When I first started reading academic papers when I was 12 or 13, I wondered who the hell Ibid was. Seemed a very smart person.

Then I quickly figured it out. But at first (mainly because I didn’t care about it or think about it very hard since I cared about the content*), I thought Ibid must’ve been some huge polymath.

My memories aren’t 100% clear, but I think the first scientific paper I read was a paper by Kary Mullis (et al.) on the Polymerase Chain Reaction. I’d helped my neighbor pass her college microbiology and other science classes when I was 9 and 10, so I already had some background in the area.

Still, it was the hardest thing I’d ever read. I remember struggling with it a bit. No way to Google back then. Unfamiliar words had to be searched out in dictionaries that often didn’t contain them at all. No adult where I grew up knew more than I did, so there was no one to ask.

I don’t regret anything, but I always wonder if I’d grown up somewhere else what my life would’ve been like.

*To this day, I sometimes literally don’t know the title or the authors of books I’m reading — while I’m reading them.

Once you understand a little computer science, you realize that there is no possible antivirus program that detects all threats. It is not even possible in principle. It is flatly ruled out by at least two fundamental features of computation.

Antivirus however is not useless. As in most areas of life, most virus writers aren’t very skilled or are very lazy. Thus, AV programs have some use.

But against a skilled attacker (like the NSA or the Mossad), antivirus programs are basically completely worthless, even if these intelligence agencies have no special backdoors in place.