My root privileges on my workstation that I can literally pop open and reimage present absolutely zero marginal security risk.

But what if a malicious website executes malicious code from my user account?

Well then it's gonna own my box. Which will let it do what?

Hack other boxes on the LAN? Can already do that without root access.

Exflitrate business data? That doesn't require root.

Steal credentials? Stored as user read only, no root required.

Again: if the end result is I get root access either way, but I stare blankly at a web training in one path...wtf is the point?

Same point as office 365 making me find the modal popunder to click before it signs in with cached credentials anyway: CYA for some lawyer and fuck wasting everyone's time.

Which especially creates friction in engineering organizations.

Yes I need root access on my machine. So naturally instead of working, I have to waste time sitting through root user trainings and documenting that yes I do have root access to my machine that sits on my desk in my office that I have to badge through the front door to even get to.

That's right kids. Back in the day, "apps" were disturbuted in ROM soldered onto a PCB inside a plastic case with an exposed card edge connector containing data and addess bus pins, that you would physically insert into your device.

If you wanted to change "apps" you would need to remove one and insert another in its place. Kids' rooms would have entire shelves full of these memory modules (a whopping 64kB each) for all their "apps."

Now git push off my lawn.

I'm sure most of them were sociopaths too. They just had the good sense to hide it better and it was easier to suppress the flow of information pre electronic media.

MLK had groupies of whom he availed himself.

FDR was as out of it as Biden by the end and he still went for a 4th term.

Lincoln declared martial law.

Washington didn't just own slaves but he also cultivated a personality cult during the early days of the Republic.

On it goes.

The problem prominent and/or mildly successful scientists of all stripes run into is that they begin to confuse their imagination for a source of truth. Having been rewarded with success in their careers for having done the so on their way up, it is almost reasonable to conclude their imagination *is* a direct line to God, Truth, or Whatever.

Feynman had a chapter in one of his books about this phenomenon. Several actually, but I'm thinking not of the famous Cargo Cult Science speech but of his experiments with psychedelic drugs in the 70s, where he wrote he almost felt like he was one with the eternal truth of creation until the high wore off and he realized that what he actually did was smoke some weed and seal himself off inside a sensory deprivation pod.

And they key is that sealing oneself off and interrogating the wider universe are mutually exclusive exercises.

Maybe Phillip K. Dick was right, but you won't find out by consulting your imagination; you will find out with hard-nosed and clearheaded systematic investigation.

Maybe there is a genetic component to race and intelligence that's separate entirely from culture and upbringing. I think it's plausible too, but having read Charles Murray, for example, I find his analysis simplistic and insufficient to make the case. And the reason is most of his doorstopper of a book he's making charts and graphs of responses to opinion polls and extrapolating into his own narrative, not conducting controlled experiments or even looking for good solid natural experiments with sufficient power to make the case.

Now obviously the kinds of controlled experiments necessary to answer questions of intelligence and genetic as separate from culture and upbringing would take too long and need to cross some ethical lines we presumably care more about not crossing than we do about knowing the answer.

So the scientifically honest thing to do is to say exactly that: it's plausible but we don't have a way of knowing for certain. Period.

The city schools suck and the school board is more concerned about performative political posturing, but the real problem is the guy who's opting out of the nonsense.

Now we'll just have to locate every copy of the web page and have it dipped in acid to make sure no one can break in at a later date.

Your government has jurisdiction over what goes on in Redmond. Nominally.

Not so with Beijing or Hangzhou or wherever the fuck these busses are from.

Yes. This is why .ssh/authorized_keys needs to be carefully managed as part of any security plan.

But I'm just a dumb bus driver. What do I know about the internets? Let the vendor figure it out.

Batteries are expensive and don't scale on demand very well. Steel tanks can be produced much more quickly and cheaply.

Electrons are easy to move; molecules are easy to stockpile.

This is a tradeoff. Tradeoffs exist in real life. The reality distortion field has little effect on them.

And the beautiful thing about methane is it requires absolutely no changes to the gas plant since natural gas is almost entirely methane. There is also existing storage, pipeline, and processing infrastructure that handles natural gas.

I'm gonna cook up some real food to eat.

On a half-serious note, the interwebs are full of AI generated videos, some quite well-made and cleverly written, others equivalent to prior slop.

The pre-AI slop was pretty prolific too. Looked like it was mostly animated or otherwise slide-showed together by faceless gig workers somewhere in the third world.

When I was in grad school about 10 years ago, one of the other grad student was paying an FPGA developer somewhere in Southeast Asia something like a few hundred bucks a month to do something for him that would probably cost tens of thousands here and that he probably ought to have done himself if he wanted to claim any ownership over the result.

Stories of ghostwritten humanities scholarship have abounded since time immemorial.

Pardon me for not getting up in arms about one form of half-assed slop being replaced another.

May I ask why you call firing people morally corrupt? Illegal, according to some artificial definitions of what is supposed to be the law, which is a system designed to force behaviors, maybe. But morally corrupt? Please explain, I really do not get it, absolutely don't understand what is morally corrupt about firing people that you don't want to work with because any reasons whatsoever. If it is your business, you should be able to fire anyone, it's not about morality, it is purely, completely a monetary decision. Do you feel morally corrupt for purchasing things on sale rather than overpaying for them?

Maybe.

Maybe there's also a subtler but much more important point about engineering philosophy to be made here:

The new shiny language with cool stuff that's better/faster/safer than the legacy language does not automatically solve all the problems that the artifact implemented in the legacy language has had to contend with and resolve over a long time; you still have to do it again in the new language.

Whether it is worth doing so is a balance between realizing the benefits of the new tools for further development and the cost in time of retreading the old ground.

To rewrite merely for the sake of rewriting utilities that are relatively stable and don't change much (meaning not much future benefit to be gained) is to accept the cost of the rewrite solely for the cosmetic benefits of jumping on the new language bandwagon. And the fact that the new tools aren't quite within spec means that the rewrite wasn't done well.

If something is done poorly and for largely cosmetic reasons, it is usually looked down on both by geeks and bean counters as a waste.

1. Fixing shit that ain't broke
2. Renaming stuff because reasons
3. Reinventing the hammer
4. Assuming every problem is a nail