Publishing by itself does little to advance science
I strongly disagree. Publishing advances science the same way communication advances culture. Imagine Einstein didn't published any of his work. How many decades back in technology and quality of life we'd have been now?
It's like any evolutionary beneficial trait gets transferred to all population in one generation instead of many. It saves precious time.
Will it really help today, when anyone with any serious intent doesn't launch their attacks from one or two standalone hosts, but buys botnet capacity?
I guess AI is the next thing that's still opt-in now, will be opt-out tomorrow and then no-escape. It would be interesting to read a nostalgic thread from 2070...
this basically comes down to State Actors ... or Everyone Else
This is oversimplification if not misleading. There are also Bad Guys (who aren't state actors), who usually can't reach for your data. But occasionally they can, when rare Planet Parades like Heartbleed or Meltdown make the news. And they are happy to use this one-in-a-lifetime chance to sell access to your data to everyone else.
I'm still trying to beat it on normal difficulty. The farthest I got was first floors of the necromancer's tower, which is about 1/4 of the game AFAIK. I resist the temptation to try any add-on, there's so much fun without them.
When you're incrementing by using UPDATE ... SET value = value + 1, the database holds the locks for the minimum time needed. Everything else is less efficient.
In more complex scenarios, FOR UPDATE is the solution.
On the other hand, the main practical feature of a language is its astronomical SNR, which brain waves lack, to say the least. This allows LLMs to be trained on texts instead of millions of live people. Just imagine the number of parameters and compute resources required for the model to be useful to more than one human.