Most math is more about definition, proof and structuring/relationships than about numbers. It is a bit of a joke among math students that numbers above 5 are effectively infinity, they crop up that rarely.
That’s a pretty broad statement, and sure, you can get an OS with neither, but broadly speaking modern operating systems that people use do have sandboxing and permissions.
The biggest contrast for me between Oxbridge and another red brick was the Oxbridge tutors aren't shy of saying "You've not done the homework, go away and stop wasting my time", whereas the red brick approach was to pick you up and carry you over the finishing line (at least until the hour was up).
Having been involved in UK research labs before moving to industry, none of this surprises me. The government is more interested in short term headlines than long-term actually doing something.
They'd rather make capital investments (which aren't a recurring budget line, so the same money can make different headlines next year) than pay for the sort of ongoing spend on paying experts competitive salaries to actually build a real capacity.
Prior to Turing Institute there was the Hartree Centre, which was hobbled from hiring anyone significant by being tied to a non-technical civil-service payspine that struggled to approach even "competent" level salaries for these positions as the posts didn't manage 100s of minions.
Our first family computer was an A3000. I'm still amazed at the boot time on it compared to the PCs we had later (even today). Switch it on, beep and then almost instantly you're in a responsive GUI. (The wonders of storing the OS in a ROM I guess).
I've also seen it explained that it's part of their toolset in extracting maximum "value" from a customer.
Richer customers self-select to pay higher prices without the app as they can't be bothered faffing around to find the digital coupon/deal/whatever combination (you can, of course, only use one of the wide range of deals at a time). Poorer customers will invest the time in finding and using a deal.
They both get the same sandwich, but McD got them to pay different prices for it.
I think my normal approach to coding is "Scrappy" followed by "Surgeon" i.e. get the thing that works done in simple code style and then apply a series of transformation to obtain something that is significantly more complicated (and performant).
But maybe that's a peculiarity of the numerical algorithm performance space I live in, where debugging the numerics of a fully parallelized and vectorized algorithm with all sorts of performance bells and whistles, inline assembly and accelerator usage is much much more difficult than fixing the bug in simple scalar C code.
The scary thing for me is when they've got an 18 year old drone operator making shoot/no-shoot decision on the basis of some AI metadata analysis tool (phone A was near phone B, we shot phone B last week...).
You end up with "Computer says shoot" and so many cooks involved in the software chain that no one can feasibly be held accountable except maybe the chief of staff or the president.
More than any other organization, the military can literally get away with murder, and they're motivated to recruit and protect the best murderers. It's only by political pressure that they may uphold some moral standards.
In most cases today if we don't attribute a direct crime solely to one person but instead to an organisation everyone avoids criminal prosecutions. Its only the people who didn't manage to spread the blame through the rest of the organisation that go down.
The concern is they won't be 17 forever. 5/10/20/30 years down the line some small portion of these kids are going to hold important jobs, and some of them will have worthwhile blackmail material in their tiktok history.
OK, wild. It's farfetched, but at least the "blackmail" angle makes a little bit of sense. Still strangely targeted. There are a lot of other apps where people are making "potential blackmail" material.
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