> It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
No un-answered serious questions. Serious questions are asked, regularly, as well as un-serious ones by cookers. But, the serious questions, the audit, the sense "did we do ok" is continuously asked.
We have an independent electoral commission. I'm not saying its incapable of being reproachable, nothing is "beyond reproach" but I have yet to hear a serious, non-cooker accusation any political party has tried to stuff the electoral commission.
What we don't have, (and I think should have) is capped party donations. I'm tired of the money aspect of who gets the most billboards.
We also have silly bad behaviour emerging: People doing their billboards in the same style and colours as the electoral commission. Often in foreign language support roles, using words like (not a quote) YOU MUST VOTE FOR PARTY A LIKE THIS which I think is really trolling the voter badly.
>Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
The flip side is even more true. If someone is claiming they care about election integrity and isn't willing to pair that with funding of an equivalent ID system that is both free and easy for voters to acquire, they don't actually care about election integrity.
I’d like to respectfully challenge you on this. There is no chance anyone can ever create an effortless-to-get ID. Even if it was like the census where they sent someone to your house repeatedly to try to find you, take your picture and print an ID on the spot, it wouldn’t be effortless because you might not know where your passport or birth certificate are.
Some people probably are so badly organized and/or ignorant that they can’t manage making and keeping one single DMV appointment even once every 15 years so that they could get an ID (I think we can all agree that an “expired” ID would do fine, as long as the picture isn’t so out of date it can’t be verified).
Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious. It’s ok that some things in life are reserved for people that have invested a tiny amount of effort once in their lives. There’s also not a free and effortless way to feed or bathe yourself.
By the way, a state ID costs $15 in Mississippi and $9 for “eligible people” in California.
The main problem with obtaining ID is that is takes time, and it's not evenly distributed. In the US its not folklore that people of color are less likely to have ID, it's a statistical fact.
This can be fixed, but you will notice the people who champion voter ID never bother trying. Naturally, the only reasonable conclusion is they like it that way. They're not stupid, after all.
>Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious
I hate calling something a slippery slope, but I don't know how else to describe an argument that is fundamentally "Sure, it will disenfranchise people, but who cares about those people anyway?" Once you accept that people's rights can be taken away simply because protecting those rights is an inconvenience, then none of us actually have any protected rights.
Exactly, a freedom you have to pay to access isn't a freedom. "If people can't get it together to pay a modest $9 fee for the 'don't get imprisoned forever' tax, who cares if they get throw into the forced labor camps?"
Beyond this point: voting isn't just a freedom, it's a duty in a civilized democracy. We don't enforce it like Australia does, but anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it, isn't fully on board with government by the people.
Voting itself takes effort (even to vote stupidly, where you just vote a straight ticket blindly and pick all the judges and ballot props at random). Voting in a way that's good for society (meaning you read about the candidates and ballot props and actually think through their true implications) takes WAY more effort. Why is it so important that we enable people who can't be arsed to make more than a trivial effort at all to vote?
There are already a bunch of arbitrary de facto restrictions:
- If you can't read, you won't be able to use your ballot.
- If you don't have transportation or any time off to vote, you can't vote in person. (Also the main objection given to requirements to get an ID card).
- If you don't know where you'll be living consistently, mail-in voting is problematic.
We accept that there will be people whose lives are so chaotic and messed up that voting probably won't be easy for them. So why is the requirement of identity proof, which is not more difficult to overcome than the above existing barriers, such a trigger to some?
> anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it...
My response is, anyone who cares so little about casting a vote that they wouldn't set aside time once in a decade to get an ID for the purpose of voting isn't fully on board with participating in government by the people -- and I'm totally fine with that.
I also don't see the point in the Australian idea, especially since paying $20-50 is trivial for anyone who's not homeless, and uncollectible (moot point) if you are actually destitute. You're still getting basically the same set of people in the voting booth anyway -- only the ones who give a shit about voting.
> By the way, a state ID costs […] $9 for “eligible people” in California.
A state ID is not required to register to vote in CA[1]. (The requirement is CA ID number or last-four-of-SSN or a third complicated way, but I'm assuming ID or SSN is attainable for nigh everyone eligible.)
That fascinates me. Intel deserves a lot of credit for PCI. They built in future proofing for use cases that wouldn't emerge for years, when their bread and butter was PC processors and peripheral PC chips, and they could have done far less. The platform independence and general openness (PCI-SIG) are also notable for something that came from 1990 Intel.
> Really needs an agent-oriented “getting started” guide to put in the context, and evals vs. the same task done with Python, Rust etc.
It has several such documents, including a ~1400 line MEMORY.md file referencing several other such files, a language specification, a collection of ~100 documents containing just about every thought Jordan has ever had about the entire language and the evolution of its implementation, and a collection of examples that includes an SDL2 based OpenGL program.
Obviously, jkh clearly understands the need to bootstrap LLMs on his ~5 month old, self-hosted solo programming language.
a.k.a. jkh. That's a blast from the past. Back in the early FreeBSD days, Jordan was fielding mailing list traffic and holding the project together as people peppered the lists with questions, trying to get their systems running with their sundry bits of hardware. I wondered when he slept.
Apparently he did as well[1]:
"The start of the 2.0 ports collection. No sup repository yet, but I'll make one when I wake up again.. :)"
Submitted by: jkh
Aug 21, 1994
They receive recognition for the results. Phone data was used in a large fraction of the cases against rioters in the 2021 capital attack. The Powers That Be were grateful that law enforcement were able to use phone data to either initially identify attackers or corroborate other evidence, and ultimately put people in prison. The justice system makes cases with this every day, and the victims of criminals are thankful for these results.
Tools like this are substantially different than time/location
Bound geofences with warrants served to providers like were used in the Jan 6 investigations. And even those are under SCOTUS scrutiny for 4th amendment concerns.
Results compel expectations, and every "success" unlocks more latitude. A rational person cannot admire headlines that trumpet the wonderful achievements of digital dragnets in one case, and then suffer "concern" when more aggressive techniques are employed elsewhere: there are powerful incentives involved, as any thinking person should know. J6 was a big unlock for state surveillance; the results were met with gushing praise and no friction was incurred. Now, new bounds are being pushed and the tools proliferate, as the fine distinctions you cling to are blithely forgone.
J6 was a completely standard use case to confirm someone’s location in the Capitol with the location data from providers. It wasn’t some novel or breakthrough use, and not everything in life is a slippery slope so it’s completely rational to approve of a technology to convict those involved in a crime and decry more advanced and less legal means purely for surveillance of people who haven’t committed any crimes.
I don't like being devil's advocate on this because I am strongly against the invasion of privacy at that point in the investigation, but without that data, they'd just take a bit longer to have identified the members of the insurrection. There's varying degrees of data you can glean from cellular networks as well, right down to "it was definitely this person, the phone logs show a FaceID unlock at X time" and that action can be inferred by network logs, all information that carriers have retained for over two decades.
What it does become is a data point in an evidential submission that can strengthen a case that could otherwise be argued back as a bit flaky. It's similar to DNA evidence in that it's not actually 100% reliable nor is the data handled forensically at every stage of collection, but it's treated as if it is.
I think it's weighted too heavily in evidence and should not be used as a fine-toothed comb to sweep for "evidence" when it can be so easily tainted or faked. At the same time, I'd love to see the current members of the pushback against ICE using this data fallacy against future prosecutions. "Yeah, I was at home, look" and actually it's just a replay of a touch or face ID login running from a packaged emulator, or whatever signature activities meet the evidential requirement.
>they'd just take a bit longer to have identified the members of the insurrection
They'd have had to enjoin more parties, probably to include state agencies. Any party can push back, stall or blow the whistle if they feel something wrong and risky to them is happening. Which is exactly the opposite of what the feds want. They want to act unilaterally, on anything and everything.
I use Preact for a very lean build for a front-end that lives in a small embedded MCU flash ROM. Gziped the whole front-end is about 25KB, including SVG images baked-in to the preact gzip file. I'm very careful about the libraries I include and their impact on the overall payload size.
I had started with a simple front-end that was using jQuery to quickly prototype the device controls, but quickly exceeded my goal of keeping the front-end at under 40KB total gzipped. The problem is needing more than just jQuery, we also needed jQueryUI to help with the front-end, or build out similar complex components ourselves. And as soon as the jQuery code became non-trivial, it was clear that Preact made much more sense to use. Our payload is quite a bit smaller yhan the jQuery prototype was.
A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
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