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.

“Objectively” doesn’t mean what you think it does, and calling others childish makes adequate people suspect you are a teen.

You’re not the main character,

You are. You are also responsible for your own choices whether you admit it or not.

That is the most selfish possible way to approach life.

If taking responsibility is selfish, then selfishness is a virtue.

at least you’ll be able to vote again and you might actually get to negotiate for things that make people’s lives better.

They are already threatening you with Trump if you don’t vote for them and don’t want to compromise. So about that “you’ll be able to vote again” - I think that’s true, but since that threat works, that’ll likely be the same kind of choice over and over. When you agree to get owned for protection, you usually don’t get owned just once.

Selfish naive children.

For fuck’s sake, are you 16?

How can a grown person be that arrogant without knowing shit about game theory?

Voting for the party that is consciously using the other one as a boogeyman will enable someone worse with no doubt. They are both worse.

And before the actual ballots are being cast, the public opinion sending right signals to Dems would reduce that risk.

It’s my choice to make whether that is true.

Well, I had migraine. But it’s rather that your personality is a bunch of nonsense.

The first paragraph is not very readable, but it’s the least important one.

The second one - I think you could find it in yourself to understand it, so being dumb doesn’t excuse you.

The third one - I’m certain you understood it. You might consider yourself very smart and cynical, only you’re not.

Yeah, I’ve recently talked with my therapist about this choice between very slow, very hard work and sitting on my butt dreaming. And about the idea that it’s better to avoid action than to act, if I’m not sure I’ll act right. And how it apparently came to me in my teens, when I’ve been doing martial arts for some time, girls would smile at me often, and in general I thought I might be too stupid and happy and there should be something smarter. That ‘smarter’ was, of course, just another teenage idea of being wise and not like everyone else. Fucked up my life for a decade.

By the way, people who’d be removed and theoretical and talk about some imagined third movement created via some magic other than voting - would be called ‘idiots’ in ancient Athens. Because they are on the side of an idea, not real politics. Then it became a rude word.

Any such decision to try and find a smart shortcut, or that it’s better to wait and see how it goes instead of sweating, - are all wrong and are exactly what propaganda works for. Being honest is smarter than being dishonest. And voting for the party most fitting your ideals is smarter than for the lesser evil.

OK, I gave a thought to this and realized that it’s the kind of argument where I assumed this is mostly male.

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.