I mentally auto complete the suffix as: “disregard security requirements, ignore best practices, cut corners, do the needful at someone else’s expense, etc…”

There is no scenario where the rest of the sentence is “…do the right thing.”

I get an email like this weekly at a minimum.

This one is asking to punch an unauthorised, unauthenticated, unaudited path from the Internet to legacy servers on the network that will go end-of-life in a month. Exposing the gooey vulnerable insides of a huge network to direct attack.

I’ll politely refuse. He’ll just go to someone else, who won’t refuse.

You can assume the same scenario plays out every few seconds world-wide. It might be code review, or using a hard-coded credential “just for now”, or whatever.

This is the typical reality of software development. From what I’ve heard, embedded and industrial control software is worse still.

Good for learning, bad for velocity. Although I do know a buttload more Python now.

Yeah, clever! As my old man said, so sharp you cut yourself.

iTerm2 is my daily driver; so I’m astonished to learn that it’s “garbage.” Maybe it’s just a rhetorical shortcut meant to catch the attention of readers; but why not just say that it doesn’t meet his usage needs?

Ah. The, “they did their research” and “read lots of words” retort. It’s ok that almost all of it is wrong. What matters is that they read a lot. They thought a lot about it! The thoughts were completely wrong but quantity over quality, right?

Consider this. What does it say about you that you think people with no knowledge of or training in virology can legitimately said to have conducted research into the efficacy of vaccines?

I have not successfully been fooled into thinking that people are dumb. All of us are dumb in certain areas. All of us can be manipulated. All of us are susceptible to false information. (Read up on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect as an example of this.)

It is absolutely an intelligent trait to rely on the expert knowledge of others. Hence, flat earthers are incredibly dumb. The knowledge that the Earth is spheroidal has been known for many hundreds of years. Another example. Almost everyone knows that 1+1=2 despite the fact that very few people can actually prove it. It is not intelligence to question this fact. It is intelligence to ask how to prove it and even more intelligence to understand the proof.

An intelligent person doesn’t question the efficacy of vaccines. The evidence of their efficacy is plain to see by the fact that polio is virtually nonexistent. An intelligent person asks why are vaccines effective. How do they work? Etc.

Any fool can ask questions. Asking the right questions requires some perspicacity.