Don't obsess with security and privacy unless they are your core business
Making a simple sandwich from ingredients is a full-time job that takes roughly 6 months. You grow chickens, fetch sea water, make bread from ingredients, and so on. Unless you sell a lot of sandwiches you made from scratch, you will bleed a lot of money and time.
Only God can make sandwich instantly. If you try to make a simple pencil, it will probably take more than 6 months.
Now, consider security and privacy. Just constructing what seems to be a reasonably private and robust linux computer took at least a year of full-time effort. It is genuinely more difficult than making a simple sandwich from ingredients, and making a simple sandwich "from ingredients" is a full-time business by itself. The so-called system crafting is a full-time business that doesn't pay.
The cost of constructing a private linux computer with your "personal" labor is your business, your job, your health, your relationships, and everything else in your life. The cost of privacy is extremely high. You need to be okay with rough edges in your computing environment.
If you force yourself to make sandwich and pencil from ingredients, make your furniture, build a house, grow foods, run an e-commerce store, construct a private linux computer, and so on, then you will not be good at any one thing, and you won't be paid much. You are only paid as much as your best expertise. Only specialization can make you rich. If you try to scatter your energy into multiple things including security and privacy, you will remain poor. Even linus torvalds, a rich computer programmer, avoids fiddling with linux kernel options on his linux computers. He just uses fedora without modification. Linus torvalds doesn't care about the fact that his AMD CPU has hardware backdoor and certainly can't be bothered to "manually" construct a backdoor-free router that blocks AMD PSP and Intel ME behind the router. But, he may "buy" computers with Intel ME disabled by others.
If you want to become rich, you should have laser focus on your core business and sacrifice other things like excellent privacy.
Now, you know what it means to sacrifice. Sacrifice may even mean you use mac pro instead of a personally hardened linux desktop. The creator of linux can't be bothered to "manually" harden his own linux computers.
If you want to be rich and have a good life, you should be ready to buy everything outside your core business. Buying things takes infinitely less time than building things from scratch.
Spending time on things outside your core business is basically a financial suicide.
" Just constructing what seems to be a reasonably private and robust linux computer took at least a year of full-time effort."
How? I mean seriously, if it took one whole year to set up one linux system, then you must have close to no idea what you're doing. It takes a couple of minutes to install the OS, and another couple of hours (heck, make it days if you want to be extra thorough) to apply some hardening techniques.
Edit: Also, you can't buy "don't write code vulnerable to SQL injection" and you can't buy "Don't ever store passwords, plaintext or encrypted or whatever. You must never know any of your users' password". This to me indicates a naive wannabe vibe-coding their way to disaster. You can't buy "privacy and security" separately from your own product. They must be part of the core business, fundamentally part of the product's design
Thank you, for telling us what we should do. People can do whatever they want, at their expense. Maybe people don't want to become rich, but have a private life no one knows about, but people they voluntarily choose. Who are you ranting to? Who is the employee, friend or boss that unnerved you?
I think it's much better to become rich and then buy security and privacy than to implement them with your manual labor.
Your time is a lot more valuable than your money if you actually spend your time correctly.
You can be a 6 million dollar race horse if you drive it well.
I don't think people actually want privacy and security over everything else. It's better to focus on earning a lot of money from what you really want to do and buy security and privacy.
I want privacy and security over everything else. This disproved your point.
>Buying things takes infinitely less time than building things from scratch.
> financial suicide.
man i'm sick of exaggeration.
anyway , generally speaking I don't try to hyperoptimize for producing cash. I'm not a machine. I appreciate security more than I do squeezing the last penny out of someone. I'm frugal, and it works out okay for me because the time I dont save by not paying people is spent doing things I already enjoy.
what's the point here? why would you bother with producing your own business instead of buying one? It takes infinite time or something -- I don't know, I didn't pay attention in econ.
I don't know if it matters, or if you'll ever see things this way, but value isn't cash. similarly, but not exactly : cash isn't value. Some of us prefer to produce value over cash -- and that confuses the hell out of some people.
Well you'll learn a few things in your future, that's for sure. Good luck !