I think the post has some valid points, developing front-end dashboards nowadays is a pretty big undertaking and if your userbase doesn't require it, why would you?

I can see some future expansion into the webspace as a premium feature like serverless.com does.

Thanks! Author here. I believe that's the key takeaway, knowing your audience and being able to do things that are perhaps controversial. In our case, it's also focusing on our strength while we are such a small team. Being mostly backend devs (although many of us launched products where we did the full stack) CLI is in our DNA. We believe if the product and experience is not compelling enough, having a shiny GUI won't help. Then why waste the effort instead of making our core proposition stellar?

If you look at the other projects, there's also a subsection on Non-discrimination. This specific example of the license plate registration doesn't have anything to do with discrimination because it simply checks the output of an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithm with a database which consists of the location and time a certain license plate has paid for.

The parking attendants just drive their vehicles and the OCR does its work. The only reason I see for the city of Amsterdam to include this subsection into the article is to tell the citizens that the part of license registration doesn't come into play until after the algorithm (or in case of a failure a human check) has decided that the license plate wasn't in the database on that point in time.

I see your point but as OP mentioned:

1) Where is the data that shows each street is equally/proportionally scanned by parking attendant vehicles? There is potential discriminatory policy there.

2) Where is the data that shows that scan-success rate (i.e., percentage of detected cars, for which a plate number could be made out) is distributed normally, rather than e.g. influenced by parking infrastructure which is correlated with socioeconomic factors? Again, potential discriminatory practice.

Other possibilities exist, too.

These may sound far fetched, and you may be right to say that, but the data would show it. It'd be nice to see the data. It cannot be said a priori that 'algorithm just checks the image, so there's no discrimination possible', if there's no word about ensuring that regardless of various factors (e.g. socioeconomic, racial etc), your non-compliance with parking rules has an equal chance of your plate being scanned and fed into the algorithm.

It's the same issue why racial profiling is controversial. You can say 'this computer/algorithm is perfect at assessing non-compliance with a rule or regulation by individual X regardless of e.g. ethnicity', and you could still have discrimination because ethnic group A is fed into this system by way of racial profiling 10x more than ethnic group B. By the same token, we'd want to see where/how-often the scanning vehicles operate, and how their scans may have lower or higher success rates in various situations.

In short, the OCR might be alright, but the entire process/model/architecture (from scanning to issuing a fine, in which OCR is just one of the middle-steps) may not be. That entire model including scanning (photographing) by a computer is described on the page, so saying its non-discriminatory implies they've assessed more than just the OCR step. And if that is the case, they cannot say it's a priori non-discriminatory quite yet without providing more info/data.

Could you provide a source for this statement because I'm pretty sure it's actually closer to 45k/y for fairly experienced developers

No, ezperienced C++ devs with the math skills you need to do 3d dev make 60k or more, 45k is just above fresh graduate level. I don't have an online source, just from what I know from companies and people I know, and doing hiring myself in the past. I made more than 45k 10+ years ago when I was an employee.

I was on approx 60k eur in Amsterdam a few years ago with 3 years experience

One could of course argue that even the modern computer and therefore software was borne out of both necessity and dick measuring.

(Insert any cipher) was too at its time.

You should remember that the context of the jokes was about the statements from ex-FBI's head James Comey on encryption backdoor in the middle of the Crypto War 2 back in 2016.

> "(with encryption) Everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in his smartphone if government can't get in. You cannot take an absolutist view on this (, and we must add backdoors)."

Replace "smartphones" with "brains".

> "(with encryption) Everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in his brain if government can't get in. You cannot take an absolutist view on this (, and we must add backdoors)."

Get the joke now?

Brain activity isn't a cipher.

There can be a cipher, if we are talking about electronic brains from GiST. But it doesn't change the issue nor the jokes.

> I’m pretty sure there’s an eighth habit of highly effective people. They don’t spend all their time reading about the seven habits of highly effective people.

I think this is often overlooked. What works for other people might not work for you and the time spent looking for the right way is better spend on doing the tasks.

It's amazing how those three comments still reflect the main opinions about crypto

"This is an absurd waste of energy" is missing.

It's not a waste of energy according to the miners who shell out for that energy.