> the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero

Zero is not the desired number, particularly not when discussing "hacks". This may not matter in current situation, but there's a lot of "security maximalism" in the industry conversations today, and people seem to not realize that dragging the "security" slider all the way to the right means not just the costs becoming practically infinite, but also the functionality and utility of the product falling down to 0.

I know a lot of security researchers will disagree with this notion, but I personally think that security (& privacy, I'm going to refer to both as "security" for brevity here) are an overhead. I think that's why it needs to exist *and be discussed* as a sliding scale. I do find a lot of people in this space chase some ideal without a consideration for practicality.

Mind, I'm not talking about financial overhead for the company/developer(s), but rather an UX overhead for the user. It often increases friction and might even need education/training to even make use the software it's attached to. It's much like how body armor increases the weight one has to carry and decreases mobility, security has (conceptually) very similar tradeoffs (cognitive instead of physical overhead, and time/interactions/hoops instead of mobility). Likewise, sometimes one might pick a lighter Kevlar suit, whereas othertimes a ceramic plate is appropriate.

Now, body armor is still a very good idea if you're expecting to be engaged in a fight, but I think we can all agree that not everyone on the street in, say, a random village in Austria, needs to wear ceramic plates all the time.

The analogy does have its limits, of course ... for example, one issue with security (which firmly slides it towards erring on the safe side) as compared to warfare is that you generally know if someone shot at you and body armor saved you; with security (and, again, privacy), you often won't even know you needed it even if it helped you. And both share the trait that if you needed it and didn't have it, it's often too late.

Nevertheless, whether worth it or not (and to be clear, I think it's very worth it), I think it's important that people don't forget that this is not free. There's no free lunch --- security & privacy are no exception.

Ultimately, you can have a super-secure system with an explicit trust system that will be too much for most people to use daily; or something simpler (e.g. Signal) that sacrifices a few guarantees to make it easier to use ... but the lower barrier to entry ensuring more people have at least a baseline of security&privacy in their chats.

Both have value and both should exist, but we shouldn't pretend the latter is worthless because there are more secure systems out there.

The thing with zero bugs is that software is very complicated not due it being harder than hardware but by simply that get some devs, POs, sys admins, devops and stuff and zero bugs will be defined entirely different.

For example, in theory the only real system with zero bugs would be one you use exactly always the same way, at the same place for the same exact goal and never change that.

Its a bit related to the old saying in cybersec " the msot secure system is the one who isnt used at all and not connected to anything" so basically a tradeoff with UX always. But who would want that?

I think thats why software on more actual mission critical systems are way more stable and bug free... still hate the word. Because it cant be avoided, since you see bugs sometiems are just situations when your uncontrolled actors (users, other services) use the system in a non-intented way so you try plan for that such us retry mechanisms, logging, backups etc.

Because when we further think about it, have you ever witnessed a system in real life thats bug free? Humans have bugs all around, buildings, cars, even nature. So how would you expect we could do that, esp each random company? Also do we want that? What if we said there is a 100% defiend system we can make perfect in 100 years... Good, but whats the point?

> utility of the product falling down to 0.

Today a bank really sent me a legitimate email about trying their new site. Went over, it was their site alright, logged in with correct username and password - poof, instantly blocked for suspicious access (from my usual home machine), call helpline to fix.

Now that's safe ... and useless. But safe.