Sometimes I think in terms of relationships between objects. I walk around slowly, up and down a hallway, and the "objects" are just vague shapes hovering around the hallway. If I'm thinking that way, it's going to be hard to explain my "chain of reasoning" while I'm in that mode.

Once I have figured out the relationships, though, I can talk about it in words. "Why didn't you do it this way?" "That felt really clunky. This way seemed cleaner, because X Y Z."

But I've never had to go into that mode for an interview. Or maybe the interview is too "immediate" - too interactive - for me to go into that mode.

We're talking specifically about the Linux kernel. Do you have any reason to say that they don't think that security is a concern?

The linux kernel maintainers tend to go a little against the grain in terms of approach to security. Primarily they tend to resist the categorisation and ranking of bugs by security impact, instead insisting that more or less all bugs are equal and you should just update to the latest version regularly if you want to remain secure.

Because open source Linux is a fad and Linus needs to beaten in the toes with a small stick.

Very childish

Um, Indiana isn't the "Indians" we're talking about here.

(I presume that's a typo.)

Indeed, fixed it.

Yeah. Writing about painting, instead of showing the painting? That's kind of lame.

Magic words: "I know a guy".

You'd be surprised at what specialized equipment some people have. There are individuals who have professional equipment in their garages. There are small shops that have big-shop equipment - not all of it, but certain ones.

The problem is, if it's an individual, you have to know them, or someone who knows them. For a small shop, they may not have much of a web page, and if they do, it may not say all that they can do.

I would google for what you need in your city or state. I would also go to Reddit or Facebook, and find groups about your area, and ask who in the area can do what you need.

You're still going to need money to pay them, though. As lp92 said, VC funding may be part of the answer for you.

I worked for this place that made a security auditing tool. The agent had to know which version of Windows it was running on. When Microsoft came out with a new version, the agent didn't know what it was running on, since it hadn't been updated to include that version. I forget what it did in response, but it didn't run right - maybe just terminated?

Microsoft discovered this in their testing, before they released the new Windows version. In response, they added our agent to a list of programs that Windows would lie to about the Windows version. If our program asked, we would be told the previous version.

Well, that was great, in that our program didn't terminate early (or whatever it did). But now, even after we updated our agent, it still wouldn't know whether it was running on the new version of Windows, and so would not audit it correctly!

This dance shows just how far Microsoft went with backward compatibility. We were not a top-1000-most-used program by any means, but they knew about us and tested us and fixed for us. (I mean, we didn't want it, in this case, but it was still impressive.)

How did they identify your software? Could you guys produce a sibling program whose job is to identify the windows version and notify the main program?

I believe they identified it by the name of the executable. IIRC, we did exactly what your second sentence says.

If you look at the compatibility tool you'll see multiple checks not only executable name match. It can check version headers and other signatures.

He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen. That's wrong enough to be called "wrong", no matter how reasonable his reasoning was at the time.

And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential. Agriculture wasn't linear. It wasn't even in his day. There was improvement in per-person output since, say, the 1400s, and more since, say, 2000 BC. There was a technological component even then.

So population wasn't exponential, agriculture wasn't linear, and what he said would happen didn't happen. How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?

> He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen.

Not really my point. Malthus was wrong about a future food crisis, but that doesn't invalidate the tools he used to make that prediction. Re-read the first line of my original post, it's pretty clearly about the theory and not his predictions.

The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, and we know it is bad for food consumption exceed production.

> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential

You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.

> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?

Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production no longer leads to a negative number for me to consider him "wrong."

Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant to famine after technology changed, because it no longer was useful for that particular thing. But the core notion of "if demand grows faster than supply, you will eventually hit a crisis when they intercept" is a pretty clear-cut conclusion to draw.

It is a bit odd for a thread to get this heated over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago. Is there some political side to Malthus I am missing?

An alleged illegal immigrant.

That's fair, although the evidence is pretty solid

When the last senior COBOL developer dies off and you need to update the bank's code to comply with this year's changes in banking regs, it might be good for the new people to have LLM support to at least understand what the existing code does.

No, I don't want vibe-coded bank infrastructure. Yes, I do want LLMs that can work with COBOL.

The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. And face-to-face communication is often a better vehicle for it than written communication.