Wow. Being proud of being ignorant is generally something I associate with modern MAGA republicans, not journalists. But then again, this is the NYTimes, a hotbed of nepotism over talent.
IMHO, that doesn't read like pride in ignorance. I suspect most NYTimes readers aren't looking for a deep dive on PostgreSQL internals, myself included. He does get into the context surrounding xz Utils and their relevance to the world at large a few paragraphs later.
> But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.
> (Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)
I think this does a good job to indicate the general level of his audience.
I'm an engineer, I can't explain the cellular energy generation pathways in eukaryotes. Someone can, most of us would find it boring, and I can't explain it. I'm not proud of it, I just recognize my limits of my knowledge and don't pretend to know more.
Then cut out all the baloney and stick to the facts. That's the problem with Gen-Z, you were never taught how to read a newspaper, just tweets and tiktoks. We're screwed.
