Comment by titzer

If it's a program you wrote to run on your on hardware, feel free. But in reality most programmers write programs for other people's computers, or just write programs because it's fun or pays well, and then their work gets integrated into a larger whole at a much later date, and then it's run in contexts the original author never imagined, long after they move on. Safety checks catch the base-level logic bugs that would otherwise cause programs to go silently wrong and misbehave in complex and inscrutable ways. Disabling them is not just living dangerously, it's a moral hazard; the programmer doesn't suffer the consequences, users do. It's not your program or computer at risk, but someone else's. I don't know how as a profession we're so cavalier with shipping exposed whirling knives, but we are.