> The limiting factor at work isn't writing code anymore
Was it ever? If you don't care about correctness and just want the vibes, then hiring idiots for pennies and telling them to write unlimited code was always an option. Way before "AI" even existed.
And I mean pennies literally. Hell, people will do it for free. Just explain upfront that you only care that the code technically works.
Why is that? I also used to hold this opinion, but we use it for 99% of our production deployments (or k8s where we need it) and it has been maximally reliable, and super convenient for fault-finding. Maybe I didn't understand your take.
Sometimes you just need to read the sources that were linked to you:
> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.
He mentions in the post that his focus is on Roman history, and that his discussion on peasants will be most applicable to the late Mediterranean antiquity
That is a completely valid threat model analysis, though? "Just hope no bad guy ever gets into the safe" is rather the entire point of a safe. If you have a safe, in which you use the contents of the safe daily, does it make sense to lock everything inside the safe in 100 smaller safes in some kind of nesting doll scheme? Whatever marginal increase in security you might get by doing so is invalidated by the fact that you lose all utility of being able to use the things in the safe, and we already know that overburdensome security is counterproductive because if something is so secure that it becomes impossible to use, those security measures just get bypassed completely in the name of using the thing. At some level of security you have to have the freedom to use the thing you're securing. Anything that could keep a bad guy from doing anything ever would also keep the good guy, ie. you, from doing anything ever.
Perhaps figuratively? I manage several servers where the majority of (LDAP) accounts have no special privileges at all. They get their data in the directories and can launch processes as their user, that's...pretty much it.
Though the upstream comment is gone and I am perhaps missing some important context here.
When the question is "how do I communicate securely with a third party," there's nothing you can do if the third party in question gets possessed by a demon and turns evil. (Which is what happens if an attacker has root.)
Random sysadmins who have access to your server have the permissions to steal whatever is communicated between third parties unrelated to this sysadmin.
Just because some random outsourced nightshift dude has the permissions to do "sudo systemctl restart" shouldn't mean he gets to read all the secret credentials the service uses.
As it is now, the dude has full unfettered access to all credentials of all services on that machine.
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