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xyzzyz

11,232 karma · joined August 9, 2010

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xyzzyz··on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
Yes, it's unlikely that people are illegally voting in person in large numbers. It is relatively easy to do so, and the risk is relatively low, if you approach it intelligently (e.g. vote as someone who is registered, but highly unlikely to vote -- even if they do vote, you're highly unlikely to be caught anyway). However, there's just no incentive for individuals to do so, because the reward is very low: each individual's vote is really worth very little, and an individual fraudulent voter does not benefit from it enough to counterbalance the risk.

On the other hand, there are other ways for people to steal elections. For example, you can steal mail-in ballots from mailboxes, fill them, and covertly drop them in. It's particularly easy to do in states where all ballots are mail-in by default. The risk-reward calculation is different, because now one organized person can cast dozens, or hundreds of fraudulent votes, instead of just one.

In other states, you don't even need to steal them: you can just knock on the door, ask people for ballots (or buy them, many people will happily sell their right to vote for $20, because it's worthless to them), fill them in, and drop them off completely in the open. Of course, the stealing/buying and filling in the ballots is illegal, but since this happens in private, it's much harder to detect and prosecute. That's why most states disallow dropping off votes for third parties, but some states inexplicably allow it.

There are multiple recent cases, where people were convicted for schemes like that, e.g State of Arizona v. Guillermina Fuentes, Texas v. Monica Mendez, Michigan v. Trenae Rainey, U.S. v. Kim Phuong Taylor, and more. Since these are only the cases where conviction was secured, the true number is much higher.

xyzzyz··on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
They’d be filled to capacity even if they literally gave everything for free, because the unsold stuff is mostly the kind of things that people don’t want in the first place. The good stuff would be snatched, and the things nobody wants would linger there forever.
xyzzyz··on Administration working to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans
OK, but do you want it vigorously enforced, or are you just pretending that your problem with the law is uneven enforcement, rather than the law itself?
xyzzyz··on Administration working to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans
So if we enforce it vigorously on everyone, you’d be fine with it? If not, then you are arguing in bad faith.
xyzzyz··on NIMBYs aren't just shutting down housing
There's not a single home in Summerlin, NV that's more than a 10 minute drive from a large supermarket. Majority of the houses are less than 5 minutes drive.
xyzzyz··on US Immigration on the Easiest Setting
You missed the "total wealth of U.S. billionaires". The billionaires own a tiny fraction of total US wealth. Most of the wealth is owned by people like me, who own a house, and stocks in retirement account.
xyzzyz··on NIMBYs aren't just shutting down housing
Places full of single family houses with essentials being 30 minutes away don't tend to stay like that for long. They are great business opportunities for developers of supermarkets, malls and the like. You buy some cheap land, build some cheap commercial low-rises, and rake cash as the tenants come flooding in.
xyzzyz··on The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52T (2025)
"Buy, borrow, die" is simply not a thing. It's a half-baked idea invented by academics, who don't realize that it's just not viable in practice. Billionaires do not actually utilize it[1].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

xyzzyz··on Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Might be most devices by count, but certainly not by power consumption. EVs are the only major appliance that’s DC, and most people don’t even have them.
xyzzyz··on Gestational diabetes rose every year in the US since 2016
No, it’s mentioned because “Asian and Pacific Islander” is a specific, separate category for government’s data collection purposes. It was created as a result of Pacific Islander lobby. You can look up all of this.
xyzzyz··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
You can progressively tax consumption by combining high, non-progressive consumption tax with negative income tax rates. Something like, everyone gets some small UBI, and also extra income for every dollar made.

For example, let's introduce 35% consumption tax, but introduce $1k/year UBI and extra 30% on income between $0 and $30k, then additional 20% on income between $30k and $60k, and then 10% on income between $60k to $100k, and 0% on any income above that.

Then, if you make $30k, your gross take home pay is actually $30k + $1k + 30% * $30k = $40k, and if you make $200k, your gross take home pay is $200k + $1k + 30% * $30k + 20% * ($60k-$30k) + 10% * ($100k-$60k) = $220k.

At the same time, if you make $30k, if you spend all of it on consumption, you pay 35% * $40k = $14k in taxes, so your net take home pay after taxes is $40k-$14k = $27k. On the other hand, if you make $200k and consume all of it, you pay $77k in consumption tax, and your net take home pay is $220k - $77k = $143k. All very progressive.

Now, the person making $200k is highly incentivised to avoid some of this tax, and instead of consuming all of it, he might only want to consume half of it, and invest the other half. This is great, because then the other half will (hopefully) get invested in a productive activity, so that in future there's even more production.

xyzzyz··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
Because if you're taxing income, you're discouraging production, and discouraging consumption is better than discouraging production.
xyzzyz··on TCP, the workhorse of the internet
There is little point in inventing new protocols, given how low the overhead of UDP is. That's just 8 bytes per packet, and it enables going through NAT. Why come up with a new transport layer protocol, when you can just use UDP framing?
xyzzyz··on TCP, the workhorse of the internet
Sure, you can reimplement multiplexing on the application level, but it just makes more sense to do it on the transport level, so that people don't have to do it in JavaScript.
xyzzyz··on A classified network of SpaceX satellites is emitting a mysterious signal
Ah sorry, I misread you. I meant “presumably Starshield”, I think autocorrect replaced it with Starlink.
xyzzyz··on A classified network of SpaceX satellites is emitting a mysterious signal
This is not the case with Starlink (and presumably Starlink) satellites. The ground stations use directional phased arrays. They can do it, because they keep good track of where each satellite is at any given moment, and do trajectory adjustments as needed.
xyzzyz··on The QMA Singularity
Yeah, if you don't know the name of the thing you're looking for, you can spend weeks looking for it. If you just search for generic like "eigenvalue bound estimate", you'll find thousands of papers and hundreds of textbooks, and it will take substantial amount of time to decide whether each is actually relevant to what you're looking for.
xyzzyz··on Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK
There is no reason to expect that the test results would be the same across all demographic groups, and in fact, everything we know about psychometry (i.e. the science of mental testing) suggests that we should expect exactly opposite. See e.g. "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns", which described the consensus position of the American Psychological Association as of 1995:

> The cause of [test achievement] differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves.

https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/APA%201985%20Intelligence%2...

xyzzyz··on UK launches Project Octopus to deliver interceptor drones to Ukraine
Anduril Anvil already has a munition variant, called Anvil-M.
xyzzyz··on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)
What you describe using many completely unnecessary mathematical terms is not only not found in “every real-world protocol”, but in fact is something virtually absent from overwhelming majority of actually used protocols, with a notable exception of the kind of protocol that gets a four digit numbered RFC document that describes it. Believe it or not, but in the software industry, nobody is defining a new “version number” with “strictly defined algebra” when they want to add a new field to an communication protocol between two internal backend services.
xyzzyz··on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)
Granted, on paper it’s a cool feature. But I’ve never once seen an application that will actually preserve that property.

Chances are, the author literally used software that does it as he wrote these words. This feature is critical to how Chrome Sync works. You wouldn’t want to lose synced state if you use an older browser version on another device that doesn’t recognize the unknown fields and silently drops them. This is so important that at some point Chrome literally forked protobuf library so that unknown fields are preserved even if you are using protobuf lite mode.

xyzzyz··on U.S. Military Strikes Drug Vessel from Venezuela, Killing 11
Ok, but what does all of this have to do with my, or raiyner’s comment? Are you really not familiar with the notion of “due process”? Is the legal system where you are from unable to distinguish between procedural rights and the morality of outcome?
xyzzyz··on The worst possible antitrust outcome
All the while they keep blocking the most mundane acquisitions.
xyzzyz··on Synthetic gasoline
Trufuel is just normal fuel, premixed with other stuff.
xyzzyz··on Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?
Just for context, what Trump tries to (illegally) ban in US, flag desecration, is already a crime in most of Europe. You can get 3 years for burning the flag in Germany, 2 years in Portugal, 3 years in Switzerland, or 1 year in Poland. Worth keeping in mind when comparing democracy and individual liberty between Europe and US.
xyzzyz··on A short proof of the Hairy Ball theorem (2016) [pdf]
It’s really easy to see that such a vector field exists on odd dimensional spheres, though, by extending the construction on S^1: f(x, y) = (-y, x). In higher dimensions, you do the same thing, swap elements pair wise and multiply one of the elements of the pair by -1. This works in odd dimensional sphere because you can pair up coordinates.
xyzzyz··on Texas Instruments’ new plants where Apple will make iPhone chips
Basically yes. I googled average lake evaporation rates, and did the same multiplications as Gemini.
xyzzyz··on Texas Instruments’ new plants where Apple will make iPhone chips
Just for context, around 200 times that amount simply evaporates from the Lake Texoma’s surface every minute.
xyzzyz··on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
This only apparently changed like 2 months, and so the author was entirely correct about how it had worked when the post was published. Your comment is extremely misleading and casts improper aspersions on the author.
xyzzyz··on Go is still not good
It's actually somewhat hard to hit that panic in a realistic scenario. This is because you are unlikely to be using slice indices that are not on a character boundary. Where would you even get them from? All the standard library functions will return byte indices on a character boundary. For example, if you try to do something like slice the string between first occurrence of character 'a', and of character 'z', you'll do something like

  let start = s.find('a')?;
  let end = s.find('z')?;
  let sub = &s[start..end];
and it will never panic, because find will never return something that's not on a char boundary.
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