We went through exactly this with Google. People argued that once they were the only way anyone found websites, they were merely collecting undue economic rent.
They specifically describe that exploits are usually multiple small vulnerabilities chained together. With that understanding, it sounds like closing vulnerabilities isn't the same as discovering an exploit. Instead, you're leaving fewer small gaps behind, to make it harder & harder to put together a working exploit.
The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace).
In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%.
When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.
On the other hand, I have paperback books I loved as a kid that were my father's when he was a kid. I carefully saved them for decades. One more generation and they could be considered family relics or something. I quickly realized the flaw with this plan as I tried to share them with my kids, who cannot be expected to treat brittle middle-grade and young-adult novels as museum pieces.
I am not entirely ready to part with the books, but I'm also unable to bear watching them get thoughtlessly destroyed by my kids. Digital has made it very easy to get copies of all of them; plus others I didn't manage to hold on to.
Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very much not onboard with the parents who trust their six year olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.
This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…
Every time someone drives their child somewhere, they are being put into a position of a small chance of tragedy. The chance of tragedy doesn't go away, only our perceptions of it. People seem to be more okay with dying with their child than their child dying away from them, so I guess that makes sense.
Why not? Same for hiring. People keep trying to impress order on a process that is ultimately, inherently chaotic, because of the reliance on disorderly human agents to carry it out.
Maybe if C-suite bros thought they might lose their golden geese to a coin flip, they'd think twice about instituting layoffs. Ironically, it would put a wall between "labor costs" (actual people with actual lives that are massively disrupted by job loss) and other costs, in terms of what can be excised from the balance sheet with an inconsiderate pen stroke.
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