is a symptom of mental incompetence. We do not want to elect a mentally incompetent leader.

I would prefer a person with a some disorders which sometimes have such a downside to a “normal” person, other things being equal.

Also people may “take care of basic personal hygiene” and still become stinky 5 times sooner than healthy people, have you considered that?

Ableism is bad.

Malware and porn banners are going to make this a feature always turned off.

They have a few legacy things working in their favor. Hardware compatibility is one, but seems to be a thing of the past now when people don’t care. Application compatibility is another, and that is with Windows, not with NT.

And they don’t have to change the core parts, because NT is fine. Windows is not, it’s a heap of legacy, but it’s not realistically replaceable.

Unless they develop from scratch a new subsystem, like Embrasures or Walls or Bars, and gradually deprecate Windows. Doesn’t seem very realistic too, but if they still were a software company and not a malware company, they’d probably start doing this sometime about now.

Well, was spyware-ridden Kazaa malware?

I mean, I agree.

Oh. I have relatives in the USA. Jewish and the older generation is sadly non-critical. Last family call ended where my uncle (strictly speaking, my mom’s uncle, son of my grandma’s older sister) dropped a phrase of “having to vote for someone who’ll support Israel” in such a worried tone, that I fscking couldn’t hold it. I mean, if my grandma wouldn’t try to shut me up with her Israel worship bullshit (she has always been, ahem, simple-minded and loud, and now she’s also of the age where people do not preserve a lot), could have gone better.

It remained in the OS business to the extent that is required for the malware business.

Also NT is not a bad OS (except for being closed, proprietary and probably messy by now). The Windows subsystem over it would suck just as bad if it would run on something Unix.

Well, either that or we have to explain zero-knowledge algorithms to voters.

What if you lose a job because of the way you voted?

In some sense that’d be a good thing to have fewer connections to people who’d do such a thing. But in fact, of course, that would lead to voter coercion.

If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.

There’s another solution, which is strictly speaking not voting. Using sortition with no unknown components - a predictable pseudorandom number (say, from timestamp, amount of UN member states, and something else) and some public citizen register, and the register of those willing to be chosen. The changes of that register would be very volatile (deaths, births), and so those of willing participants. And just like with checksum algorithms, the smallest changes in sources would cause the biggest changes in the result. At a firmly defined moment in time (no shifting day forward, day back and so on) it’d be calculated which people become, ahem, electors. Due to no unknown components it’d be verifiable by everyone and hard to tamper with.

And then they would vote non-anonymously, as it happens now. Not direct sortition to a presidential post, because there has to be some degree of security from madmen.

EDIT: Actually one thing I like about this is that the art of politicking, as in campaigning, as in selling yourself to the public, becomes less relevant.

It’s a huge problem in today’s world, where outside of the West everyone knows that who’s considered the victim and the good guy and who’s the aggressor and the bad guy is determined by spending on such campaigning and efforts to sell the point.

Westerners generally think that the best point of view will sell itself to them. And Yazidis in Sinjar could do that worse than ISIS supporter countries, while ISIS was murdering them.

And also remember that Kuwayti nurse who “testified” before UN who was in fact a daughter of a prince, if I’m not mistaken.

So I like sortition quite a lot, but there should be mechanisms to alleviate its results (randomization and all that). Like non-anonymous voting on top of it. And maybe with 2/3 of electors being selected this way, and 1/3 of them via anonymous popular vote.

There’s a solution of vote not being anonymous, so that everyone can check if their own vote has been stolen, and everyone can see if there are anomalies in distribution of voters.

They’ll just be afraid.

I could say that singing ability differs between various things that can be called singing in various cultures, and anything depending on spectator’s evaluation (pleasure) is subjective, but these are obvious, so whatever, hold a cookie

Ye-es, but nobody in the West said so. Maybe if in that one moment things went differently, Russia would be at least a very flawed democracy today.

Russian Supreme Court in 1993 when ruling that Yeltsin and the parliament should both resign and have new presidential and parliament elections. Yeltsin’s opposition agreed, Yeltsin said he’s the president and it’s democratic and legal that he decides everything and sent tanks.

Since the US was friendly with Yeltsin, this was considered business as usual.

Those mass disinformation campaigns are being done by (sometimes “almost”) nation state level actors. Governments are going to counter only some of them.

As for my own opinion - in 2020 during Artsakh war there were a few Turkish immigrant events in European countries where they’d march, yell Turkish neo-Nazi stuff, yell that they are looking for Armenians and so on. I don’t remember governments of those countries (who are already in charge of regulating fascists on their streets) doing anything about that.

I think this is going to be the same here - a regulation is a price tag in disguise. Smaller actors will be barred from doing those disinformation campaigns, bigger ones or friendly with the right governments will not be.

Killing and splitting corporations is better, but the previous part about price tag is the exact reason they are not doing this. Those governments want to have bot campaigns of their own, to manufacture consent, to see what people are saying, to control the public discourse. They just don’t want others to do it too.

This is a toad fucking a viper, as they say in Russian.

I guess his PoV is that Xitter is his property, thus when he does whatever there, it’s not censorship, but when state demands from him to do whatever there, it is.

But his position would be easier to defend were he not Elon Musk.

Most of all about neo-colonial politics. Many actions presented as the opposite of that are in fact neo-colonial. Such as the kind of governments and forces and “recognized borders” all European and related countries (including USA and Russia) support very firmly (as in - helping suppress every movement contrarian to them with any amount of cruelty being allowed).

Where does that capitalization style come from? Asking as somebody who’s never been in the USA.

Sadly we live in an age where non-tech people, a bit like LLMs do, can say all those words and not understand them.

I genuinely think using PDP-11 level (in feel, can be more performant) machines as our PCs (with hardware accelerators for cryptography, some sound and some graphics) would be beneficial for the humanity. Limit them to things they can use differently from a squirrel using a wheel.

Digital voting is just the same human error with more steps. Nearly all of the issues with paper voting are present in digital voting and then some.

I wonder if one can use ghost keys for an anonymous voting system, which still ensures that a voter only votes once, and still makes all votes verifiable.

That would have much fewer issues.

Running unique code that cannot be run elsewhere, and is 100% open source such that the source can be viewed by anyone without exposing itself to risk that a smart enough bad actor can cause havoc?

No need to use some fantastically obscure hardware. Source code being open is not bad.

A voting system is the easiest thing to emulate. Except for load.

Would it be a weird question to ask how many Black people were in that commission?

I mean, sometimes racism can take priority over party affiliations.

Well, thx, but I already have a couple of noname Chinese cables with braided cover (to avoid breaking) which seem to be as good as anything else I’ve touched, and were kinda cheap.

No strategy was involved in buying them, though, so I’ll remember you advice.