Code as configuration loses one primary benefit which is being able to read the actual config and know exactly what will apply. In the example in the article you would get the same benefit by disallowing users to edit the config directly and instead require the config to be generated via a cmdline app/service that encodes the same policy?
When I started stardew I didn't know how to play so I would spend days waking up walking around and then go back to sleep repeating until my parsnips grew, but when I introduced my SO to the game, we ended up trying to learn how to actually play and then ended up with spreadsheets to track all the seasons, grow cycles, relationships and whatever else lol
Only in theory right? The moment you use it with a service that requires credentials or an email or a physical address to mail to, it's not, unless you somehow wash it through an anonymous pool somehow
To be honest, it's probably not enough to just block these scrapers if they are acting maliciously, people should just start serving generated content back to it and see how long it takes for them to catch on and fix the problem
I was thinking about that very thing as well, but I came to the conclusion that robotic movement doesn't really need to match human movements. If you want to have consistent fine motor control, you wouldn't really expect things like acceleration when hitting with a hammer, or pulling down the top of the griddle.
This is a good question, and one that I've been thinking a lot about as well. I think the problem is that
A) there's a LOT more people using computers now than ever before, and
B) the entry point into "computing" has lowered, which means that users come to a piece of software with a wide range of expectations of both what it should do, and how it should do it, and
C) the complexity matrix of the form factors that people expect to use software has also grown in size, and
D) software grows in complexity in response to the needs of the users (B) and the devices it runs on (C)
E) tack onto the above is that you really have to handle N+10 things nowadays to have a proper piece of software (ie. i10n, security, UX, performance, etc.)
It's a bit of a cop out to just blame complexity, but it's almost impossible to have a small team write a (sufficiently complicated) program that does all the above, but companies want single-software solutions (runs on everything for everyone from new users to veterans) and users also expect it. So as a result, developers are overworked, users complain the software doesn't do what they expect (often for good reasons), and devs often end up resenting users because despite their best intentions, it's simply not possible (a lot of the time) to make something that satisfies everyone.