[jameshart]

It’s not necessarily that you will forget that you changed a setting.

What’s more likely is that if you change a setting with an incomplete mental model of what that setting affects, you might later discover that it opened you up to some risk that you did not appreciate when you made the change.

This affects technical users just as much as nontechnical users, it just kicks in at a different level.

A user who clicks the ‘install anyway’ button on an OS warning dialog telling them they are about to run untrusted software might be doing so without an appreciation of quite how many safety features they just disabled, so when asked later on ‘when did you turn off your firewall?’ they honestly don’t know that was something they ever did.

But likewise, a developer who enables a setting to solve problem A, without realizing that that setting will also screw them when they run into problem B, is… basically the cause of 99% of debugging.

‘It can’t be DNS because that would always be cached, unless there’s some setting that… son of a bitch, who knew that when you enable debug logging it disables DNS caching?’ - some developer somewhere at least once a day