This is actually my preferred approach. If you want to put a 4gb base64 as your phone number, go right on ahead; best believe I will truncate it to a sensible length before I store it, but sure. Who am I to question your reality.

Sadly, people abuse shit like that to pass messages (like naming Spotify playlists with messages to loved/friends/colleagues while in jail) and maybe we have to assert a tiny bit of sanity on the world.

How do prisoners have access to Spotify?

Presumably some feature/jailbreak of JPay (and the like) tablets.

https://offers.jpay.com/jp5-tablets/

Sounds awful.

> imagine allowing invalid values to exist

Pretty common, for example when using databases as a mostly dumb store with all the logic in application code, and then a second application (or big refactor) appears and they introduce a subtle bug that results in an invalid `INSERT` (or whatever), and the database happily accepts it instead of rejecting it.

imagine enforcing invariants as part of the design of a software system

The nerve, taking good jobs away from young qa testers. Wait till the IT Union hears of this!

I’m just saying enforce invariants at construction time / type-designing instead of with the validity checks

This wasn't that kind of validation - it was "is this token allowed to do this thing?" Like "validate your parking" kind of scenario.

(And yes, it should probably have been "CheckAuthorisation")

naming things is so hard.