I mean this doesn’t prove Stalin not bad.

Are these stats including dead people or just prisoners? I feel like Stalin may have been fielding a murder-forward build.

The kind of “privacy” you get by using a VPN or avoiding Facebook tracking your web browsing is absolutely not appropriate for using against a threat model that includes three-letter agencies or even, frankly, the local cops. They can just, like, come to your house when you aren’t there and bug it. Point a camera at your screen, station a dude in the closet, replace the computer with a cunningly painted cardboard replica of the computer which is a spy, etc. Or from the other end, they simply exploit a zero-day in every one of your seven proxies, because they care enough about catching you to burn them.

Sometimes the threat model says you just lose and you can’t actually get what you want by using computers, because you have an information technology hammer and a fundamentally legal or political problem.

If you think the police are actually on to your crimes, stop doing those crimes! If the crimes needed doing for some reason, someone else less likely to be known to the police will probably do them instead, and you can surely find less-crimey ways to further whatever they were meant to accomplish. If you’re in it for yourself for some sort of personal gain, quit while you’re ahead.

If you think you’re drastically overestimating the likelihood that the police are after you for your crimes, and it is affecting your ability to function, that’s definitely a problem for your therapist. Presumably one who doesn’t insist you explain your various crimes to them in detail, a thing which your lawyer (which you also maybe need?) might have concerns about.

This is honestly a lot of the problem: code generation tools can output thousands of lines of code per minute. Great, committable, defendable code.

There is basically no circumstance in which a project’s codebase growing at a rate of thousands of lines per minute is a good thing. Code is a necessary evil of programming: you can’t always avoid having it, but you should sure as hell try, because every line of code is capable of being wrong and will need to be read and understood later. Probably repeatedly.

Taking the approach to solving a problem that involves writing a lot of code, rather than putting in the time to find the setup that lets you express your solution in a little code, or reworking the design so code isn’t needed there at all, is a mistake. It relinquishes the leverage that is very point of software engineering.

A tool that reduces the effort needed to write large amounts of human-facing, gets-committed-to-the-source-tree code, so that it’s much easier and faster than finding the actual right way to parse your problem, is a tool that makes your project worse and that makes you a worse programmer when you hold it.

Maybe eventually someone will create a thinking machine that itself understands this, but it probably won’t be someone who charges by the token.