@h3artbl33d ok, let’s be fair here. PKI is really hard for someone who doesn’t do it regularly, and most devs don’t do it regularly. Especially with custom CAs.

I had almost the exact thing happen: a developer was struggling to re-integrate with a service endpoint after a version update. He had spent weeks, and they were at risk of missing the contracted delivery date. The dev found one of my tech talks on PKI and reached out for help.
The error: SEC_UNKNOWN_ISSUER. It took a few minutes for me to realize he was pointing at the wrong trust store, and I sorted him quickly.
This was in 2019, long before AI agents were writing code reliably.

I’m not saying skills atrophy isn’t happening, but this specific example is more about misaligned skills, which has been an unsolved problem forever.

here’s the thing: in today’s society, you DON’T actually need ability or competence to do things if you have enough competence to fake it and can generate sufficient hype.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying; society needs competent people and everything falls apart if we lose them. However, society doesn’t reward competence, especially compared to their incompetent but charismatic peers, and especially in today’s ideologically driven, post-facts world.

Musk knows jack about rockets. Altman knows jack about AI. They’re white men who know how to hype up investors, and that’s sufficient to be successful in today’s society.

Charlatans are nothing new, but we’ve somehow ended up in a society where the more smoke they blow, the more we reward them, with no checks on whether they’re actually generating any measurable net positive impact on society or humanity as a whole.

@slothrop

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

(Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++)