I think the difference is right wing "preppers" are more individualistic. For them it's about saving themselves and their immediate family. The left acknowledges that we live in a society. And the real power to prevent happens at a societal level. So their energy is focused more on fixing government and through high leverage policy changes instead.
We can't yet equivocate ML systems with human beings. Maybe one day. But at the moment, it's probably better to compare this to a compiler being fed licensed code. The compilation output is still subject to the license. Regardless of how fancy the compiler is.
Also, a human being that reproduces licensed code from memory - because they read that code - would constitute a license violation. The line between derivative work, and authentic new original creation is not a well defined one. This is why we still have human arbiters of these decisions and not formal differential definitions of it. This happens in music for example all the time.
> There is no logical basis for it. Or rather, any latticework of logic you erect to justify this choice is based on a foundation that has nothing to do with reason.
Any formal system is going to be based upon some set of axioms. You can't apply reason without some foundational choices (ie. your axioms).
The bright line you are looking for is a lot fuzzier than it seems at first glance.
If you take as axiomatic that "the human race surviving is a good thing we should work towards". Having kids becomes an exceptionally rational thing for people to do.
Funny how my belief system is basically the contrapositive.
"Having kids is not universally good so the survival of the human race might not be that important (but we should still work for the quality of life for the people who are and will be alive.)"
This. The march to authoritarianism accelerates when people accept the meme that the truth is unknowable. So they simply accept the reality put forth by the autocrat.
The most basic kind of truths are facts. We at least need to agree on those as best we can first. And then apply critical thinking on the the squishier stuff on top.
Except for that for a lot of "facts", according to Rousseau, we already have 4 truths: what you say, what I say, what we agree upon and what really happened.
So, while the pursuit of truth is important, I'd argue that respect towards each other even when we cannot agree is the most important thing.
Maybe we need to start teaching people to habitually attach provenance and confidence information to every fact (really: belief) they report, at least as much as practically possible?
"Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I strongly believe Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I find it plausible that Iraq might have had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to that UN report, Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to NYT, which quotes that UN report, Iraq had WMDs", etc.
A lot of problems are caused by people who say "X" when they should say "I strongly believe X", or "I think I read somewhere that X", or "I'm not sure, but I think X".
I generally speak like this and find it causes problems with others because they view this as a weak form of speech. It makes you appear uncertain, which should be a good thing, but our society seems to value undeserved confidence far above cautious uncertainty.
I find it helpful to spend a bit more cycles on keeping track of audience and a bit fewer on perfect conveyance of certainty levels.
Once you've set the bar re: certainty for a particular discourse neighborhood, you can just make claims at that level thereafter without feeling dishonest. As long as you're sensitive to cases where others may have joined without enough context to know that you're out on a limb.
Yes- intellectual dishonesty is at the root of this. When I was raised, the integrity of a "man's" word was a measure of the "goodness" of the person. Now, we hear things like "he said what he had to say" and a basic acceptance of lies if the person is on our side of the debate.
I've tried to get into this habit. Qualifications are great too because when someone comes back to say "you said X! You lied!" you can remind them of how carefully you qualified your statement.
This is Circle of Competence applied[0]. It's admitting what you know you don't know so you don't make mistakes by being overconfident.
It's even more than that. By qualifying your statements, you let others evaluate them correctly.
So, for instance, if 'tptacek here says a factual statement about security (and there's no large thread contesting it), I'll treat it as gospel. But if he says he's unsure about it, or he read it somewhere, I know to attach less weight to it. I'll code in it my brain as "uncertain, but passed the sniff test of a relevant expert". Etc.
The same principle works in more mundane aspects of life. Whether a person believes something (and how much), or whether they're just reporting something they've read elsewhere, matters a lot for evaluating a factual statement independently.
The one thing with this is that you have to be consciously careful of who you view as an authority on different subjects, or whose opinion on something is relevant. For a simple, everyday example, it's easy to follow a friend's recommendation to eat at a particular restaurant, even if that friend has completely different tastes in food than you do (which, in all likelihood, will result in a poor dining experience for you). Likewise, I think even smart, educated people often make the mistake of treating the word of powerful individuals as fact even if those individuals have absolutely no experience with or authority on the matter.
The world s autocratic countries (russia china turkey etc) don’t rely on fabricated news, they rely on hiding the truth and placing a biased spin on it. They know that outright lies will actually harm their image.
And killing journalists, and imprisoning political opponents, and controlling the media and, yes, straight up lying, because no other voice can be heard, so it's impossible to publicly fact check their lies.
That's a few autocratic countries. Such a statement is obviously not true in general. For starters you have dictatorships which have been based upon absurd and shameless lies. North Korea currently, Haiti under Papa Doc, Turkmenistan under Niyazov. In addition I'd imagine hiding news is the first line of defense, but if that fails none of these autocratic governments are not above lying (and I'd bet you find the dictators of those countries have lied many times when it suited them, if evidence is available).
But if the truth is unknowable, how does the autocrat know it?
I've only met a few people who are skeptics about the existence of facts--but I find that they're likely to be skeptics about other things too.
I think that if it's a position you arrive at via honest philosophical inquiry, it's not a hazard at all.
The position to be wary of is where you still believe in the truth, but are so beleaguered by the cacophony of voices claiming to know it that you're willing to accept that somebody else has access to it if it means that you get to just peacefully be on their side and don't have to bother sorting through it all anymore.
That is too say: claiming to know the truth is often a proxy for being too intellectually lazy to bother forming a good argument, and I think that nihilism is preferable.
I might be mistaken. But either you have the ability to verify your specific vote was cast, for the person you expected to cast it for. Or you don't.
It would seem impossible to offer election confidence to the majority of people without a simple system that has this property.
If kidnapping and torture are on the table for your threat model. I think most people's voting record could be figured out with near 100% accuracy if they get access to your computer logins, emails, hacker news account, and all your social media accounts. Which according to your coercion model, they totally could. No need to go after your vote token specifically.
So unless the voting system singles you out in particular (which a random token wouldn't. Every vote would have one). Ruling it out as a solution because of a super low probability scenario seems like a misattribution of probability in the face of clear value (ie. easy and private verifiability by all parties).
Having secure elections is how we create a world where no one has to worry about coercers coming after them.
You underestimate this treat model. We know from the history that if votes can be checked, the misuse will increase.
* In traditional families women will effectively lose their vote.
* Vote buying becomes possible.
* fellow party or church members start to check the votes.
The ability to use smartphones to take pictures in ballot box is already threatening secret ballot. Let's remove secret ballot so that we can have secret ballot is not valid solution.
It seems like the argument here reduces to "personally verifiable votes should never exist".
> In traditional families women will effectively lose their vote.
People can lie. That's the only recourse they have today right? Would producing a "plausible deniability token" to show to adversaries suffice here to provide usable cover?
> Vote buying becomes possible.
This is already possible. Though you are right that it is not strictly verifiable today. But I would argue that we lack data on how many people would take money to vote X in todays system, and then vote Y instead and lie about it. If this set is tiny, then this problem doesn't grow much does it?
> fellow party or church members start to check the votes
This should simply be illegal. Bright line. Your vote is private and no-one or organization shall be allowed to force you to disclose it.
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It seems again like the arguments here are sort of baby/bath water. There are outlier problems preventing this from being perfect. Yes. But the benefit of a truly verifiable election would inoculate us against mass election hacking. Which increasingly seems like a genuine threat we need to deal with. Are the outlier problems not worth the price of preserving democracy?
> There are outlier problems preventing this from being perfect
These are not outlier problems. I have been election official in Finland and it's not rare to see husband trying to make his wife to show the ballot. Smartphones are already creating problems that are hard to quantify.
The real solution comes from doing basic things right. Electoral observation can be improved. Paper ballots standard where ballots can be quickly counted using electronica counters from multiple suppliers (different parties can bring their own) can make voting both secure and safe.
Outlier probably wasn't the right phrasing on my part for this specific issue of spousal voting pressure. Thanks for calling that out. You were right to.
The way I think about this though is that we should view these concerns as needing tailored (sometimes orthogonal) solutions. There is an analog here to testimony in court. Defendants have the right to know the evidence against them. Including the identity of witnesses and the nature of their evidence and statements. This often puts witnesses at risk for retribution. It's a huge problem. But do we do away with requiring this kind of evidence disclosure? Not having it makes it easy for evidence to be fabricated without consequence. And for defendants to not know who or what is being used against them in court. This would potentially have even more dire repercussions. So currently, we find other ways to help ensure the safety of witnesses and accept this major issue.
In the same way we might find other solutions to the issue of Spousal pressure. Opt-in voting receipt print outs. Support programs for domestic abuse, etc...
This is for sure a problem. And maybe even a major one (like witness safety). But overall, the alternative of having insecure and unverifiable elections is increasingly seeming like the more important issue to address. Most complex systems are about balancing tradeoffs. And it should be unsurprising, that a stable election system is too.
Paper voting is pretty effective at preventing mass election hacking.
Software can never prevent mass election hacking, as hardware can always deliberetly miss-implement your algorithm.
I'm also curious what is supposed to happen if you go check, and your vote doesn't match. Sure, the government investigates, but, a, why would you trust the government, and b, why would they trust that you weren't simply paid to cast doubt on the election?
> If kidnapping and torture are on the table for your threat model. I think most people's voting record could be figured out with near 100% accuracy if they get access to your computer logins, emails, hacker news account, and all your social media accounts. Which according to your coercion model, they totally could. [Note the removed last sentence.]
I agree, but it's not necessary to kidnap the person. It's a scary word.
A personal token makes this too easy. For example, you can be "encouraged" to send an email to bigbrother@example.com with your national ID number and your token. Or the day after the election, in each office at work everyone can just meet and show their token while cheering for the current government.
I guess that in a some society people is more careful with the things they post and the things they like in fb, and the things they say in public. At least the vote can be (almost) secret, and they can disagree safely.
Some schemes could require the person to remember a passphrase (not printed out) that is mixed in with the one-time-token to compute the final verifier token.
> you can be "encouraged" to send an email to bigbrother@example.com with your national ID number and your token
Would the system providing some sort of plausible deniability token give enough cover for this? Is this a problem at scale?
Also... they can do this to you for your email, and social media logins too right?
> Or the day after the election, in each office at work everyone can just meet and show their token while cheering for the current government.
I don't understand why this is fundamentally different than todays world where people wear MAGA hats or drive around with Obama/Biden bumper stickers. Sure it's not cryptographically verifiable. But it's certainly "good enough" for all practical purposes.
You can buy a fake MAGA hat or Obama sticker. The ability to lie about your vote is a feature not a bug.
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If each one has a secret passphrase, nobody can verify that the total is calculated correctly.
If people can choose their own passphrase, they can be forced to use one. I like "Fr33dom!"
If the passphrase is calculated automatically, just make the combination of the token with a different passphrase generate a nonsensical result (if you have 10 parties, generate a number between 1 and 100000 for security reasons), so people can't lie. And make people send the email with the national ID, token and passphrase.
Here in Argentina the old method (100 year ago) to vote was that everyone go to the local voting site, and everyone vote in public raising their hand, someone count the votes and send the result to the central location. (The historical details may be inaccurate. But it was something similar.)
Obviously, people can be forced to not go to vote, or people that voted against the local political chief can be pressure to change their votes, or never vote again, or just hit until they understand their error.
It was a long fight to get secret votes, some people even died for the right of a secret vote. I guess other countries have similar stories.
It's difficult to imagine the problems without a recent similar story in your own country. Let's assume you are from USA. Just imagine that during McCarthyism people that were requested testify in the committee has to first say their national ID, token and passphrase to be sure that they didn't vote for the Communist party. Anyone that refuses gets blacklisted automatically for national security reasons.
We seem to be focusing on defending against different things. I am focusing more on mechanisms to defend the integrity of the election itself against hacking or election fraud. Which seems like a dominating concern in the modern context.
Different threats require separate considerations for sure.
To be crystal clear. I'm still for secret voting, and being able to lie about your vote if you want to. But without an ability for the voter to verify their vote, you must trust the entities themselves that are holding the election. Both that they are acting in good faith. AND that they managed to secure the election against outside tampering. The very people that you are worried might compel you to declare your vote are the ones running the election systems themselves in many situations.
We need to be able to operate with less trust here, not more.
> If each one has a secret passphrase, nobody can verify that the total is calculated correctly.
It's possible we are misunderstanding each other. There would be a verifiable ledger. With opaque tokens for each vote. The total can be verified by counting. Just like normal. We could use our signature method of choice to sign and verify the integrity of each vote and all the votes. The body holding the election would be able to verify the total counts are correct and not tampered with.
For a specific vote, an opaque identifier that nobody except the voter can resolve, provides a mechanism for the voter to self verify their vote was counted in the way they expected.
A passphrase was just one idea to avoid printing the token on your vote receipt. But if we really want to go down the rabbit whole of having cover. There are many other ways to provide plausible deniability. You could opt to not get a print out of your token. And your deniability would be you don't have it, and you can simply lie about which vote is yours (even though you know the one that is yours).
> It was a long fight to get secret votes
I'm still saying we keep voting secret. What we are discussing is the ability for a voter to verify their vote was counted. But it's still meant to be secret. In fact, something analogous to the 5th amendment to the constitution could help enshrine the right to a private secret vote as a fundamental right.
> Just imagine that during McCarthyism people that were requested testify in the committee has to first say their national ID, token and passphrase to be sure that they didn't vote for the Communist party.
We make it a constitutional right to have your vote be secret. Make this clearly illegal. If you are worried about the central government not obeying laws, then nothing really helps you. The central government ultimately wields the final say in all matters here. They can put you to death if they like. A verifiable election system is meant to help ensure we never devolve to a government that does what you are worried about.
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Ultimately all of your examples about being forced to declare things apply also to your credentials to your personal devices and online account. All of which contain more less enough information to both figure out what your vote was, and much more.
Nice. What build times are you seeing for clean builds of the rust toolchain itself? Curious to benchmark against my 2700x. I'd imagine near linear scaling with the core count.
I think the 3900x might be a happy middle ground. I'm guessing we would probably see (with the increased IPC, core count, and core clock) like 70-80% increases over a 2700x in these kinds of multithreaded workloads. So probably slightly more than half way to a 2970x or 2990wx?
3900x looks fantastic on paper. In general, if the Ryzen stuff is sufficient for your needs, it's a better value. You pay a big premium for the Threadripper boards (and big case and big cooling solution). So in that sense, the 3900x is definitely in a sweet spot at the top of the Ryzen range.
Tradeoffs: threadripper boards officially support ECC; Ryzen boards are hit or miss. TR boards tend to be priced around $300 whereas you can get a Ryzen board for $100ish. TR had (prior generations) twice the DRAM channels and way more PCIe lanes than Ryzen, so if you're doing GPU-intense work or something else with use for lots of PCIe, that's a plus. Not to mention, additional core count over Ryzen, although with greater inter-die latency. Not sure what that will look like with TR3.
Is 3900X worth $500 at list over $400 3800X at list? Actually, yeah, it looks at least 25% better to me (esp. the doubled L3) if you can use the cores. The 3800X is overpriced; they probably are learning from the 1700<->1800 dynamic in gen1. Is it worth it over the 3700X at $330? Maybe not.
For me the question is really, how long will Ryzen 3000 be on the market before those better IPC/clocks/core densities show up in TR3? PCIe 4.0 support is huge; AMD wasn't anemic on PCIe channels on Zen and Zen+, and PCIe 4.0 doubles bandwidth from 3.0. Hopefully those IPC gains do not come attached to Spectre/Meltdown-like vulnerabilities. I'm excited for Zen 3 TR! That might be worth an upgrade from the 1950X. Meanwhile, it doesn't seem like Intel will get to PCIe 4 until 2020 (although that's reasonably soon).
I think the 3900x is in a great position to provide the best of both gaming and productivity. Extremely aggressively priced at $500 for the horsepower it seems to give you.
I suspect there is going to be a 16 core 3950x later in the year. Maybe with slightly lower single core frequencies. But maybe 20-25% greater multicore performance.
I bet they are delaying that to keep something up their sleeves when Intel responds. And to not totally cannibalize TR prior to releasing TR3.
The 570 boards are going to be around $100-200 more expensive though. The PCB is a bit different and the specifications are more tight for PCIe 4. I think the cheapest board you'll see soon will be above $150 at the very low end all the way up to $600 or so. Many of the prior two gens will have issues running the newer CPUs and the board vendors are recommending against Zen2 on chipset boards prior to 570
If that's round trip latency. Then input latency will be 8ms right? Input action to Frame update latencies are reliably 12-13ms+ with a local console routing through a TV.
So if they can do something fancy with rendering frames to the network to sync with your monitor. We might see a minimal increase in actual overall latency.
I had the same thought. The hard parts really are the containerization of apps, and the auth and permissions model. Sandstorm as far as I know is the best thought out attempt at tackling those problems.
I would assume you propagate a transaction ID or expected row version (and persist transaction histories and/or version numbers along with the inventory item row after mutation).
I would flip it and say that the Government only maintains the public key registry, and you alone keep your private key. You can extend that kind of scheme by signing "birth certificates" of your children using your private key to prove familial relationships. The hard part is dealing with key revocation in the event someone steals your private key. And of course overcoming the ambient distrust of government some people have.
Or losing the private key or forgetting the password. I have public keys that are older than a lot of HN commenters that I have not been able to use for almost two decades, I can't imagine how fun it would be do design a system where your private key is integral to your civic rights.
Build a system that can handle public keys for 100K people for more than ten years and then I might think about letting you start working on a pilot system to work out the additional failure scenarios, but absolutely nothing that the tech industry has produced in the past thirty years provides me with any sense of confidence that they would not screw this up horribly (and then those same people would complain bitterly on some future HN equivalent about what a waste of money this effort was.)
Oh for sure. Thought experiments like this are often far cries from workable solutions that are robust in the real world. That's basically a summary of why viable crypto for the masses in other domains remains such an albatross.
