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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The key thing for elections is that all counts ought to be auditable and verifiable. It doesn’t matter whether the count is done by humans or electronically. Enough information from each individual vote must be preserved so that counts can be verified, during the legal window for races to be confirmed.

    I am old enough that when I first started voting, we used lever machines. You pushed a lever for your choice in each race, then you pushed a big lever, which “recorded” your choice and resets all levers for the next person. But, it recorded your choice on manual dials that showed the vote total. Sometimes, the dial has issues rolling over from “9” to “10”, or “9999” to “10000”. If your vote got swallowed by the mechanical dial, it’s gone! There was no remedy. At the end of the election, the poll workers reported the counts off the dials. If they needed a recount, they looked at the dials and said “Yup, that’s the count”.

    Today, I vote on a paper ballot, which gets fed into a machine. I can see right away if my vote is accepted – if it is not, I can get a new ballot and try again. All those paper ballots are retained so if there is a recount, they can either be run again or physically inspected by hand. It is much better tha it used to be.











  • For the same reason why they let so much water evaporate. They could convert some of that heat back into electricity, just like they could run closed-loop cooking systems, but it would cost more money than it would save. There’s no financial incentive to do so…

    … Until regulators start insisting! These datacenter folks have gobs of money, we shouldn’t be shy about requiring them to not ruin the local environment.

    It would be best to do it on a national level, otherwise these folks will just shift the development to someplace without the regulations.




  • It’s effective in terms of cranking out software. I’m talking about skilled senior engineers managing this directly. They know what they’re about. But at what cost?

    Those senior engineers became skilled by starting out as entry-level engineers who didn’t know all that stuff, but learned from the senior engineers before them (and by writing a lot of bugs that hopefully got caught by code reviews.) Now, companies are using AI as an excuse not to hire entry-level people.

    15 years from now, we will find there are no mid-level people to promote, because they never got their entry-level job and are now waiting tables.