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@david_chisnall thanks to LLMs, everyone can now write their own Operating System and entire software stack! Each with a different set of bugs and vulnerabilities. Individually vulnerable but collectively strong thanks to their unique "DNA". Monoculture problem: solved! Software is becoming biological and darwinian; let the best software genes win. Condolences to mathematicians and other theorists 🙂

@david_chisnall
You've clearly never needed to download stuff for different countries/companies that is in conflict with eachother. I have 2 phones now, only possibility to solve that problem. And not even thinking about buying 2 laptops....

@david_chisnall probably also run a mix of hypervisors (not just different versions, completely different ones), and a mix of CPU vendors (multiple hypervisors don't help when they're all affected by the same Intel or AMD bug) and a mix of CPU architectures. Although that still doesn't protect you against bugs that affect all or most architectures (like some of the side-channel attacks). If you run an unpopular OS, hypervisor, or architecture you may have some protection against widely used exploits until your OS/hypervisor/architecture becomes widely used and targeted by exploits.
Having said that if we ever get to live in a CHERI monoculture that wouldn't be so bad, it'd significantly raise the complexity and likelihood of attacks :)

@david_chisnall
Potatoes.
See famines in 19th C. Not just Ireland, but other places too.

I wrote a story about it.
https://www.corvidspress.com/fiction/otherworld-series/no-silver-lining/

I could have written a darker post-apocalyptic tale.

There is a bigger problem with people using the so called Cloud (someone else's server) instead of their own servers.

@david_chisnall finally me running both Solaris and Plan 9 servers pays off

@david_chisnall Down with monolithic kernels.

@david_chisnall Permissive Linux;

You get a sense of why Linux is the goto OS when installing “Foo” applications; Coming from say OBSD where if you can find “Foo”, it’s the oldest version and secure beyond usage. 🤣

@david_chisnall Anything that has a fundamentally cloud-based infrastructure is rife with weak points and not wholly under the user's control.

@david_chisnall the most microslop shilling thing I've read today. Ofc microslop doesn't want one big competitor, but many small ones.

Anyway, that is not true. All of the servers run on Linux for decades now. That was never the problem, but just now, when microslop is losing desktop market? Very curious indeed.

@david_chisnall indeed, sounds like the very same issue in agriculture monoculture.

@david_chisnall We've been in the Linux monoculture for some time already. It is the most popular operating system in the world powering the vast part of the entire World's IT-infrastructure for decades.

@david_chisnall Also don't enable all the features, just the ones you actually use