We accept a degree of friction for other constitutional entitlements.

Buying a gun, free speech, right to assembly. Each with caveats.

Appearing in front of your fellow citizens as a breathing person is central to how voting has worked for hundreds of years.

Why change it?

I agree it should be paid day off.

I don't think people who want to exercise their first or second amendment right accept friction over it. In fact it seems to me that's been one major source of political unrest.

But those same people who don't want their first and second amendment rights to be infringed are okay with voting having high friction so a lot of people can't do it.

When you say "why change it" are you not aware that many US states vote by mail (and/or ballot drop boxes) and have for decades? Or are you ignoring it?

Yes I'm aware. By change it I mean the gradual shift from in person to mailed ballets. This is shift toward isolation. Bubble preservation.

Standing inline with your neighbors to exercise our vote is empowering. It reminds us of our status as voters. As equals. It crosses boundaries. It's beautiful.

Sure there's cases where appearing in person isn't practical and I'm not suggesting we close the door to that. But I think it should be needs based.

I appreciate the vibe you're going for, but standing in line with your neighbors is also a massive time sink that directly costs people money via lost wages. Making drop-box voting needs-based just places democratic participation in the hands of those who determine who 'needs' and why. A democracy is only as real as its citizens' access to ballots.

Any friction must be weighed against the harm it seeks to prevent.

There simply is no meaningful intentional voter fraud in the US.

I agree. But I also like the ceremony.

In an even more online and disconnected world, it forces us out of our homes to stand with our neighbors in an exercise of our power.

There's a beauty to this that, when a large amount of voting is done over mail, I feel is lost.

I personally would prefer in person on a national holiday with civic groups (eg Boy Scouts) selling hotdogs.

That's the case right now--but what might a customized model tailored only for a narrow set of OS functions behave like? I suspect its achievable with a lot less compute.

Now is that a desirable product? Would it succeed on the merits in the marketplace? Maybe it would...

As an example, is it faster to multiply 2 numbers using a single MUL instruction or multiply matrices with millions (or billions) of elements multiple times? Multiply that overhead by every single thing you do and that's the overhead of using an LLM to emulate a program.

mtgox all over again.

Amazing. Is something like this available now, or in the future, for hobbyists? Happy to pay retail prices.

The stated intention is to discourage scams. Bur this is exactly the same way Xiaomi makes their devices "unlockable" and in reality they just turned off their unlock server years ago and the button doesn't do anything, so you can't unlock.

Why do I need a remote cron job to install an app on my phone?

it's a good point. I wonder if we'll see a PHP fork and rewrite in rust. like tcrs. given the recently issues they would seem to benefit the most...

There are plenty of alternative interpreters or compilers out there already, no need to start a new one again: https://github.com/gakowalski/alternative-interpreters#alter...

I wonder if that isn't a side effect of how its structured...

When a corporation sponsors the language, such as Java, Go, .Net, there's an inherent economic component which acts as a forcing function.

PHP being a foundation sounds nice. But consensus wasn't strong enough to affect the key outcomes.

why nobody in foundation management was not intereated in resulta of rhe security audit?

making php is the core of (checks notes) php foundation

or is the management full of completely not technical people who use it to boost their CVs?

Right, and that's a good question too. Since its a foundation, its probably fair to assume that a fair number of management are there due to financial contributions by their sponsoring corps.

When that's case, the priority might become on renewing financial support. Keeping the personality happy is seen as a way to keep the funding stream.

Given the proven capabilities of LLMs in computer security, get ready for similar issues to affect NodeJS, Java, Go, Rust etc...

NodeJS and Java are in a similar place (this CVE is a memory safety issue in PHP's C-language interpreter) but Go's compiler/runtime is written in Go and is memory-safe all the way down to the assembly.

Looks like we now have a similar release happening for NodeJS

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/october-2026-securi...

Blog post from a week ago with no “CRITICAL”, any reason to expect it not to look like the last one (https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/july-2026-security-...)?

Much of Node’s standard library is written in JavaScript, which can’t go on to exploit V8 vulnerabilities even given similar types of bugs, so I wouldn’t say it’s in a similar place. Not as familiar with Java, but I expect PHP is in a class of its own here.

I expect it will be the death of the C codebase which will get an oxidation push.

This is a joke, right? I can't tell if this is a joke.

It probably is but I am converting everything to python already.

Not rust?

I am used to Python. Hard to switch to something else until I am forced to. I am trying to manage agentic coding at least to the point where I can identify bugs with my own eyes instead of purely believing the LLMs. I know I will cheat and let an LLM take over the entire Rust app if I tried.

...and make no mistakes!

Don’t you mean WWZ ? Php is hardly dead – billions of installs.

I wish

Or corruption.