I mean, electronic voting is just as easy to explain too. You push a button, it records your vote.
The complex part comes with answering how the system maintains the integrity of the ballot rather than just "how it works". In both cases when you simplify it, its equally understandable.
How exactly do we guarantee that paper ballots prevent fraud? Explain that in a simplified way, and it gets just as complex when you look into the bureaucracies that manage this in different countries.
I can (and regularly do) explain the security of our elections in a few sentences that everyone has understood so far. I almost have a masters in CS and I can only understand like half of what Helios Voting does.
- committees are made up of 6 people that have to be nominated by 6 different parties
- 3 of them must be on the polling place at all times
- 2 of them must have eyes on the ballot box at all times
- all 6 are present for the counting
- the higher-level comission (chosen by the same system) double-checks uncounted ballots
- everyone checks that their partial result is correct on the website
- anyone can check that the published partial results are summed correctly
> I mean, electronic voting is just as easy to explain too. You push a button, it records your vote.
It's never that simple. The beauty of pen & paper is that nothing can possibly go wrong short of having a stroke or seizure in the voting booth that will cause your vote to be miscounted or go to the wrong candidate.
A button has many things that can go wrong. Short circuit? Software bug? Neutrinos going through the earth happen to hit the circuit in such a way that your vote switches?
Electronic voting WITH paper ballot verification is a good middle ground, but no voting process should ever omit paper ballots for confirmation and hand-recounts.
Right but mail in voting kind of disproved the need for all of this ceremony. You can cast your vote remotely and it works just fine. States even hold elections entirely by mail. It would be annoying but you could exactly replicate the mail in voting system in all aspects with email. You would for free get an even better confirmation that your vote was received because they would send you back the hash of your sealed ballot attachment and you could check it against yours. It's not exactly practical
or accessible but it would be exactly as secure and hand recountable after the fact.
Okay now take the exact annoying system and replace only the sending an email with uploading your sealed ballot to a web form. Changing nothing except removing a 3rd party from the delivery mechanism—even more secure. Congrats you just invented e-voting.
There is still tons of ceremony for mail in ballots, it just happens asynchronously to the voter making selections. That's true of paper ballots as well, as significant parts of the ceremony happens after the poll closes during the count.
The biggest problem is that email and online voting suffer from a lack of anonymity.
In person: voter eligibility is confirmed and marked executed, voter makes selections, ballot securely placed in box without being read.
Mail: voter eligibility is confirmed, ballot sent, voter makes selections, voter mails ballot back secured against tampering, voter eligibility is re-confirmed and marked executed, ballot securely placed in box without ever being read.
In both cases all the poll worker steps are overseen by election scrutineers who can confirm all legal requirements were adhered to, in particular that no one knows who anyone voted for, just that the vote was collected.
Email cannot replicate the separation of the voter eligibility verification with the ballot counting. No matter what you do there will always be pathways to link a specific voter to the ballot they cast.
> Email cannot replicate the separation of the voter eligibility verification with the ballot counting
Yes it can, that's what I was on about with the whole "sealed" ballot thing but didn't feel like harping with the details. Once you fill out your ballot you encrypt it with your state election official's election specific public key and the attach it to the email—the digital "put it in the inner envelope." Poll worker confirms eligibility and puts just the encrypted ballot in the drop box. At this point in the process they couldn't look at the vote even if they wanted to. Then when it's time for counting they decrypt each one and count it.
Again is it practical or accessible to your grandma? No but it's exactly the same as mail in voting.
There is absolutely no way to guarantee the process of detaching the outer ballot from the inner one doesn't retain a link to the voter. There are problems on 2 levels: the math proofs behind cryptography involved (which is being worked on, but not currently solved) and the building a verifiable implementation that honours all the requirements in a provable way. That's currently easier, but fails hard on the public trust front due to the overwhelming complexity.
Moving mail ballots to email is not currently possible or even very viable.
Well yeah the poll worker could just write the voter's name on the inner envelope but that isn't a deal breaker. There's no need for math proofs or whatever nonsense. The cryptography is just to provide a light barrier to the poll worker who's being observed detaching the two things just the same as mail in ballots like the glue on the inner envelope. It doesn't need to be verifiable or perfectly secure because again mail in ballots aren't. Someone could steam the glue off, look at the ballot, and reseal it (or replace it entirely) but that doesn't happen because they're being observed.
The point of this exercise isn't to say we actually do email in voting but to demonstrate that you can absolutely build a system that's exactly as understandable and trustworthy as the mail in ballot system but digital because it is the mail in ballot system just s/USPS/a series of tubes.
I get wanting to be wary of bespoke voting software but in this hypothetical it's a human watching the screen of a boring Windows workstation provided by the state's IT department as the poll worker uses Microsoft Outlook and puts ballots in a folder. At what point is the threat vector remote enough with these devices we're fine trusting literally everything else in our lives to that it's paranoia rather than a legitimate threat? I mean even if you are that paranoid let anyone who cares analyze the machine afterward I guess. And in this system recounts are trivial, you still have all the original data.
This has to be a satirical response. Please tell me it's satire. If it's satire it's actually a pretty bad caricature of elon fan boys.
Because I can't believe anyone would seriously make a comparison to a 55+ year old car manufactured in a communist country.
It's like saying that an email server that takes a week to send emails is fine because the wait times for a posted letter in the 1960s could take 2 weeks.
Getting tired of all the bystander commentary. It's a toy for rich people. If there's 0 chance you're going to buy it, who really cares about your opinion.
You think nobody cares about their opinions, but somebody cares about your fatigue?
It's like a sucker's (or a fraudster's) war cry to say that the people who are already hooked into a venture are the only ones who should be allowed to point out that it might be a scam.
>a rogue ad-blocker app is exactly as dangerous as a rogue VPN service. Fortunately, because these ad-blocking apps are usually open-source, there are limited opportunities for bad actors.
I find it naive to state this when earlier he noted that he's suspicious of free services without a clear funding model.
Sure, open source is certainly better than closed source, but its not like somehow magically it prevents exploitation. There's plenty of examples especially in a small project like this with few eyeballs. So why question the funding model of a free VPN but not question the funding model of an open source project? We just assume its being done out of good will? I find that perspective naive.
Not that this entirely clears the skepticism, but to directly address the question as asked: blocking ads scratches a clear itch for the author. FOSS works great because software has no marginal cost, so as long as someone wants it to exist badly enough to make it so, there's then no reason not to give it away to anyone else who wants it. Providing a free VPN service to the world is quite a bit less likely to be an author-itch, and actually incurs a cost.
From experience I'll say one thing that Polars doesn't have great interfacing with is doing things like string concatenation, like taking multiple columns and combining them in with static string text in complex ways to create new columns.
Pandas has a really simple ability to just define a new column with
`df['col_a'] + "text" + df[col_b']` where "text" can be any string text inbetween your column values from col_a and col_b
If i remember correctly while you can do pl.col("col_a") + pl.("col_b") for plain concatenation, you can't mix in static text strings like you can with pandas and I haven't found really elegant ways to do that personally. Whereas I've found polars doesn't have as simple of a way to do that. You can choose to add one separator and make that anything you want, but only one separator and only inbetween the two values (so no suffixes or prefixes for example).
That being said, I hate everything to do with the pandas API (especially with its indexing system) and really prefer the more polars API for anyone coming from a SQL or database background. Pandas really shows its sort of academia background rather than a data engineering origin.
I'm not sure what you tried. Is this not what you want?
>>> df = pl.DataFrame({"x": ["a", "b", "c"], "y": ["d", "e", "f"]})
>>> df.with_columns(new=pl.col.x + " text " + pl.col.y)
shape: (3, 3)
┌─────┬─────┬──────────┐
│ x ┆ y ┆ new │
│ --- ┆ --- ┆ --- │
│ str ┆ str ┆ str │
╞═════╪═════╪══════════╡
│ a ┆ d ┆ a text d │
│ b ┆ e ┆ b text e │
│ c ┆ f ┆ c text f │
└─────┴─────┴──────────┘
Would love to know what prompts you used for this. Anytime I've ever tried to make an LLM create funny but satirical jokes it fails terribly and comes across cringey and try-hard. This one genuinely seems funny and absurd.
I mean, in fairness these are two completely different domains. OS development and AI business intelligence are as far apart as one can get.
That being said, given the AI context, it does sound pretty shortsighted to choose an overly saturated existing name for your new product. AI agents or LLM chat bots will definitely be confused with prompts like "hey what's this graphene project?". Dunno how tthey missed that.
Sounds like to me maybe universities should stop focusing on being cash grabbing machines and instead properly teach with a useful instructor-to-student ratio?
Sorry, if your answer as to why using a beneficial pedagogical approach is your class sizes are too large, then it sounds like your class sizes are too large!
It's not meant to "encourage the rich to support" the health system, it's meant to avoid completely gutting the public health system by creating a parallel pay-for-play system where only the richest pay and subsequently suck up all of the already finite resources and talent.
Introducing parallel private health care is just accelerationism for privatization wonks who want to just see the death of universal healthcare by sucking it dry for those willing to pay.
There's no magic wand with the resources available for healthcare. Creating private systems so rich people can skip the line doesnt magically create that capability, it means taking that capability from someone who maybe needed it more in the public side of things.
In most other contexts, rich people being able to spend money for some good or service would simply induce more supply ultimately making the product cheaper and better for the masses as well. The rich get to be "early adopters" buying a product when it's expensive and not very good; the poor as "late adopters" get to buy a product that is cheaper and works better once the bugs have been worked out. So...why exactly are resources and talent considered "finite" when it comes to health care and shouldn't we maybe look at FIXING that rather than take it for granted?
Consider, say, food distribution: McDonalds has traditionally made far more money as a private business catering to the tastes of the poor and middle-class than any fancy restaurant ever made catering to the rich. Do fancy restaurants like Per Se "suck up all the resources" needed to cook and serve food? Does the existence of fancy restaurants hurt McDonald's by making it harder to find burger-flippers? And does McDonalds in turn "suck up all the resources" thereby making it harder for people in some other context to find and acquire food? If not, what makes healthcare so different?
Also citing Fraser Institute, a known extremely right-wing hack "think tank" is like citing a used car salesman on the benefits of buying a car. Their entire raison d'etre is to privatize any remaining public good in Canada, so they will always hunt for any kind of information or data they can to paint whatever picture they want from their lobby funds.
Oh give me a break. This argument that people's objections to advertising comes from some Pollyanna naivety over things being free is nonsense. Tell me the last time you have ever seen a company be upfront and explicitly offer a free tier where they tell you upfront exactly what they are harvesting about you and for what purpose (and no, "improving user experience" isn't being upfront) but also offer you a paid version where they explicitly promise not to do that.
"If the product is free then you are the product" is supposed to be a cautionary observation, not an axiomatic proscription.
Does anyone actually trust companies that offer paid services to not harvest their data? Whenever I see this trope I think to myself that whatever lack of regulation, oversight and enforcement lead to that being okay would equally allow for them to both take my money and harvest all my of data anyways.
This is akin to people who criticise socialised medicine or services and pejoratively characterize supporters as just wanting "free stuff", as if the concept of collective payment is naive or something
The complex part comes with answering how the system maintains the integrity of the ballot rather than just "how it works". In both cases when you simplify it, its equally understandable.
How exactly do we guarantee that paper ballots prevent fraud? Explain that in a simplified way, and it gets just as complex when you look into the bureaucracies that manage this in different countries.
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