That justification honestly doesn't sound that ridiculous to me, especially if the closed-source stuff is mostly just platform-specific GUI and integration code. Is there even a practical mechanism to open source an iOS app and then letting users verify that the version they're downloading from the App Store is exactly the same version that is open sourced?

I bet the rationale would be "anything over 12 characters will be too hard to remember and people will just write down the password."

But it's a maximum. It prevents people that want to use passphrases from doing so.

I think we (whoever we is) should start normalizing the concept of passphrases; on sign-up screens they should show the benefits of a passphrase. I'm surprised that Googles PW generator does not use passphrases, and I don't know about ios because I haven't tried theirs yet.

I started using passphrases after I saw this xkcd https://xkcd.com/936/

When I'm trying to log into something on a device that has a terrible keyboard, like a TV or giant touchscreen, it's a lot easier to type words I know than gibberish.

correct horse battery staple; knew it before I clicked the link.

Whoops, I've been pwnd!

https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

Until the late 2010s, the AD account password at my financial institution employer was capped at 12 characters because, for a subset of workers, AD creds were sync'ed to a mainframe application that could only support that many characters.

Sounds about right. One of Australia's big four banks had the online banking password requirement of exactly six characters for a long time - for similar reasons I assume.

Could it be that the only large safety-first companies are the ones forced by law (either proactively, or due to reliable legal accountability if things go wrong) to be safety-first?

The ones I took out my Mid-Market apartment window looked pretty true to my eye. But I had an iPhone X, which was 3 years old at the time. Perhaps the correction had gotten worse in newer iPhones.

But you wouldn't have to ask that silly question when talking to a human either. And if you did, many humans would probably assume you're either adversarial or very dumb, and their responses could be very unpredictable.

Sure, just like less desirable products of every category cost less essentially by definition. But that’s not really a retort to someone asking by why land prices have risen so much.

Population increases through immigration or birth and the area (a city) staying the same size. Plus covid people valuing a house more.

Surely U.S. housing was not twice as automatable 12-13 years ago as it is now.

No, that rose in price for different reasons

And the same person who posts about that on Facebook will the next day post “keep your government hands off my social security check.”

I mean, there’s just no way you can take the set of publicly known ideas from all human civilizations, say, 5,000 years ago, and say that all the ideas we have now were “in the distribution” then. New ideas actually have to be created.

Whoa, I just realized that the comma is the thousands separator when writing out the number in English words.