This was potentially in response to this event, posted to HN earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2

This was potentially in response to this event, posted to HN earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874470 (a Spectre Linux kernel patch rendered ineffective by LTS maintainers in an attempt to silence a compiler warning). The scenario described in this submission was the first thing that came to my mind upon reading about that patch.