I personally wouldn’t call the former particularly tame, and the latter of the two comes with the additional burden of knowing that you’re the engineer of our collective end rather than just a student of it.
But I’m not going to argue that grappling with Thermodynamics is easy either. I’m not that far gone.
Well, at least it isn’t transfinite set theory. Or AI research.
Jokes on Meta: I don’t have friends. Those are an unacceptable liability these days.
Fair question. I find it unnerving, because there’s very little a software developer can meaningfully do if they cannot rely on the integrity of the hardware upon which their software is running, at least not without significant costs, and ultimately if the problem is bad enough even those would fail. This finding seems to indicate that a lot of hardware is much, much less reliable than I would have thought. I’ve written software for almost thirty years and across numerous platforms at this point, and the thought that I cannot assume a value stored in RAM to reliably retain it’s value fills me with the kind of dread I wouldn’t be able to explain to someone uninitiated without a major digression. Almost everything you do on any computing device - whether a server or a smart phone relies on the assumption of that kind of trust. And this seems to show that assumption is not merely flawed, but badly flawed.
Suppose you were a car mechanic confronted with a survey that 10 percent of cars were leaking breaking fluid - or fuel. That might illustrate how this makes me feel.
Well, that’s unnerving.
Ah, kill -9. Me old pal. Always ready to assist when inconvenient bodies needs to be buried out back. Best friend ever.
Ah, a rubber duck debugging adherent. At least they paid good money for a professional.
“Well, we raided his mom’s house and confiscated all his cobbled-together e-waste.”
“And!?”
“His drives were encrypted. Apparently he ‘applied PQC patches to dm-crypt himself’, whatever that means. All I know is that it made the guys from NSA scream. There was nothing we could do.”
“So we’ve got nothing?”
“Oh no. He happily gave us both the keyfile and the passphrase.”
“So…?”
“No warez, no CSA, no political manifestos or illicit recipes. Not even tax evasion - it’s not like he has an income. Just… copyleft source code as far as the eye could see.”
Once you people have finally had enough, Linux and/or Libre Office will be right there. Waiting.
That would be ideal of course, but this is the US we’re talking about, so it seems unlikely that you’ll have them.
Look, does it really matter whether they do or not? If a company is morally bankrupt enough to conduct business like this in the first place, it’s a certainty they’ll just find some other novel way to be flaming assholes.
If you don’t want to get cheated, stop doing business with thieves and liars.
Speaking on higher-order infinities, let’s take pity on the MAGA crowd: Of the uncountably many things they’ll never understand is just how hot Cantor’s diagonal argument is. Just look at it, squeezed into that tightly-packed matrix.