Yes very disturbing, but not unexpected.This is the foundational nature of government, and why citizen's don't generally want big government.
Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs.
Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line.
The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that.
Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent.
The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves.
This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life.
By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc.
Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed.
There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings.
Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them.
Most truly evil people believe they are good.
This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
Igor, This is a subject area that seems like it would be a good starter learning project and doable but really its not.
There are many problems that just are not suited to a young person at that age level of comprehension. Gaming graphics for example often requires understanding quaternion math, computer science, and hardware at a very low level (realtime processing where ms framerate processing counts).
Game design often also is multidisciplinary and requires knowledge of psychology, storytelling, music, and art.
Kids simply don't have the life experience, to put something together for this and have it turn out in a satisfying completed project.
Additionally, even when you are an expert, the experts don't play their own games most times. The vast majority of the fun and allure comes from the discovery of not knowing everything about the game and discovering it. This is why writing games for yourself is often doomed to failure.
Additionally, most games today have subtle manipulations and embedded addiction triggers. These aren't things they can just pick up and use. As an example of this, Call of Duty and Battlefield (FPS), have headshot audio triggers that associate through pavlovian conditioning headshots ingame with the dopamine hit sound cha-ching.
The ability to control addiction is in a part of the brain that doesn't usually develop fully until your 20s, and this stuff is in most modern games. There is a framework called the Octalysis Framework, it provides common methods to embed dark patterns in a way people don't perceive. It is based on some earlier work based in thought reform (torture), and later psychology experiments identifying key drivers to enable manipulation. This is extremely subtle stuff similar to what Pixar & Disney do in their movies (i.e. the handsome guy is always the villain, the preacher is always crazy...lot more).
Robert Cialdini wrote a book covering some of this precursor material. The book is called Influence, and it lays out all our natural perceptual blindspots, and how to exploit them. These are blindspots not even grown adults will notice most of the time without training.
I think you will be better served by starting them on something educationally constructive that is more suited for their age. If you are looking for something math related, Cosmic Calculator series has shortcuts that let you do math amazingly fast. Storytelling for writing authors may be good as well, or just focus on getting them to read for pleasure.
Descartes Rules of Method were particularly useful around that age as well as logic and reasoning (which public education will not teach them), since they are only just starting to be able to discern lies from truths, and that is a major developmental milestone.
Other activities might include Piano lessons, or art lessons.
The current gaming landscape is unhealthy, and can't be vetted by an 11-yo and even platforms designed to make this no-code easier, you have to worry about them suggesting and influencing in ways that will diminish them, or mislead, or creating interference and frustration, or something more directly harmful like TikTok and their recommendations to the Blackout Challenge (kids have literally died).
Some who don't have children might think this is overblown but there are no trusted platforms out there that will safeguard kids appropriately.
Google "Roblox kids scandal" and you'll see what I mean; and they've been recommended here in more than a few other comments.
Update: Sometimes I find it really surprising where others priorities are here on HN. You'd think protecting children would be paramount, but voting paints a very different picture, -3 for mentioning tiktok or the roblox scandal...
I suspect the voting is more based on the fact that you're essentially saying "your child should give up, this field is bad and there are no good spaces for kids" when that's both terrible advice and not at all true. Yes, there are exploitative spaces, but there are in fact good spaces too. And your whole thing about how "making games is less fun than playing them and playing them is actually a dark pattern that is evil" is extremely cynical and doesn't hold well if you know about more games than mobile ones or CoD.
If the post was about a kid wanting to write novels and you had said "writing is not as fun as reading, and you shouldn't read anyways because most books are scammy self-help books and conspiracy theories that exploit your brain," I think you would be similarly downvoted. Nothing to do with a Roblox scandal in that case either.
Any rational person reading what I actually wrote would disagree with just about everything you say here.
You try to be clever twisting what was actually written, but in the end this new version is something you've written. It is what you say, not what I said. While the words are similar, they have been subtly altered to change the meanings, making them your words, not mine, and most importantly these words you've written are false.
You've twisted the words just enough so any reader skimming lightly might be confused, and misled into a consistency trap of agreement. Very subtle and skilled which only increases the loss of credibility when it is found out.
Your motivation for this begs an important question about your character, and credibility as a whole is lost.
Good people don't do this, and there can be no mistake as to whether this was intentional given the level of attention and effort you invested coupled with the clear skill that can only come from practice.
Thank you. You thoroughly make my point about how no online places being safe, as this type of subtle deceptions and behavior is what children will have to interact with and they are at a stage of development that is inherently vulnerability lacking the tools to communicate or identify the faults.
People would only call what I've written cynical, in contexts of opinion when I was talking about opinion, but I used facts and references (not the same meaning), providing rational methods of support. You would imply this is an unbacked opinion as a nullification attempt, but this doesn't work on the rational, and rationality is one of the few things that separate humanity from the animal kingdom.
You should know that these tactics and techniques you use would at one point have gotten the outcome you desired, and it may fool some of the more gullible masses for now, but that number is shrinking. The knowledge is becoming common knowledge, and when it does people like you will have nothing left.
As with all deceptions, it lacks a core consistent truth, which can't fool people all the time. The more examples you provide, the more widespread knowledge of it spreads. What you hope to keep under wraps, will eventually be known by all and then you'll be left with nothing.
Based on your objective actions, I must conclude you are a malevolent blind person desperately lost and seeking to bring destruction in its various forms to those around you for some as of yet unknown motivation towards some selfish benefit .
There is only one cure for the malady you have, and eventually someone will give you that cure since you can no longer help yourself. All I can do is pray for a swift recovery.
> I am personally not worried. Any outcome is great. Either I keep a well paid job and it becomes even more well paid, or AI is so good there aren't any jobs at all anymore, which sounds good too.
You certainly have a rose-tinted magical way of viewing the world.
You haven't thought through the consequences of this at all. I'll break this down a bit further for you hopefully in a way you can understand.
You work to provide value in exchange for a store of value; currency. You do this to spend that currency on food and other basic necessities which are dependencies for your survival, first, and then discretionary spending second.
Producers hire you so you can distribute labor and produce, so they can make a profit. They stop producing when that's no longer possible. Its an agreement between both parties which enable distribution of labor and exchange of goods flowing through an economy. Without either part, no exchange occurs, there may be a brief stalling period but when its stalled everyone's goose is cooked. It is a very fine balance, or supercritical state where deviations can cause exit conditions. Sound similar to an n-body problem; that's because it is, along with mathematical chaos (small changes in inputs create dramatic unpredictable changes in outputs).
When there are no jobs, you can't earn currency, and you suddenly can't feed yourself. You have nothing to do, no way to differentiate yourself either.
Worse, No one will listen to you because you no longer provide value, you are now a nameless worthless slave. The only thing you had was trading your time and education for money and this is now gone. Your children will be worse off because the cost of education will no longer provide benefit.
This will worsen as population grows.
Eventually because resources are inherently scarce, someone somewhere with power, will decide its just better to reduce the number of mouths to free up resources; and they'll decide for you that you and your entire family meet that criteria, along with many others, but not the majority who voted those people into those positions of power. It will be a genocide of the rational and intelligent, powered by big data and your tax dollars.
It won't be the old people because they represent the most power having started and accumulated power first, but they will eventually be on the chopping block as well.
Along with this, production systems will fail, either as a result of vandalism, or growing corruption all causing shortage, which causes unrest and violence. With no market, or medium of exchange (inflationary economies fail when debts exceed production), order wanes.
The rational and intelligent people will fight back weakly, trying to organize to survive by destroying the system of bondage and slavery that is imposed on them without their consent. Eventually everything fails as systemic issues cascade.
Because intelligent people have the capability of great harm, they will be eliminated first favoring others instead.
Are you worried yet? You should be, every single thing here logically follows the next with just a little educated background in economics and history.
The world you say sounds so good, is in fact a hellscape world of spiraling madness, and intolerable suffering with no one capable of the first step (recognition) that can stop the death march forward. Anyone that could will have been killed long before recognition could happen in ways that don't attract attention and it will only show up in the actuarial tables under mortality.
People will stop having children when they can no longer afford to.
Old will crowd out the young as medical technology improves, and then there will be a great dying and collapse.
Those that remain will have not been prepared, having developed in a disadvantaged environment and so these collapses may end in the annihilation of the civilization as a whole.
By the time you recognize the problem (if at all) its too late to do anything about it, and your heads on the chopping block along with your family and friends because you had the intelligence to do the job in the first place, but not enough for you to foresee the consequences of your choices.
You and others like you are so concerned with can you do something, that you didn't think about should you do something.
Older generations called this type of blindness and destruction evil, and viewed it as a curable malady at the turn of the century; but not a cure anyone would willingly choose.
Currently, we are on track for economic collapse by 2029, though the more they print the sooner it occurs.
Mises has a full breakdown on how centralized systems fail, written in the 1930s. Its why socialism is considered a failed economic system by rational people.
To use your phrase of: You haven't thought through the consequences of this at all. I'll break this down a bit further for you hopefully in a way you can understand.
Don't even have to go further than "You work to provide value in exchange for a store of value; currency."
Work assumes that there is work to be done. If everything is abundant, there is no work to be done because no currency needed. Who makes food? Machines. Who makes the physical infrastructure? Machines. Who generates the power? Machines.
I'm not saying that this is going to happen (I also don't think anything you're saying is going to happen either), and I think the GP was being facetious, but if you are going to take that statement seriously, then I think you do not understand what abundance truly means.
You are blind, and supporting something that is both incredibly evil and destructive.
If you can, take a look at what abundance does to people in the real world, objectively, do some actual research. Look at mortality for lottery winners, and business tycoon heirs; read their horror stories.
When there is no work, there is no purpose, no growth, no value, and no life, nothing new happens.
It is death, either quick and self-inflicted, or slow until madness from suffering takes over, where you can't notice it along the way like a person suffering from a progression of Alzheimer's. That is the abundance you seek.
I said "I'm not saying that this is going to happen" so I wouldn't say I am supporting it. Was just making a point that you looked at it too black and white and didn't think through everything. More of a response to what I felt was unnessecarry pompusness
Your argument feels more like an anarcho-primitivism/Unabomber idea of abundance or technological progress reducing humanity's satisfaction, so we should stay where we are, i.e., always have tasks(work) rather than pursue fulfilment.
1. The weaknesses of the human condition might be the cause of our destruction.
That's why I am not surprised when people give these anti doomer takes. History keeps repeating again and again and people haven't really learned from their mistakes.
2. The solution to this problem would be to fix or greatly diminish human greed and selfishness or anything else that I might be missing. We would then have greater chances of heading towards a utopia.
We will end up with either a utopia or a dystopia.
I don't disagree. I don't really have too much of an opinion on which one we end up with. I was more pointing out that, at the limit, it's not certain that we will end up in a dystopia through abundance, more that it is extremely uncertain of which one it will be and to extrapolate as the GP did is to not full take abundance to it's limit.
I would assume we are moving towards a dystopia. GP is correct on the dangers but his perspective is incomplete and takes you on a wrong direction as you may have said.
It would require a lot of people to understand the dangers and take action to solve the necessary problems before it's too late.
Governance and the other systems we have must fundamentally change. (All over the world)
We must acknowledge our flaws and frailty which causes us to be selfish,greedy and seek dominance and control over the rest.
This is animalistic behaviour.
People must recognize that we are running out of time.
We are seeing a race whose direction is difficult to predict but the magnitude will be out of bounds.
If you are useless, you won't matter. Have you thought about how pests are treated?
This is relevant today and as time goes by, it's not difficult to predict.
I understand what you have said but I have an argument why it can happen before 2029. How can I contact you securely? I asked this since you know the dangers, you might be extremely worried.
I'm aware of the severity but I don't have a secure way of being contacted at the moment. I don't know when I'll have it up and running.
Most of my devices have been repeatedly compromised on a fairly consistent and continuing basis (bricked at the firmware level; routers, modems, phones). HFC-head end services appears compromised on the ISP side, reports have been made; tickets opened; and closed 30 days later with no correction, and no record on future calls so its all BS.
I have been bogged down in the process of recovering from backups. Its slagged enough hardware that I now keep SPI firmware and parallel memory chip backup images for my important systems prior to connecting them to a network, and its a real chore accessing the hardware to revert to known working good images for quite a lot of these component interfaces; often they are buried destructively under pads/thermal heat sinks.
I don't have an ETA, its minute detailed work, and working directly with hardware really isn't my forte.
> you might be extremely worried.
That's been fairly consistent since this came to my attention a few years ago, not for myself but for family and friends that might survive this.
In fairness, I think its likely I'll be dead from vaccine injury by the time this rolls around. Nerve-function and muscle loss are progressive and worsening, and its stumped every expert, and worsening symptoms after reintroduction of booster, and infection later (from the grocery store, C19) so odds aren't good.
I've done what I can, and dwelling on the things you can't control doesn't do anything but create misery.
I'm aware there are a number of things that can accelerate the timetable where it would happen sooner, some outlier things as early as late 2025, but those aren't likely to happen.
2029 is the point at which the economic system fails to socialism/communism with no action needed from anyone; just business as usual. From there, its a steady death march to full collapse and most don't have a clue.
Quite a lot of people run across the Trachtenberg system at one point or another and think its rather novel; along with the story behind it.
When working with it, it is actually rather limited compared to other systems that were around the same time.
There is a far better and more robust system that has been reprinted several times, which was aggregated in a book more recently, called "The Cosmic Calculator", this is a three volume series for teaching mental math to kids, based on the ancient Vedas teachings, also called Vedic Mathematics.
It is at least 20 years old, I still have my copies that I received in 2001 as a gift, Amazon says it was published in 2019 which is incorrect; it is far older.
It was often used alongside activities where you would memorize (via flashcards) the common complements for 9 and 10 to the point of instant recall/association.
The digit sums are somewhat lacking, although understandable considering that the fundamentals of abstract math and group theory were still being explored at the time of publication. (i.e. digit sums <> cyclic groups).
You can find a link here. For reference, the copies I received in 2001 are identical to the displayed version below. There is also a Instructors Manual (a 4th book) which came with the set.
Early on this media was the best for long term archiving, but as with all things this is no longer the case.
Both the player and the media cost quite a bit initially, but it was worth it when you needed to know the media would not degrade in austere environments.
Unfortunately, in recent years SONY decided the media product was to be replaced and made a brand instead, and anyone who didn't catch that press release kept buying the media that degrades, and found out later about the issues (after degradation and loss had already occurred).
This happened sometime between 2020 and 2022 iirc.
All MDISC branded discs were replaced with bluray disc media while keeping the inflated price tag for the brand.
Degradation of data is important for some of us, which is why this product had a marketable place with archivists, where BD simply would not cut it. Data needed to be archived for the long-term (i.e. > 10 years).
The degradation of the dye/film in sunlight for BD media was a significant problem, and remains a problem today.
In a 10 year period, varying greatly depending on UV/light exposure, there is detectable degradation in any BD-based media.
You are not wrong that this is puzzling, especially when viewed through the perspective lens of a professional with background in these areas (10 years).
There are many red flags which beg questions.
That said, I stopped taking them at their word years ago, this isn't the first time they've had dubious announcements following entirely preventable failures. In my mind, they really don't have any professional credibility.
People in the business of System Administration would follow basic standard practices that eliminate most of these risks.
The linked post isn't a valid post-mortem, if it were it would contain unambiguous details of the timetables and specifics, both of the failure domains and resolutions.
As you say, a network connector could mean any number of things. Its ambiguous, and ambiguity in technical material is used to hide or mislead most times which is why professionals detailing a post mortem would remove any possible ambiguity they could.
It is common professional practice to have a recovery playbook, and a plan for disaster recovery for business continuity which is tested at least every 6 months, usually quarterly. This is true of both charities and business.
Based on their post, they don't have one and they don't follow this well known industry practice. You really cannot call yourself a System Administrator if you don't follow the basics of the profession.
TPOSNA covers these basics for those not in the profession, its roughly two decades old now, it is well established, and ignorance of the practices isn't a valid excuse.
Professional budgets also always have a fund for emergencies based on these BC/DR plans. Additionally, using resilient design is common practice; single points of failures are not excusable in production failure domains especially when zero-downtime must be achieved.
Automated Deployment is a standard practice as well factoring into RTO and capacity planning improvements. Cattle not Pets.
Also, you don't ever wait on a vendor to take action. You make changes, and revert when the issue gets resolved.
First thing I would have done is set the domain DNS TTL to 5 minutes upon alerted failures (as a precaution), and then if needed point the DNS to a viable alternative server (either deployed temporarily or running in parallel).
Failures inevitably happen which is why you risk manage this using a topology with load balancers/servers set up in HA groups, eliminating any single provider as a single point of failure.
This is so basic that any junior admin knows these things.
Outlandish workarounds only happen when you do not have a plan and you are dredging the bottom of the barrel.
I've worked with Thibault before he could self-sustain on lichess donations, he's a professional software developer and sysadmin and one of the best I've worked with.
The people behind lichess are very much professionals, have worked in companies before, and know about everything you're writing. However instead of building a business they decided to run a completely free and ad-free non profit living off donations.
You don't get the same budget doing that compared than a subscription base / ad supported service. That's true for the number of people maintaining it as well as the cloud cost you can afford.
If you look at their track record, uptime have been pretty good. Shit happens, but if you ask me it's worth it to have a service like Lichess that can exist completely on donations.
There are many problems with what you've written here as well as bot-like behavior in the responses that have telltale signs of vote manipulation and propaganda similar to Chinese state-run campaigns.
We will have to disagree. You have clearly contradicted yourself in at least one way, and attempt to mislead readers in a number of other ways which I won't go into here.
From these, I have to come to the conclusion that you don't have credibility.
The downtime would not have happened if they had followed professional practices. Even a qualified Administrator coming into the outage fresh would have had a fix within 30 minutes if they were working at a professional level.
Yes shit happens, but professionals have processes in place so that common shit does not just happen. This was preventable.
I'm going to assume that your question is genuine and sincere, and not meant sarcastically.
If you read the following books by established experts, you should be able to rationally answer the question for yourself as to the why and the how. The subject matter involves torture for thought reform, real not fantasy. This differs from SERE training which is geared towards resisting information extraction.
China by their own words (internal leaked documents), seeks the destruction of the national will, of their enemies. This involves an identity based approach to torture/thought reform, which falls under the military strategy, Divide and Conquer. Digital attacks are cost effective when weighed against other options.
Anything you believe, love, or common experiences that you share with other people is fair game for inducement and then destructive interference to promote nihilism, while segmenting individuals into two groups, disassociative responses (apathetic/non-response), and psychotic break responses.
The items targeted include chess, along with many other things. Inducement of struggle sessions to break people.
If you spend the time to review the material I mentioned, you'll likely find out that a core belief of yours is untrue, that belief being that something like this is fantasy and impossible. This has a way of breaking the weak-willed, often in a psychological reversal/delusion.
I hope you are a strong person, we need more rational people if we are to survive as a species.
Robert Lifton (Thought Reform and The Psychology of Totalism)
Joost Meerloo (Rape of the Mind)
Robert Cialdini (Influence)
USMC Press (Political Warfare)(Free ebook at their website)
No I don't, but you certainly do after trying to gaslight like that.
Can't tell if its pathological or malevolent... probably both.
Pray that we never meet.
Thankfully, it is not such a simple thing to discredit when world renowned experts all agree and say a thing, and the longer they have been established the more one should listen.
Saying I need to seek professional help for repeating what's been documented by experts, yeah that is rich.
This is so far out of line I wonder what the background is for this issue. Lichess is not emergency dispatch software running in a 911 Call Center, if they have an outage the cost is that users can't play online chess until it is fixed. Additionally, the founder of this open source project is objectively good at what he does. Exhibit the fact that he built and hosts a top 2 online chess platform that competes well against the biggest commercial sites. How does that not lend some professional credibility.
Your idea of "so far out of line", would include any communication you disagree with, and is absent rational principles or social norms/mores basis, it is absurd.
I stuck to the objective issues in my previous post, you should too before making baseless claims.
Do some due dilligence on the business entities involved, peruse their github history (the deleted parts). Get a real picture about what's going on there. You'll find many contradictions if you dig.
The question on any critical IT professional's minds is how can you run the service given the resources claimed. Yes he runs the top traffic site for chess, and its done on a bespoke monolith.
You napkin math/sketch it out by required component services, and it quickly becomes clear that nothing adds up. When nothing is consistent, or supported, you examine your premises for contradictions and lies, which goes again back to credibility.
As they say, each 9 of uptime increases costs by an order of magnitude. For a non profit service, a few hours of downtime seems a fine trade off vs engineering all of the “right” redundancies. All of which have their own operational costs.
The problem space you describe is actually infinitely more complex than you make it out to be, but to truly understand it you have to understand how centralized systems fail. The vast majority of people out there, even the so-called specialists haven't actually solved the underlying problems because in some ways they cannot be solved.
If you would like to educate yourself to better understand the world, and life in general, when it comes to centralized systems; I would recommend Mises on Socialism. It was written in the 30s, but describes systems based on structure, maps failure domains within those systems, and coins problems that remain un-refuted today following rational principles. It can be a difficult read as it was written at a time when hyper-rationalism was the lingua franca, and each word had one specific non-contradictory meaning with little ambiguity.
Almost everything discussed in his book impacts and applies to every centralized system, this includes bureaucracy, government, education, and any heavily regulated industry, or inflationary economy (where money gets printed).
The latter most proof is a bit indirect, but basically Producers and Consumers have requirements that must be met in terms of purchasing power. Ponzi's purchasing power collapses in the final stage where outflows exceed inflows, and both those requirements for exchange then fail leaving a defacto state of socialism, or annihilation. The producers stop producing when they cannot make a profit, leaving only state-run entities for survival.
Socialism has 6 main problems, and depending on the structure potentially many others; the economic calculation problem is the impossible to solve problem. It is a progressively mathematically chaotic n-body limited visibility problem with arbitrary variables instead of constants. Inevitably shortage occurs, then self sustains, order wanes, food production ceases its current levels, and chaos reigns. Most of humanity or all dies out from ecological overshoot reversion or its complications (MAD) (i.e. based on Malthus law of population growth/Malthusian Trap).
Cascade failures are some of the most complicated and difficult problems any system's engineer deals with, and resilient systems design are needed, but centralized systems create brittle designs with single points of failure and front-of-line blocking.
Anytime you have government regulation, you must necessarily have a good understanding of the failures of centralized systems, and the misleading lies and false solutions that often accompany those systems when people are involved.
Atop the structural changes, the psychology of people involved in centralized systems changes dramatically when compared to people in systems that have a hard loss function which they are measured against (i.e. where they get fired if they can't perform).
To answer your questions:
a. Government Regulation/Privacy, Lack of Free Market (inflationary economy)
b. Monopoly/Collusion
c. Anytime government imposes ambiguous restrictions, or impossible to fulfill requirements you have a sieving filter applied to the business sector. All other business then dies off creating a moat, so no new business can enter the market.
As for why we cannot automate 'insurance calls' that is more simple than everything else.
When humans communicate with other humans, there is a component of communication called reflected appraisal. This happens beneath perception, and when there is an inconsistency, it induces irrational responses and actions. This also is one method that real-world torture aims to exploit for either information gathering or thought reform (breaking someone permanently, which is used often in adtech/marketing; a topic for another time).
Humans are capable of handling multiple contexts at the same time and choosing the correct one where other humans will share a common single shared meaning utilizing the words, and other indicators as a medium. This is basic Uni-level Introduction to Communications coursework.
Computers are unable to handle multiple contexts given the same inputs. It breaks determinism which is a required property for computation to do work (on von-neumann architecture), and the best it can manage is approximation using weights, which will never be able to handle and perform consistently with the same words that have contradictory meanings depending on context. Large companies are also incentivized to not address their customers needs and instead torture them through CSR doom loops (struggle sessions). You can learn more about torture by reading Robert Lifton, or Joost Meerloo. The systems in place at these companies are designed with this in mind (intentionally), to cut their biggest cost, labor.
Data breaches of medical data are also far more harmful than others. Imagine someone finds out you use a specific medicine regularly and then introduces a common chemical that interacts with it into other products you use. While this was once the stuff of fiction, with big-data having no liability for security, and fines that usually just further concentrate an existing market sector, anyone with sufficient money can know this; or even target this if you make yourself a target, or to cause manipulation towards products where they make a profit. Corporate Espionage with megalithic corporations is a real thing.
The structure would most likely need to be a hardened microkernel, similar to se4L; and would necessarily need to mask every unique piece of information that comes from the hardware in a generic way that prevents or dramatically impacts fingerprinting in a non-deterministic way.
To do anything programmatically in a resilient way you need to uniquely identify what you are working with first.
Also, in practice, there can be no secure OS so long as there is no control over the hardware. Existing consumer equipment would need significant redesign at the hardware/signal domain level.
Firmware malware is becoming more common, almost ubiquitous, and frightening with the applications it allows, thanks in large part to existing companies creating backdoors. As all companies build this functionality in, and there is very little benefit to them in short or long-terms to do so, its reasonable to assume its by some secret order. Free-market companies don't generally spend money on features that target only a small portion of their customers when it also creates liabilities that can balloon.
Application wise, here is a thought experiment for you:
How hard would it really be to silently upload software to a target running in a SMM context (Ring -2) that scans or hooks memory looking for high entropy strings of common fixed widths (i.e. a Rabin-Karp search), and when entropy is above a threshold saving those into the service sector of the attached hard drive in a cache-like structure.
While a bit rhetorical, what would the consequences be for this? Would encryption keys stored in memory persist and float to the top for remote or physical querying? Is there anything you can do about that without access control to SMM? Is there any software instrumentation that lets you have visibility on something like that?
The general obvious answers are yes its likely in the first, and no to the rest.
The problem with discussions like these, and one that goes nearly always unspoken, is the problem of credibility.
When you deal with deceitful people, credibility matters.
The only time credibility does not matter is when you can independently verify what is being said, such as through a framework like Descartes Rules of Method, Logic, or some other epistemological method that is appropriate. Only then does credibility not matter because you can judge for yourself because it has appropriate rational backing.
When you are solely down to an entity that does not use such a framework; credibility matters.. and by extension reputation and past actions take on more importance than hollow words.
Microsoft, especially when it was run by Bill Gates, was never a credible entity. Today, it is run by accountants seeking to ride the knifes edge of what the market will bear, and in the process provide as little value as possible for creations that were made decades ago, ride the gravy train until it goes into the ocean.
While the people at Microsoft certainly have come up with some neat features and projects, when looking at these features/products and the history behind them (i.e. looking at Powershell), these were largely complete accidents, and/or significant internal politicking that could have gone either way because there was little to no profit in it. Their engineers used to be some of the best, but it matters little when the Accountants are in charge and see everything in a risk averse lens.
Once you lose credibility, it is almost impossible to get it back because you have to do so much more than it would have cost originally just to tip the scales back to even. Perception is sticky like that.
To get back to the core question, can we trust Microsoft with Open Source...
No you can't, not ever, because they are solely concerned with making profit and stealing whatever they can under the color of law. Open Source doesn't make profit.
The rise of open source is the natural outcome when barriers to entry in a market impose costs so high that you can't do business without those features, (excluding participants from that market, monopolistic ally), and open source is exploitive free labor that's been used to create an alternative to those products when no business can compete due to the simple mathematics of costs.
Even the big players can't compete with free for long without diversifying which is why FOSS is still around today. Volunteers, and some non-standard funding routes which aren't really all that viable at scale. This is also why Microsoft as an entity has been trying to poison pill Linux for awhile, they want to be the only game in town and read everything you write in Office; build a dossier, and sell it to the highest bidder. What could be more valuable then the thoughts of every single person using their product.
Of course they'll claim they aren't doing this (deceitfully), just like Google claims they don't wiretap and listen to surrounding endpoint devices they don't own to show you ads related to what you were talking about in your own home.
No change will take place because there is no incentive towards change.
One might say, well there was this huge outage, but in reality they will keep doing as they've done business as usual. They may spin up a new shell company, under a new name, and that will be far cheaper than devoting a budget to security in the first place. Rinse and repeat.
There has long been little to no liability for software flaws, and proving negligence is an uphill battle.
Just to clarify, System's Engineer's know how to build resilient systems that do not fail under most circumstances. It is only when corporate overlords decide to make the tradeoff of resiliency, for a little more penny pinching in the shares; that things like this happen.
It is a natural flaw of any centralized hierarchical system involving people. Corruption, Front of Line Blocking, are all just another term for Single Points of Failure.
Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs.
Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line.
The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that.
Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent.
The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves.
This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life.
By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc.
Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed.
There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings.
Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them.
Most truly evil people believe they are good.
This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
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