Yes, ChatGPT is a great learning resource, great for fearless exploration, and is available 0-24 and scalable (whereas the usual maintainers are, unfortunately

Yes, ChatGPT is a great learning resource, great for fearless exploration, and is available 0-24 and scalable (whereas the usual maintainers are, unfortunately more often than not, the diametrical opposite of these). The big elephant in the room problem is that software/tech/opensource is this Schroedinger's safest cat. Because on one hand we have 3-redundant hardware and independent implementations and we can go to the moon and back with it, and let it drive our cars, and we have LetsEncrypt, and browsers pushing for TLS1.3 everywhere, and Civil Infrastructure Platform with all the extended lifetime, Jepsen tests, and TLA+ and rewriting the world in Rust ... and on the other hand billions of people blindly download/open anything on their Android 6 device with expired root TLS certs and running unpatched Linux checks notes 3.18.10 ... WTF. Sure, that might not be the most apples-to-apples comparison (or maybe it's apples v2 to v42), but this is mostly the reality everywhere ... I have very good friends working in ITsec (from managers to bugbounty-reapers), and ... things are highly comical. It's the whole culture that's lacking. Sure, it's relatively new, a mere decade basically, so we'll see. (And incidents like this are definitely raising awareness, maybe even "vindicating" some people who boldly said fuck this shit upon seeing autoconf/automake/make/configure and started to write yet another build system.) All in all, the pressure is rising, which will probably lead to some phase transition, and maybe - if we are lucky - systems and platform with top-to-bottom secure-by-default engineering mindset will start to precipitate out of this brewing chaos. (And this might make it even less fun to do open source maintenance.)