“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”

Reminded me of story more than a decade ago about an academic who conducted a series of "breaching experiments" in City of Heroes/City of Villains to study group behavior, basically breaking the social rules (but not the game rules) without other participants' or the game studio's knowledge. It was discussed on HN in 2009 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690551)

Here's how the professor (a sociologist) described his methodology:

These three sets of behaviors – rigidly competitive pvp tactics (e. g., droning), steadfastly uncooperative social play outside the game context (e. g., refusing to cooperate with zone farmers), and steadfastly uncooperative social play within the game context (e. g., playing solo and refusing team invitations) – marked Twixt’s play from the play of all others within RV.

Translation: He killed other players in situations that were allowed by the game's creators but frowned upon by the majority of real-life participants. For instance, "villains" and "heroes" aren't supposed to fraternize, but they do anyway. When "Twixt" happened upon these and other situations -- such as players building points by taking on easy missions against computer-generated enemies -- he would ruin them, often by "teleporting" players into unwinnable killzones. The other players would either die or have their social relations disrupted. Further, "Twixt" would rub it in by posting messages like:

Yay, heroes. Go good team. Vills lose again.

The reaction to the experiment and to the paper was what you would expect. The author later said it wasn't an experiment in the academic sense, claiming:

... this study is not really an experiment. I label it as a “breaching experiment” in reference to analogous methods of Garfinkel, but, in fact, neither his nor my methods are experimental in any truly scientific sense. This should be obvious in that experimental methods require some sort of control group and there was none in this case. Likewise, experimental methods are characterized by the manipulation of a treatment variable and, likewise, there was none in this case.

Links:

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university...

https://www.ilamont.com/2009/07/academic-gets-rise-from-brea...

Researcher sends bogus papers to journal/conference, gets them reviewed and approved, uses that to point how ridiculous the review process of the journal is => GREAT JOB, PEER REVIEW SUCKS!

Researcher sends bogus patches to bazaar-style project, gets them reviewed and approved, uses that to point how ridiculous the review process of the project is => DON'T DO THAT! BAD RESEARCHER, BAD!

One potentially misleads readers of the journal, the other introduces security vulnerabilities into the world’s most popular operating system kernel.

Interesting - follow that thread and you find https://lore.kernel.org/linux-next/202104081640.1A09A99900@k... where coverity-bot says "this is bullshit":

    vvv     CID 1503716:  Null pointer dereferences  (REVERSE_INULL)
    vvv     Null-checking "rm" suggests that it may be null, but it has already been dereferenced on all paths leading to the check.

There are some activities that should be "intimidating to newbies" though, shouldn't there? I can think of a lot of specific examples, but in general, anything where significant preparation is helpful in avoiding expensive (or dangerous) accidents. Or where lack of preparation (or intentional "mistakes" like in this case) would shift the burden of work unfairly onto someone else. Also, a "newbie" in the context of Linux system programming would still imply reasonable experience and skill in writing code, and in checking and testing your work.