Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
It's probably hard to come up with something messier than SqlAlchemy here. Not an expert, but spent more than enough time spelunking queries in the debugger. I much prefer bugs that can be surfaced at compile-time rather than run-time.
I've found a workable approach, browsing HN with my feed reader (FreshRSS, in this case). I have bookmarks for various things, one of which is what I've labeled "AI nonsense". It's not HN-specific, but selects for unread articles that match a variety of AI-adjacent terms. One or two might look interesting enough to read, all the rest get the "mark as read" treatment, and so much clutter just goes away.
No, in the case of all the desync attacks that James Kettle has found since, HTTP between servers is more like "worse really is worse." At least until they all speak HTTP/2.
I've had good luck with my Kobo, for those books bought through their store. (I strip DRM from everything I can, if I can't buy without in the first place.)
Flares will burn, and keep burning, once lit. I wouldn't consider them to be especially spicy in the whole context though, since anything that has set them off has already lit the rest on fire.
Coincidentally, I'm a volunteer firefighter, and helped put out a fully-involved car fire yesterday. The interior was GONE, except for seat springs and the like. Fuel too, of course, and the tires. The alloy wheels were more interesting, guessing there was magnesium sparking off in great showers of brilliant white. We're concerned around things like gas shocks and bumper / hatch struts, because they will pop off with some violence; we found a hatch strut yesterday, probably 20' _behind_ our truck after we were done. If there had been road flares in the mix, I'd be thinking, "oh, that's pretty".
I worked for a small company that did work for a cross-border manufacturer. Coming from Canada, we were told explicitly that "meetings" was a perfectly good reason for a day trip, and we were never there "to work". US customs has been historically as humourless a bunch as ever existed, and the factory on the other side was unionised, so meetings it is.
What cracked me up was driving back late one evening, arriving back at the Canadian side. The agent asked where I'd been, and I mentioned the town just behind me.
I think the issue here is one of informed consent. You might say, "OK, this makes sense" when agreeing to location data for a weather app. In the context of whether it's going to hail soon, location is reasonable. What you only see in those GDPR-type banners is that the data is being re-sold off to 1001 "partners", none of whom are important for my hail-to-head concerns. Never mind all the cases where it's re-sold on to all the governments and personal-level creeps through aggregators.
On the other hand, the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.
I tried growing a little wine cap bed once, and it hadn't gone well. Perhaps it was the chickens pecking at it, can't say. I do still get wine caps on occasion, but they have migrated to more far-flung parts of the yard.
Along with all the general discussion, I found the concept of defensive parsing striking a chord when reading this as well: "The Seven Turrets of Babel: A Taxonomy of LangSec Errors and How to Expunge Them", https://langsec.org/papers/langsec-cwes-secdev2016.pdf
I'd love for these ideas to take hold at work, but I'm on the fringes in infosec, not a dev.