pacala

8 ms·

31.
by pacala 6y ago
This may well apply to countries as well. Due to the scales involved, it takes longer to notice the deleterious effects, and is much harder to reverse course.
32.
by pacala 6y ago
In practice, vote secrecy does not appear to be a priority concern of the authorities. More so when you have to educate more than 3000 local authorities [number of counties in US] to pay attention to the issue. I did a quick duckduckgo for
33.
by pacala 6y ago
Fair enough. If I understand correctly, the server only uses the user's identity to generate a random serial number, then only remembers the serial number and the fact that user X has generated a serial number. With that, we are left w
34.
by pacala 6y ago
The lack of follow up is indeed rather frustrating. On the plus side, the article reports that they kept the people in quarantine 8-12 days after the testing round. From other sources on the Web, "on average symptoms appear after 5 day
35.
by pacala 6y ago
* Voting is the cornerstone of democracy. It is the one place where it's not worth cutting costs for convenience. * Trust but verify. I'm not aware of a cost-effective way to monitor mail-in voting. Suppose I want to observe the p
36.
by pacala 6y ago
I believe we are mostly on the same page. Voting should be in person, on paper, on a weekend day. It can be done, even in covid times. One more thought: Simple >>> Complex. Small variations in a technically correct process may brea
37.
by pacala 6y ago
Exactly. We should not trade off the weakening of the voting process for convenience. The voting process deserves to be as strong as we can possibly make it. In person, on paper, on a weekend day.
38.
by pacala 6y ago
A political machine that can make use of the 'who did Joe voted for' information is likely to have access to the ballot id database and link 'ballot id 43abfd32' to Joe. On voting machines, good point. We should not use
39.
by pacala 6y ago
What keeps an attacker from: Open the ballot envelope and the secrecy envelope Note who you voted for Pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope Use the vote information in whatever way they see fit ? Variation:
40.
by pacala 6y ago
There several problems with mail-in voting systems, including your proposal. On top of my head: * The tampering envelope is extended to weeks instead of hours. * There is a non-zero risk of vote secrecy violation. * There is a non-zero risk
41.
by pacala 6y ago
The ability to check one's ballot status implies that the ballot is tied to one's identity. How does the system guarantee vote secrecy? Edit. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Oregon#B
42.
by pacala 6y ago
I come to grips with: * The 'engagement' metric leads to toxic outcomes no mater what. * The upper management / board is single mindedly obsessed with 'engagement', as a proxy for making money. * I cannot function i
43.
by pacala 6y ago
Predicting political preferences is a huge can of worms. Don't do it. Have the data scientist delete their model.
44.
by pacala 6y ago
As actors in the World, we are machines that turns sensor data into a linear stream of actions. To the extent the decision process in not completely random, there exists a metric that ends up maximized by the decision process, sometimes ref
45.
by pacala 6y ago
Nit pick. There is another imprecision lurking in the quoted statement. Epidemics are subject to power laws, making it misleading to take averages over large populations. US mortality rate may be 29.87/100k, but that is an average weig
46.
by pacala 6y ago
? There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -&gt
47.
by pacala 6y ago
PDF of the decision: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may20/b4....
48.
by pacala 6y ago
In the good old times of Soviet power, there were other oppression mechanisms besides lethal force. In fact lethal force was only rarely used, especially after Stalin. A couple of examples: * Send dissenters to perform menial jobs in some r
49.
by pacala 6y ago
Meta: This is a very low quality post. It is accusing Karol Sikora of being 'either 'an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar' without a shred of evidence of such behavior. Assassinate the character of the messenger wi
50.
by pacala 6y ago
The type of the constructor is not the type of the object. The type of Rectangle constructor is (number, number) => Rectangle, vs the type of Rectangle which is just Rectangle. Think RectangleFactory vs. Rectangle.
51.
by pacala 6y ago
Please don't cite euromomo as a source: * They stopped graphing the per country raw numbers, which makes it impossible to put things in perspective: what is the comparative excess mortality per million people? * They use deceptive grap
52.
by pacala 6y ago
Full title: Florida scientist was fired for 'refusing to manipulate' COVID-19 data, she said
53.
by pacala 6y ago
The major challenge is that we either hide for an indefinite amount of time, which destroys the wealth pipes, aka the economy, or we get hit by a second pandemic wave. There are NO good options. Cherry on top: everything is hyperpartisan, w
54.
by pacala 6y ago
> the undesirables aren't even aware they're banned Chilling. Given the scope of BigTech, 10x chilling. An 'undesirable' can end up on a secret black list for whatever petty reason, and then have a huge streak of targ
55.
by pacala 6y ago
FWIW, open source is not an absolute good. It is undercutting the ability of your peers to make a living. It is making software a commodity, such that capital rich hardware owners can make a killing. See AWS. Commoditize your complement. h
56.
by pacala 6y ago
Humans are unique in evolving recursive language. Consciousness is a recursive agent: observe me observing the world, several layers deep. Likely the exact same mutation / brain structure backs both mechanisms. Neither electrons, nor t
57.
by pacala 6y ago
Not super familiar with Kafka, but behind the scenes some RDBMS are log replay engines. Are there technical reasons to not slap a RDBMS frontend on top of a Kafka log and avoid dealing with raw streams in the application code? Edit: From
58.
by pacala 6y ago
Agreed. Careful/Restrained OOP / 95% FP [the ML branch] / DOP, all names for the same sweet spot. The push back is against hard OOP culture, rooted in confused thinking. * Everything is emphatically NOT an object. There is im
59.
by pacala 6y ago
The technical difference is lack of language-level module support, requiring manual management of vtables. It can be done, see Linux kernel for an example, but often times degenerates in a ball of globals. To further clarify, one can use DO
60.
by pacala 6y ago
Exponential growth doesn't work forever. As recently as 100 years ago there were less than 2 billion people in the whole world. At 7.8 billion and growing 80M [1 Germany] each year, we're running out of room to breathe.

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