> That's a lot of work, but is it productive in the end? Probably not.
Your imaginary scenario defines the solution to be pointless. If that same city was subjected to weekly riots smashing windows & doors, and people regularly died, stopping "productive" work to install things that keep people alive and productive? That's productive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Basically, if you accept this line of reasoning, then someone going around breaking windows and someone else going around repairing them can be seen as good because it creates jobs. But that would be nonsensical and create poverty. That's why economists focus on wealth creation not job creation.
Fixing security bugs is only needed because people exploit them. It creates work but it doesn't create wealth.
Protecting yourself from bad actors also doesn't create wealth but it protects wealth you already have.
You know cybercrime and APT groups are not bored kids in their parents basement, there are groups that are running automated tooling to find vulnerable companies and if possible take all their wealth.
Just look at Binance of course, but if you are small company there are also people targeting those especially with AI assistance nowadays.
it is distinct from question whether it is productive to defend from evil people
evil people + protecting from them is obviously net negative!
but it is not changing that of evil people are present then reasonable level of protection from them is needed, and setting it up is productive
One way to think about it is that production allows you to pay for stuff. Not necessarily directly but by way of trading. It is the output you use to buy things like security.
Consider an apple farm. What does the apple farm produce to pay its bills? Apples. They could also dedicate resources to pears, &c, and that would add to their production -- to the goods they produce, the goods with which they (indirectly) purchase tractors, fence posts, &c. They could also dedicate resources to security -- more fences, &c -- and this may even be prudent. Maybe thieves are getting taller. This doesn't really add to production, though; at best, it maintains production at the status quo ante (assuming the fence is effective).
The software is better in the end but not all of it will be productive.
If that same city was subjected to weekly riots
That's productive.
The point it, this was not happening before. LLMs made cheap cyber attack possible. But it didn't make the implementation of fixes correspondingly cheap. So now everyone needs to spend extra money/effort to install grills to cover where LLMs fall short.
For postgres, this absolutely makes sense though as long as people are willing to shell out the profits from LLM use to support postgres development. That is one way this could workout for everyone..
Then they have a pikachu face when someone smashes their car window to steal something worth $50 they left on front seat because “who would do that?”.
What is even better thief will most likely pawn this for $10 but for him it is effortless $10.
Obviously this doesn't work on the internet since most hacking comes from overseas out of our control. Which makes me wonder if there is a possible future where we just block packets coming from countries that don't lock up the hackers.
Not obvious to me. I am generally a fan of Cyberspace manifesto and the free Internet, I think it's great people can reach outside their ingroup and talk to strangers and ostensible enemies.
But, that doesn't mean we should give up physical security, the guarantee that the connecting party comes from a certain physical location (state, company). I think allowing connections from anywhere by default is fundamentally flawed security architecture, for certain things.
The algorithm is: if the threat model is valid, there are vulnerabilities and you either have some software everybody knows about or a gang of hackers specifically targeting you, you should patch.
The part of the industry that profits from security theater will want you to patch no matter what, even if your business goes down in flames due to downtimes and new bugs introduced by patched components. They won't remind you to assess the threat model first.
It becomes productive only once your business stops for days because somebody brought it to a halt by breaking into the servers and deleting them.
You have a perverse view of product ivity
I don't think that's true.
In medicine, science often doesn't know how specific drug really is working. They just do a lot of tests and if these tests are positive enough, they ship it. I think it's good analogy. Biology is very complicated and it's out of our grasp to truly understand how various parts of it interact with each other on so many levels. But if something helps, it's stupid not to use it just because we don't fully understand it. Sometimes it bites. Sometimes it bites 30 years later. But we still follow that approach.
Software is similar. The complexity of the systems we build is enormous, when we're taking in account all the moving parts. I just read that someone emits radiowaves toggling memory bit and ex-filtrating information. How can you account for that? Probably you can't. But we still need software for good things.