Beginner energy is faux? I relish my beginner energy in all my side projects - I fail and learn. This is completely normal when done safely and without people depending on you. Unlike management.
And here we come to the crux of the train issue - elitism. You both find it below your level to use public transport, and you don't want to mix with the 'unwashed masses' - again, doing so would be below your level.
Straw man aside, I find the notion of cars being used as a tool to escape from or even to overthrow an authoritarian regime extremely funny... Even without a big brother: cars are heavily regulated and controlled; current cars are a privacy nightmare; cars are (as yet) mostly dependent on fossil fuels (that you can't produce yourself, and are heavily regulated and taxed).
If anything in an authoritarian regime, cars would be (and were) an instrument of control.
The extra funny part is that all the car-brained ex-communist people that had to be good little comrades during the 20-year waiting list period they had to endure are now big on the 'cars = freedom' mindset... No my guy, if cars were freedom, you can be damn sure only the communist nomenclature would be allowed to have them. Instead you were humiliated with spending half your life on a waiting list, and then the only freedom you got was to continue being a subservient communist subject under the party boot. How else would you afford gasoline after all? Not that that was enough... For context, I live in a former communist country, parents and grandparents waited for 10+ years to be graced with the permission to buy a car. Then proceeded not be able to afford petrol until the early 2000s...
Oh, the good old cars are freedom cliché? Thank you, I feel perfectly free when I don't have to worry about parking, gas, maintenance, taxes, inadvertently killing anyone, polluting...
So is this the crawler that has been constantly hammering all my applications searching for these files from the very second I first issue a TLS cert for them? Thanks to you I've had to put fail2ban on all my public-facing web servers...
How about you be a good netizen and make it so people can request to be scanned and don't proactively do it, let alone constantly keep hammering them with requests?
Are the cheap gaming PCs off of Craigslist here in the room with us right now?
Snark aside, the second hand market is off the rails, too... The Steam Machine is cheaper than any DIY gaming PC I can build right now, even from parts off of OLX... And unlike the one I'd make, the Steam Machine will get the Steam Deck treatment as far as optimisation and certification (as in Runs on the Deck) goes.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
Wait, you can't really think that it's ethical and in any way a person's responsibility to expose themselves to the CFAA and lawsuits??
Ok, let's go over this again - it is naive because you naively trust the vendor not to report you to the authorities/sue. A side effect is that such companies never get to learn their lesson, thus you naively think that you contribute to overall privacy and security while the effect is opposite - the company got a freebie and won't change security stance, the CFAA gets to stay.
I would argue about the ethical part as well. One way to guarantee ethics is to immediately report to both vendor and respective government body so that any suspicion of blackmail is removed.
Another person's definition of ethical would be to immediately notify all affected users.
My personal stance is that the IT community needs to shut the fuck up until companies start begging for help and the backwards-ass CFAA gets deleted. This is ethical - you didn't get paid for a security audit, then you keep your mouth shut and offer no free work and you don't expose yourself to lawsuits.