kirubakaran 2 days ago

"Trust, but verify" is just a polite (ie corporate) way of saying "Don't trust until you verify", right?

2
thaumasiotes 2 days ago

No, it says that projects should move forward without verifying that prerequisites have been fulfilled, but that the verification should take place anyway. It's about the pace at which you can go.

Trust-free:

    Ensure that step A can go off without a hitch.
    Begin step A.
    Ensure that step B can go off without a hitch.
    Begin step B.
    Ensure that step C can go off without a hitch.
    Begin step C.
Trust, but verify:

    Begin step A.
    Begin step B.            Check that you have whatever you need for step A.
    Begin step C.            Check that you have whatever you need for step B.
                             Check that you have whatever you need for step C.
You can't finish step B until you have all the prerequisites, but you can start it.

jodrellblank 1 day ago

I can only make sense of that saying in terms of how much trust to give, whether it's a high-trust or low-trust environment. Whether you assume good-will and basic competence or not.

e.g. you might assume that a sorting library from an internal developer at your company will put things in order but you might want to verify that it has reasonable worst-case performance for your use case. A no-trust situation might lead you to scrutinise everything about it - does it work at all, does it have horrendous performance in every case, is it a supply-chain attack with disguised errors leading to deliberate exploit holes.

In this case, "trust but verify" might mean assuming the Professor and TA are doing an experiment they have done before, which basically works, but might have made a mistake or missed something while setting it up, writing the slides, or explaining it to you. "Don't trust" might mean the TA got the experiment from ChatGPT, hates OP for being on a scholarship and is trying to sabotage their success, and the whole thing isn't an Electronics course it's really the Professor's practical joke/psychology experiment about stressing students.