brain just didn't combine all the pieces until I heard the words "wire transfer" which triggered memories of crime shows.
Besides all the other red flags, what would have (probably) triggered an alarm would have been the actual list of equipment (and its generic content).
Set of furniture?
Copiers?
Graphics generator and software?
Data storage and Microfiche?
High speed Internet access?
All coming from a same supplier, the same that provides the Mac and the "Dual Monitors", maybe it is "normal" in US, but elsewhere there would be several different suppliers, very detailed confirm orders, a lengthy contract for the Internet access, endless back and forth for fixing delivery and installation dates, etc.
This named cross-selling in scientific marketing, when somebody sell to customer related items, even far related.
Best example, when You will buy auto, good seller will try to sell items for tourists, picnic items, spinning, and even bait (sure, will include regulated items in base, like insurance, fire-extinguisher).
I got you. I said "implied threat" meaning that someone who was having second thoughts before wiring the money is thinking about what could go wrong if they didn't wire the money, and not what could go wrong if they did. As others have mentioned there is also the whole sunk cost fallacy. This whole story is a great example of social engineering and it's the first time I've heard of it. Good for you to take the effort to post it. It's just long and could use a quick summary of the actual scam upfront for people with short attention spans.
Absent all the red flags, the basic form of the scam is pretty sophisticated. Here's a check to get yourself setup from our preferred supplier and expense it when you start probably should set off alarms to the degree that other things seemed off. But it's not by itself something a legit company would likely never do.
I understand, I had that same belief. My thoughts were that faking checks and money is dangerous and stupidly hard, and since jobs pay you, the idea that it was a scam never came to my mind until way later when I was asked to wire...
I can go on Walmart.com (or many other places) and get a box of checks made for $15 with any name, routing number, and account number I care to provide them.
That said, receiving a personal check from a company of any size should properly set off a lot of alarm bells.
I was not in the right state of mind, my brain weirdly skimmed and auto-corrected grammar mistakes. I thought it was weird but I was just happy and yet busy to think about it further.
Yeah I mean when someone is happy and excited that they're going to get a job that pays $45 an hour then they probably won't care whether the employers know English or not.
This is also a "red flag" that will probably stop being useful soon, as chatgpt etc make it easy for scammers to write things that don't have this kind of mistake.
I have read that the poor spelling in scams is on purpose, it filters people out early on. Anyone who overlooks the poor spelling and grammar is more likely to continue
Just fyi, anyone can send email (a.k.a. spoofing) from @autonation.com, the harder part is correspondence from that domain - but I think you were pretty much aware of the scam at that point. Good job.
