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I told my parents: if they are ever called by anyone, to tell them "now is not a good time, please give me a case number and I'll call back when I do have the time."

And then, this is important, look up the number for the customer service hotline online.

I feel like this is a simple solution that works 100% of the time.


My dad googled “amex phone number” and called the first result. I spent most of a Saturday cleaning up after the scammers.

I told him, next time call the number on the back of your card.


Any chance the first result was an ad? Those are definitely a popular phishing distribution mechanism, so getting your parents an adblocker could help

Likely. I had him setup with uBO but sometimes it would bork a website so he disabled it, I think. Then, one day I screen shared with him and he's using Safari! He claims he had always used Safari. :/ He doesn't really even understand what a browser is. Or a tab. Once I screen shared and he had like 30 gmail tabs in Safari. :o

I just got a family member to install one after they Google'd a hotel name and accidentally clicked the first ad instead of the hotel site.

Another top tip is how to response to “can I just confirm”. No, they can't just confirm any details, until they have confirmed who they are, which they can't do without us calling them on the company's published support number.

Luckily my parents are appropriately cynical and have not fallen for anything like that, but I know a couple of people of my generation who have (in the worst case losing 5K+ in savings, back when there was no onus on UK banks to take any responsibility for such fraud through their systems so it was properly lost to them).


Mike Tyson once said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". I think you are underestimating the underhanded tactics and emotional tools available to scammers to keep you on the line.

When I'm at home with the old man (mam is unfortunately in a care home), it _really_ irritates me how many scam calls he gets some days. Most of them are obvious: they just hang up when you pick up, the line is very bad or the caller is otherwise barely intelligible (i.e. they are speaking their 4th language), they refer to an account that doesn't exist or a fictitious government agency. But the occasional one is very smooth, and sometimes even have a few details about Dad's life and/or accounts that give pause (either of the form “could this actually be real” or “I wonder how have they collected and associated that?”).

If my family are anything to go by, they definitely target the elderly more than even one generation down (so it isn't just due to those of the younger generations often only having mobile phones and landlines are more targeted) because they know those tend to be more susceptible to the con and more likely to have some savings worth pillaging.

Also in DayJob, some of our C*s and others associated with them (PAs, office managers) have seen some pretty sophisticated phishing attempts, both targeting the business's dealings and their personal accounts. I get the impression that these are reducing in number ATM (or the filtering of them is improving) but that those coming in are making an increasing effort to be convincing.


I agree the functions in a file should probably be reasonably-sized.

It's also interesting to note that due to the way round-tripping tool-calls work, splitting code up into multiple files is counter-productive. You're better off with a single large file.


> due to the way round-tripping tool-calls work, splitting code up into multiple files is counter-productive.

Can you expand on that?


I think he was referring to a cryptographic signature, possibly using the "web of trust" to get the key. I'm not convinced we need central authority to solve this.

If you already know some php python javascript and/or c, you can pretty much just wing with Claude code.

If you're already passing over the sources to strip the types, why would you also not do tree-shaking and minifications?


Why would I want to strip my types?


Because it's a waste of bandwidth if they're not enforced at runtime, the same reason why minification exists.


Both not minifying and including unenforced type hints consumes a little bandwidth though this can be largely offset by compression. This is an engineering trade off against the complexity of getting source maps working reliably for debugging and alerting. If I am shipping a video player or an internal company dashboard how much of my time is that bandwidth worth?


Maybe because TypeScript is not valid JavaScript (yet)? If you don't strip types, your code doesn't work.


It depends on the runtime: Node can run Typescript because it automatically strips types (which is so convenient during development).

But in browser, for now only the more limited JSDoc-style types can be shipped as-is indeed.


This feels like a ridiculous thread that captures everything wrong with modern Javascript ecosystem.

It's grown into a product of cults and attempted zingers rather than pragmatic or sensible technical discussions about what we should and shouldn't expect to be able to do with an individual programming language.

edit: to clarify, I assume there needs to be a basical level of comprehension of programming languages to debate the nuance of one, and if you can't think of a single reason as to why someone would want types removed, that's a possible indicator you don't have that necessary level yet, and I think the most effective way for you to learn that is to Google it. Sorry for coming across as rude if you genuinely don't know this stuff.

If you already know many reasons as to why types would be removed, then it seems disingenuous to ask that question, other than to make the point that you feel types shouldn't be stripped. If you think that, say it, and explain why you think they shouldn't be stripped.


The current state of Javascript is you _have_ to remove types; I was pointing out I can think of reasons why I sometimes wouldn't want to. (Admittedly in a glib manor; though on this site many prefer that to four paragraphs)


I agree entirely on all points. It'd save me time too:)


How goes that saying?... always assume ignorance or malice will getcha


Hear me out: javascript integrates types as comments (ignored by default) in its standard and engines start to use types as performance / optimization hints. If you mistype, your program runs, but you get worse performance and warnings in console. If you type correctly, your program runs more efficiently. We already have different levels of optimization in V8 or JSC, why can't they use type hints to refine predictions?


It's so they can talk to their bot using Apple iMessage. That's pretty much it.


Oh so you need an iPhone _and_ a Mac mini :)


Another great take I found online: "Don't send us a PR, send us the prompt you used to generate the PR."


What I've been begging for every time someone wants me to read their AI "edited" wall of text.


this is never going to be faster because it requires syscalls


The time you lose at the syscall boundary you may be able to win back during much shorter GC pauses.


Some suggestions that are already in the PR list disable GC.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.gc-disable.php


it would be prompted for the master password again, according to the website


IIRC the official test-suite is not open-source, so I'm not sure how possible this is.


You do not recall correctly. There is more than 500K SLOC of test code in the public source tree. If you "make releasetest" from the public source tarball on Linux, it runs more than 15 million test cases.

It is true that the half-million lines of test code found in the public source tree are not the entirety of the SQLite test suite. There are other parts that are not open-source. But the part that is public is a big chunk of the total.


Out of curiosity, why aren't all tests open source?


One set of proprietary tests is used in their specialist testing service that is a paid for service.


What is that service used for besides SQLite?


It's still SQLite, they just need to make money: https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

Edit: also this:

> TH3 Testing Support. The TH3 test harness is an aviation-grade test suite for SQLite. SQLite developers can run TH3 on specialized hardware and/or using specialized compile-time options, according to customer specification, either remotely or on customer premises. Pricing for this services is on a case-by-case basis depending on requirements.


That's interesting. Here is more information https://sqlite.org/th3.html

The roots of SQLite are in defence industry projects of US Navy and General Dynamics. Seems like TH3 might be of interest for these sort of users.


One could assume also for Fossil.


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