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vjerancrnjak • today at 8:07 AM • 5 replies • view on HN

Doesn’t this imply a software design issue where it is just written in a way to have these security bugs and patching them 1 by 1 is not what should be done but the whole design should change which can eliminate full classes of security bugs without any particular patches being necessary?


Replies

muvlon • today at 12:45 PM

Yes, and we didn't need AI to figure this out. Linux has been averaging ~500 security-relevant bugs per release since at least early 2024, before LLMs got any good at security research: https://social.kernel.org/notice/B9nU6wnmFvh5atXSG8. Now AI has pushed it to ~2000 per release, which is considerably higher, but at this point, does it make a difference?

There are plenty of design decisions that could fundamentally change things. But they're not being taken. What you're seeing is the revealed preference of this system: Security is important, but not enough to make people incur the cost of adopting major changes in pursuing it.

Gigachad • today at 8:43 AM

This is what the Rust advocates have been trying to say for a decade now. But C enthusiasts would always chime in that those bugs were just caused by careless devs and a real C programmer is fine.

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meowface • today at 8:10 AM

Sort of, but one has to be pragmatic.

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AlienRobot • today at 8:51 AM

The only thing I know is that if I wanted to learn how to program, I have thousands of tutorials on the Internet and Youtube teaching everything from if/else to data structures and big O.

But if I wanted to learn software design and architecture, I'd probably not even know where to start.

tmountain • today at 8:09 AM

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