B and R but not ICS

You shouldn't be pulling untrusted assets in CI regardless. Hacking your bash runner is the hardest approach anyways, just patch some subroutine in a dependency that you'll call during your build or tests.

Been there too, and for me it was under 40 hours. Sometimes you'd have to cut people off and say they needed to go home if they were trying to pull more. But the whole 'strategy' is that cleaning up mistakes takes way more time than getting it right the first time, so keeping people fresh and without distractions is the most important thing.

39c3 is the conference it is being presented at, not the presenter. 39th Chaos Communication Congress, the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club.

This is a hacker messing around who is presenting to inspire others and get feedback. Many things presented at Xc3 are wildly impractical, potentially illegal, or not even technical at all and more on the side of activism and policy. Most are interesting and fun, which is the main goal.

Sorry but no. Software engineering is too high dimensional such that there is no rulebook for doing it the way there is for building a bridge. You need to develop taste, much like high level Go players do. This is even more critical as LLMs start to spit out code at an ever higher rate allowing entropy to accumulate much faster and letting unskilled people paint themselves into corners.

I think of it a bit like ebike speed limits. Previously to go above 25mph on a 2-wheeled transport you needed a lot of time training on a bicycle, which gave you the skills, or you needed your motorcycle licence, which required you to pass a test. Now people can jump straight on a Surron and hare off at 40mph with no handling skills and no license. Of course this leads to more accidents.

Not to say LLMs can't solve this eventually, RL approaches look very strong and maybe some kind of self-play can be introduced like AlphaZero. But we aren't there yet, that's for sure.

I don't think that conflicts with what I said but perhaps counters with something I didn't; your ebike analogy implies a recklessness that the junior with the attributes I mentioned will be averse to. Conversely the senior with the full grasp of LLMs and the "taste" and judgement will naturally be ahead.

But the comparison I made was between the junior with a good attitude and expert grasp on LLMs, and the stick-in-the-mud/disinterested "senior". Those are where the senior and junior roles will be more ambiguous in demarcation as time moves forward.

You would still need to pay the bank the full 700k even if it's only worth 300k now. This might mean that you still owe 400k on a 300k asset. In this way you can be underwater while still being a 30% owner.

But that option is obviously worse than declaring bankruptcy, which you can do. You can't be forced into remaining with your underwater house.

It does raise the point though that anyone who borrowed against his house to obtain other assets could be negatively affected by this turn of events.

Also in the case of mass bankruptcy and mortgage failure of the lower middle class I guess there would be risk of bank failure as in 08? That said, I still think the hypothetical illustrates the overall situation quite well.

> It does raise the point though that anyone who borrowed against his house to obtain other assets could be negatively affected by this turn of events.

How?

A drop in the price of houses means it becomes more difficult to exchange houses for non-houses.

If you borrow against your house to obtain something else, and then the price of houses falls, you successfully timed the market. That's all upside for you.

What do you think is the difference between example 3, the guy with a $500,000 mortgage on a $700,000 house, plus a $50,000 car, and example 3', the guy with a $450,000 mortgage and a $50,000 car loan on his house, plus a $50,000 car?

Say I inherit a $700,000 house and, being the kind of guy I am, immediately mortgage it for $500,000. But I stop renting and move in to my new house. Also, I hire a bunch of call girls to live with me in my house. One year later, the price of my house drops to $100,000, and I turn it over to the bank.

I started (the crash) with a $500,000 loan and no way to pay it back other than selling my house. At this point, the faster I realize what's happened and sell my house, the more money I'll be left with. (If I sell immediately, I'll get $200,000!) The longer I postpone selling, the worse off I'll become. (Though since I can live in the house, this trades off against what I would spend on rent.)

I've also spent $500,000 on entertainment and one year's rent. Mostly entertainment. Is this a harm that was dealt to me by the fall in the price of my house?

When the price falls, this forces me to sell the house, locking in a profit of... $500,000. (Which I've already spent.) It could have been $700,000, in theory. This $200k difference in profit vs potential profit can be seen as an effect of the price crash. But that's pretty good for an event that notionally took $600,000 out of the value of my house. Borrowing against the house helped me.

If you want to talk about a negative effect on someone, walk me through the accounting.

    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    |    event    | my equity | my cash | my debt | bank equity | bank cash | bank held debt | hookers |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    | baseline    |        0  |      0  |      0  |          0  |        0  |             0  |      0  |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    | inherit     |      700k |      0  |      0  |          0  |        0  |             0  |      0  |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    | mortgage    |      700k |    500k |   -500k |          0  |     -500k |           500k |      0  |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    | party       |      700k |      0  |   -500k |          0  |     -500k |           500k |    500k |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    | price crash |      100k |      0  |   -500k |          0  |     -500k |           500k |    500k |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+
    | bankruptcy  |        0  |      0  |      0  |        100k |     -500k |             0  |    500k |
    +-------------+-----------+---------+---------+-------------+-----------+----------------+---------+

At the beginning of this process, I was short $700,000 for a house that I needed but didn't have.

Before the price crash, I had "200k equity"† in that very house, leaving me $500,000 short of a house.

After the price crash, I was deeply underwater on the house. Without bankruptcy, I was still $500,000 short of my house, but only $100,000 short of some other house.

And then, after the bankruptcy, I was $100,000 short of a house.

1. What is the harm that I suffered from the price crash?

2. If the "hookers" column had some other label, would that change the harm that I suffered from the price crash?

† You might note that this is accounted as 700k equity in the table. The table is correct, but that's not how we talk about it. There is probably an error in my earlier comment related to this.

> a $50,000 car loan on his house, plus a $50,000 car?

Well I suppose that guy might come out unscathed since many US states protect your primary vehicle in a bankruptcy. But to an approximation declaring bankruptcy involves losing all of your remaining assets. So in that scenario the borrower is on the hook for the cost of replacing those assets (limited by how far underwater they were on the mortgage naturally).

Your other example involved blowing the borrowed money on entertainment in which case I agree that you come out ahead. But that is precisely why I used the term "assets" in GP.

Also I don't think everyone just gets let off scot free after a bankruptcy? Don't you sometimes get stuck with some amount of repayment depending on the nature and volume of your income?

My question about bank failure also still stands. While the impacts of this hypothetical on personal finances are certainly interesting to consider, I'm thinking we really don't want to do the whole widespread mortgage default thing again.

Sure, bank failure might happen. That comes out clearly in the chart; the flow of value is that the bank loses a bunch of cash which ends up in "hookers".

> But to an approximation declaring bankruptcy involves losing all of your remaining assets. So in that scenario the borrower is on the hook for the cost of replacing those assets (limited by how far underwater they were on the mortgage naturally).

If you financed something by borrowing against your house, then it cost less than your house, and when you have to replace it, the cost will be less than the cost of buying a house at the original prices. This is the "you lose your house and your car" example. Losing your mortgaged house and your owned-free-and-clear car is good when buying a replacement house+car costs less than the mortgage on your house.

What if house prices fall into the sweet spot where (1) your mortgage is underwater; and (2) a new house + new "assets" exceed the value of your mortgage? (But don't exceed the original value of your house.)

It could be that those assets don't generate income. In this case, they are isomorphic to the hookers in the example.

If they do generate income, then you might save money by keeping your house at its inflated pre-crash price, and you'll make those pre-crash loan payments using the income stream generated by the assets. Here you have a loan that is nominally against your house but actually against your business. It's underwater when considered as a mortgage, but it's not underwater when considered as a business loan, so you'll keep paying it. Your bank will be fine with this. (Both in the sense that they won't object, and also in the sense that they won't suffer financial hardship.) You'll probably have to recollateralize the loan.

(Or your assets might generate income, but not enough income that you'd save money by keeping your original mortgage. In this case it's straightforward that you're better off losing the original house, losing the original assets, buying a new house, and then not buying new assets.)

The bank isn't going to give you a loan for the next 300k house though, if you declared bankruptcy.

No, 10 years ago everyone was complaining that their BlackBerry was faster to type on than an iPhone (or maybe that was 12 years ). I don't think touchscreens being a pain to use is a new revelation.

That’s nearly 20 years ago. Approximately no-one had a blackberry 10 years ago.

To align this more precisely - 2015 was the year of the Blackberry Priv (I used one for a couple of years) and, being an Android phone, felt like kind of a last gasp for Blackberry.

The KEYone was 2017 (I had this up until 2023 or so) and the KEY2 was 2018.

They've still got QNX.

The other way would be to ruin the career prospects of any politicians that put their name behind this.

Name and shame via a broad media campaign. It only has to happen a few times for nobody to want to propose this kind of thing anymore.

At 160/mo you are using so little you might as well host off of a raspberry pi on your desk with a USB3 SSD attached. Maintenance and keeping a hot backup would take a few hours to set up, and you're more flexible too. And if you need to scale, rent a VPS or even dedicated machine from Hetzner.

An LLM could set this up for you, it's dead simple.

I'm not going to put customer data on a USB-3 SSD sitting on my desk. Having a small database doesn't mean you can ignore physical security and regulatory compliance, particularly if you've still got reasonable cash flow. Just as one example, some of our regulatory requirements involve immutable storage - how am I supposed to make an SSD that's literally on my desk immutable in any meaningful way? S3 handles this in seconds. Same thing with geographically distributed replicas and backups.

I also disagree that the ongoing maintenance, observability, and testing of a replicated database would take a few hours to set up and then require zero maintenance and never ping me with alerts.

The lede I buried there is whether all of this theater actually gives you better security and availability than 'toy' hardware.

Looking at all the recent AWS, Azure and Cloudflare outages, I posit that it doesn't.

Nice troll. But TFA is about corporate IT so hopefully you get whatever.