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I always find it amusing when a particular software artifact is treated as some kind of powerful weapon in itself, and not just the codification of some really
by ramesh31 5y ago
I always find it amusing when a particular software artifact is treated as some kind of powerful weapon in itself, and not just the codification of some really smart people's ideas on the current state of the art in some domain. The number of people on earth that can do this kind of stuff would fit in football stadium. The people are the weapon, not the specific executable.
- matthewdgreen 5y agoI mean that’s kind of the definition of a weapon. The atomic bomb was also just the codification of some ideas into a physical machine.
- ramesh31 5y ago>The atomic bomb was also just the codification of some ideas into a physical machine. No, it wasn't. It was the product of the entire industrial capacity of the United States. The amount of Deuterium required for a fission bomb took years of labor by hundreds of thousands of people to produce. The "ideas" were worthless without the physical infrastructure and industrial capacity to carry out the construction. Software, on the other hand, requires nothing more than really really smart people and a $200 laptop.
- matthewdgreen 5y agoI see. So if we could have developed a nuclear bomb for $200 and destroyed a city using it, it wouldn’t have been a weapon? I don’t understand the reason cost is being brought into the definition.