From the original 404 article:

And yet, this is of course an extreme example of the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies. This is the same underlying AI that powers Grokipedia, which is the antithesis of Wikipedia and yet is being pitched by its creator as being somehow less biased than the collective, well-meaning efforts of human volunteers across the world.

You may already know this, but a lot of everyday people don’t. They still think that a computer can’t have bias, and if all these tech bros and business leaders are talking about AI then maybe it does make sense to replace our society with an impartial machine. This article is for them.

I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.

The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

Anyway, that’s all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.

Since this will be a facility owned by a public university, I think the city would see no property tax revenue from this project. So why should a city trade its health and/or morals for a nuclear weapons datacenter and not even get anything out of it?

What I’m getting at is that for people using FDE, any performance hit is worth it compared to worrying that you’ve covered every angle.

Suppose you’re in some hypothetical country where torrenting is illegal. The presence of /usr/bin/qbittorrent on your disk could be enough to face charges. Unencrypted /var/log? Maybe they can see you’ve been running a cryptocurrency miner. There could be plenty of data outside of $HOME on your computer which a cop might try to use against you.

In the most paranoid hypothetical scenario, someone could mount your unencrypted /usr/bin and replace openssl with a compromised version.

The Elon-oi.

I’d be OK if my descendents got to eat them.