I've counted paper ballots for multiple presidential elections in my country.
People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember.
To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on.
So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.
It is not the paper ballots that's taken advantage of. They have no general public participation and opposition. The public simply do not give a damn about polling stations in places where Carousel voting is possible. There is no opposition observers or they cannot be because the examples in the Wikipedia page are dictatorships, not democracies. You cannot turn a dictatorship into democracy by voting.
Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters. Every ballot can only be given somebody whose identification is checked against this publicly available list and marked. The lists must have multiple copies some in the hands of opposition observers. They need to be published.
> Every single vote must be checked against publicly available lists of voters
Yeah, do that by hand please, without relying on electronic means.
Paper ballots with "honour" based out of circumscription participation is not secure. My country also suffered from this issue and it's not an authoritarian regime. They fixed it by adding and checking IDs on a ballot participation list. Nobody explained how that works to the average voter.
What I was trying to underscore is that even for something that's presented as simple and fool proof as paper ballots one can find vulnerabilities, especially when you're dealing with nation level threats. So in my opinion we shouldn't ask electronic ballots to be more security than what is already in wide use.
And in fairness, electronic ballots don't need to be more (or as) secure as paper ballots, but 'mail in' ballots. If we can come up with a method that's as secure as mail ballots I'd call it a success, despite what Tom Scott says.
The more comments I read on this specific HN topic, the fewer people I see actually involved in the polling process.
I really recommend people volunteer for it, if you're American and you're concerned. All you have to do is call your county elections office; they always want more people. You get paid near-minimum wage and it takes two days a year, but that's it.
What you will discover is that most of what people are asking for in this thread is stuff the states of the United States already do.
If a person is deeply concerned how the election is run? Go get involved. It's your country and your election system.
I believe local llms are the future. It will only get better. Once we get to the level of even last year's state of the art I don't see any reason to use chatgpt/anthropic/other.
We don't even need one big model good at everything. Imagine loading a small model from a collection of dozens of models depending on the tasks you have in mind. There is no moat.
It's true that local LLMs are only going to get better, but it's not clear they will become generally practical for the foreseeable future. There have been huge improvements to the reasoning and coding capabilities of local models, but most of that comes from refinements to training data and training techniques (e.g. RLHF, DPO, CoT etc), while the most important factor by far remains the capability to reduce hallucinations to comfortable margins using the raw statistical power you get with massive full-precision parameter counts. The hardware gap between today's SOTA models and what's available to the consumer are so massive that it'll likely be at least a decade before they become practical.
Also the fact that a theory is refutable. That a theory is not _the_ truth, but the best explanation so far and if something proves it completely or partially wrong then we move on to the new, better theory.
This comment makes me think of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect but applied to comments. If I was unaware of what has been happening for the past few weeks I would find this comment reasonable and well nuanced. I realize that many times I read something on hn on a subject I know almost nothing about and leave thinking I've learned something.
This is why I like to watch YouTube tutorials sometimes, especially when I’m new to a certain topic. They show every step clearly. The author can’t forget to mention a piece of information because he’s doing it in real time. Too often with written tutorials there’s one or more steps missing, that are obvious to the author but not necessarily to someone new to the subject.
Yes although this requires the author to assess what they are showing to see if it makes sense from a teaching / learning perspective.
I remember watching a tutorial about a new feature in Photoshop. The author
* showed some results
* showed how the older version of the feature worked (assuming we were all familiar with it)
* did 'undo' multiple times to get back to the original image
* started showing the sequence of steps to use the new feature
* realised they had made a mistake and undid some of the steps
* restarted from the point where they had made the mistake.
I had to watch this about five times to work out the actual minimal sequence of steps involved. Some editing or a retake would really have helped here.
John Sarno's book "The Mind Body Prescription" is the book that's always mentioned on HN when this topic comes up. But there's a more up to date book with actual science to back up what you described, it's called "The Way Out" by Alan Gordon. In this book he uses the term "neuroplastic pain" for those sort of pains, it's also called central sensitization in some research papers.
Anyone suffering from any sort of chronic pain should give this book or a similar book a try.
Similar to you, I convinced myself out a chronic tendonitis that would just not disappear even after physical therapy. It was gone a few weeks later. Just by following the recommendations in the book. It's basically self talk therapy.
Such a "truest" formula doesn't really exist, or at least what you determine to be the truest is just a matter of definition and taste.
For any equation it's mathematically trivial to come up with a different set of equations that produce the same result, e.g. for example just via approximating the original function with some infinite series that is guaranteed to give back the original result in the limit.
But even beyond such trite examples, it's not unlikely that there will simply be multiple competing ways to model the same data that the equation takes in and spits out that are very different in form and function, and perhaps even in mathematically incompatible ways (this could happen if e.g. the equations model more than what exists in reality but all of reality is described by some subset of the parameters of these equations, like how gravity works for negative masses but such a thing does not exist from what we know).
You could then decide on some reasonable criteria which of all your models is the truest one, but the criteria themselves will be up for subjective debate.
People who think it's not safe should really spend some time learning how it works. It's impossible to cheat at scale. Each ballot is verified to be correct my multiple eyes. A person is reading, one is writing down the name, one is verifying and some other things I don't remember.
To cheat you need to have everyone in on it. A whole town involved to cheat and to at best win one polling station. It's safe because anyone can attend the counting, so each party can send someone to check no shenanigans is going on.
So the more votes you want to be winning by cheating the more people must be brought in the conspiracy. That's impossible to be unnoticed at the scale of a city, much less at the scale of a country.