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Comment on Capital i and lowercase L look the same in pretty much any sans-serif computer font

As a job title: sysadmin

Loathe.

Every now and then there crops up the situation where there is no copy/paste from host to host. And when that involves a fucking product key or some shit… Mother fuckers just base 58 that shit.

What would you rather read and type?

Product key: “I dont fucking know lots of lllllIIIIIIlllIII etc”

Or…

Product key: “CqiDNKttsj1NUubpbVJ2VJL9eMEpRvRFMV3hNPRxtUX7SMox5UQjeEZX3DqqHNAfkSE”

I rest my case.

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reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Please enter your serial number…

One? Ell? Eye? Zero? Oh? Vee Vee Double-U?

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tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Mother fuckers just base 58 that shit.

I’m assuming that this is the point you’re making, but just to clarify:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32

The most widely used[citation needed] base32 alphabet is defined in RFC 4648 §6 and the earlier RFC 3548 (2003). The scheme was originally designed in 2000 by John Myers for SASL/GSSAPI.[2] It uses an alphabet of A–Z, followed by 2–7. The digits 0, 1 and 8 are skipped due to their similarity with the letters O, I and B (thus “2” has a decimal value of 26).

This is generally considered to be a preferable encoding for things like this.

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- foggy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah…
  
  I didn’t mean RFC Base32.
  
  I meant human-safe alphabets.
  
  Base58 or Crockford Base32 (which is distinct from “base 32”) that intentionally remove I, L, O, and 1.
  
  RFC Base32 still hits the exact problem I’m ranting about.
  
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