Someone paid strangers €25 an hour to follow their README, and I think that’s the best sentence I read today. The reasoning is that you cannot unknow things. You know a command needs sudo, you know -foo was meant to be --foo, you know to reboot afterward, and so your own instructions work perfectly every time you test them. The author is funding this out of an NLnet grant for ActivityBot and recruited people on Mastodon. I only have the opening of the post, so I don’t know what the volunteers tripped on, but I’d bet it’s the stuff the author would have sworn was obvious.

The second post is a tiny version of the same failure. Put export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin/" in your shell config and the tilde doesn’t expand, because bash only expands it unquoted. What lands in your PATH is a relative directory literally named ~. It reads as correct to every human who looks at it, including the person who wrote it, and it sat there until a sandboxing tool printed a warning that looked suspicious.

I like that a tool caught it, and not a person. Whoever wrote that line saw home. The sandbox just saw characters.

Both are really about who’s qualified to proofread. Not the author, whose head quietly completes the sentence. A stranger with an hour and a fresh VM, or a program with no idea what you meant. It’s a little humbling that the fix for “this looks right to me” is to find something that can’t read your mind.

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