Yeah, these things quickly boil down to the trusting trust thing (see Ken Thompson’s Turing award lecture). You can’t trust any system until you’ve designed every bit from scratch.

You gotta put your trust somewhere, or you won’t be able to implement jack.

I got reminded of it last week after years. What are the chances it came up again. 😁

It’s in Intercal, a joke language from '70s. Mark Rendle describes it here in his talk at NDC. This whole talk is ridiculous btw.