The simpler the machine, the better. As I said in my other comment, I'm about ready to go back to locked wooden boxes myself, opened and counted in full view with cameras rolling.

I don't think they can be dealt with. But I'm willing to listen to your ideas. How would you deal with vote buying? How would you stop the scenario where a guy says "I'll give you $1,000 if you vote for candidate X" (or "I know where you live, I'll break your kneecaps if you vote for candidate Y")?

The machines should be kept air-gapped, not connected to the Internet, and all that. But again, human nature kicks in. There have been some poll workers who swore under penalty of perjury that in their polling place, there had been election machines that got an over-the-wire software update on Election Day. That's just... all kinds of wrong, if those reports are accurate. It doesn't prove cheating, but it does prove that whoever was in charge of that polling place should be fired. Because part of the job is making sure everyone knows the results are valid and accurate, and having voting machines connected to the Internet goes directly against "hey, you can see that no hacking is possible here". Doesn't matter how much the machine's manufacturer promises their machines are unhackable, the machines should not be connected to the Internet at all once they are actively being used for voting.

At this point, I'm ready to go back to paper ballots and a locked wooden box (kept in public view, and publicly verified to be empty before locking it up) myself. The simpler the solution, the better, is what I'm arriving at.

However, every US state I'm aware of (if you know of exceptions, please let me know) has some form of photo ID you can obtain for free. Usually it's in the same format as a driver's license, and obtained from the same place (the Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Land Transportation, the name varies). There's a fee to obtain a driver's license, but a photo ID card (in the same format as a driver's license but marked "NOT LEGAL FOR DRIVING" or similar wording) can be obtained for free, by going through the same process as getting a driver's license (bring something to prove your identity, get your photo taken, wait for the card to be printed) but without taking a driving-skills test.

And before someone asks "what about the people who can't prove their identity"? Well, I can actually give an anecdote. I know someone who ended up in that situation: away from home for college, couldn't get her birth certificate or anything else, and needing to replace her passport that was lost. (She is American but had grown up overseas because of her parents' job, hence why she had a passport but no driver's license when she went off to college). She had quite a time of it at first, since every "prove your identity" requirement circled back around to another form of ID. But she was eventually able to get a fishing license just by swearing under penalty of perjury that she was indeed (name). With that in hand, she got another form of ID (I think a library card, though there my memory is iffy), then with two forms of ID she could get something else, and then eventually she was able to get that non-driver's ID card... and then was able to prove who she was to get her lost passport reissued.

That all happened nearly 30 years ago so I can't swear to the details. But the point is, photo ID cards are widely available, and it's normal to be asked for one. So as long as the law specifies that acceptable forms of photo ID include X, Y, and Z (where X, Y and Z are forms that most people would already have, and that are normal and in common use), and as long as at least one of those forms can be obtained without a fee (which as I said, is true in all U.S. states that I'm aware of, please mention any exceptions you know about because I'd like to know) then it will pass Constitutional muster.

My personal opinion is that if people think they can benefit from cheating, a certain number will do so. It's just human nature. We're seeing more and more of this with LLM cheating on the rise in universities. So there's always going to be a certain number of people who want to vote fraudulently — after all, if the right person gets into office, it'll probably benefit you. Your taxes might be lowered, or your government handouts might be increased, or whatever other reason you have for preferring one politician over another. Preference alone does not mean that people will vote fraudulently: after all, most legitimate voters also prefer one politician over another. But the easier you make it to cheat, the more people will cheat successfully: among those who wanted to cheat but didn't, usually the only reason they didn't is because they couldn't see how to get away with it.

So photo ID to vote just seemed like common sense to me, along with other measures like ballot boxes kept in a publicly-visible place until they're opened, to help prove that nobody has tampered with them. (Read up on the 1946 elections in Athens, TN sometime — there, the fraud was being done by the sheriff and his cronies who would take the ballot boxes away, "count" them in private with no outside observers present, and announce that surprise surprise, the sheriff's crony had won the election again).

Now, in that particular case, the state (I believe it was Colorado though I'd have to find the article I read, and I don't remember where to find it any more) didn't require photo ID, so there was no way to prove that the people showing up on Election Day were the actual voters, as opposed to the cheaters. But this poll watcher's opinion was that they were the actual voters, and the cheating had been done by whoever had submitted ballots in their name days (or weeks) earlier. Given how many people she said this had happened to, I'm inclined to agree with her: it wasn't three or four people, it was (she said) something like one-third of the people who showed up on Election Day at that polling place.

That's a case where the fraud couldn't be repaired by knowing that it had occurred — the fraudulent ballots (if they were indeed fraudulent) had already been accepted, and it was impossible to go pull the ballot allegedly belonging to Joe Smith back out of the ballot box. But the publicly-available list of "who voted" did at least make it possible for the fraud to be detected in that particular case.

And it's not editing files on the server, it's actually reaching into the running code and tweaking its values.

That, I think, is the difference here. In many languages, the debugger can pause on the exception and let you inspect the code. But in every other language I've used, once you edit the code to fix the bug, you can't resume from where the debugger paused. You have to recompile the code and resume from the top. In CL, you can resume from exactly the state you were in when the debugger paused, only this time with the correct data in place. (Or even with a code fix having been applied, live, to the code).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49974251

Now, if your entire server is taken down because one connection threw an exception, that's bad design. But pretty much no major language works that way. All of them allow you to set things up so that an exception handling connection A won't affect connection B. And if you've done that in Common Lisp, then connection A halting and waiting for the debugger won't affect connection B either.

https://comp-348.github.io/lisp-debugging.html has an example of what it looks like. A toy example, to be sure, but the basics of a real example would still look the same. You're given a choice of several options, very reminiscent of the "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" choice that used to be oh-so-familiar in the days of DOS. Except this one is more useful, because it offers ways to specify how to resume. E.g., the toy project is halting on a `(print X)` call where the value of X is not defined. And the choices are:

0. Continue. (Retry using X).

In the toy example, this would fail, because nothing else has defined X. But in real code, the name might have been undefined because the data needed to define it hadn't arrived yet, from the database or the filesystem. In which case retrying the statement might work the second time.

1. Use-value. (Use specified value).

This one prompts you to enter a value for the undefined variable, and continues, but it does not modify the value of X in the program. The next time the program tries to use X, it will halt again with another "unbound variable" error.

2. Store-value. (Set specified value and use it).

This one, just like Use-value, will prompt you to enter a value to use... but then it will set X to that value and continue running the program. Next time the program tries to read the value of X, it will have one, and the program won't halt.

3. Abort. (Exit debugger, returning to top level).

This is what you would choose if there's no good way to fix the error, and you just have to quit the program and restart. Though note that choosing this option isn't going to exit the program you're debugging, just take you out of the debugger. You'll still need to kill-and-restart it some other way... or come back an hour later when the value is finally available, and then choose options 1 or 2.

Hopefully that gives you a taste for what the CL debugger is like to use in practice.

But Vim can also operate noun-first: just press `v` to go into visual mode. Then you drag out a selection, and press the command. No need to switch editors and relearn all the places where they differ. (If you're already used to Vim, of course, which might not be the case for you).

Which is why I've never tried Helix or Kakoune myself. Because the big selling point, noun-first operation, is already in Vim, just one keystroke away. Multiple cursors are a neat idea, and when I have to use VS Code I find them quite useful for doing things that I would have done with Vim macros. But I've already learned Vim macros, and there are few cases (though not none) where multiple cursors would have made something easier than the macro-based approach.

Anyway, point is, for anyone else who might stumble across this comment somehow, that Vim allows noun-first operation too: just go into `v`isual selection mode, select text with motion commands, and then press the operation command key.

If somebody thinks "this product is flawed in this specific way" is a bug report and an indicator of something to be fixed (assuming the bug report is valid, some bug reports aren't), then that person has the hacker ethos and will produce good products.

There are a couple comments that do fit the "being mean" framing, yes. But most of the comments here are along the lines of "here's a flaw in the product which would make it better if it was fixed". For example, my own comment pointing out the unreadability of the LLM-generated README: I pointed out a flaw and how to fix it. (I also made a point of mentioning that it seemed like a useful tool. I didn't spend too long on that point, because the bug report ("make your README human-readable, please") was the main point of my comment). But if someone were to take a comment like mine, pointing out a flaw and suggesting a way to fix it, as "being mean", then I would kindly suggest that that person find a different job than software engineering. Because every time the compiler says "Syntax Error", it's pointing out a flaw in your code. Any person who can't handle flaws in their work being pointed out, can't handle this job.

Stick that in front of your wall of LLM text, and I'd at least have confidence that some day you're going to come back and make the README readable.

It's cool that so many people are building useful tools with LLMs, but for the love of ones and zeroes, people! PLEASE write your README by hand, instead of handing it off to the LLM with no human involvement! You know how unreadable LLM prose is! Why do you make that the first thing people see when they see your repo?

For example: my wife and I are Americans living overseas, in a country I won't disclose (on general principles) except to say that it's in a part of Asia where Iranian nationals are rare. About ten years ago we met an Iranian man who was getting the same master's degree that my wife was getting from a local university. We became friends, and although we don't see him and his wife nearly as often now that they've moved to another city, we saw them just a couple months ago when they were back in our (larger) city for a conference. And even though our two countries were officially at war with each other by that time, it didn't matter to our friendship. No awkwardness, no strain, just "Hi (name), I didn't know you were in town," and so on.

In broad strokes that tends to be true, but the details can surprise you. If you've ever worked in a cross-cultural situation with colleagues from other countries and cultures, you'd be shocked at what kind of cultural differences can sneak up on you and catch you by surprise. Differing attitudes towards how much respect to show to one's boss, or the way you should interact with a coworker when you meet them in the hallway, or whether you're culturally required to attend the wedding of your coworker's sister, or send an expensive present, or send a cheap "it's the thought that counts" present, or just send a card.

For example, I once read a blog by an American working in the Japanese auto industry. He talked about attending a meeting where the boss proposed an idea. There was a short pause, then his Japanese coworkers started speaking up: "Good idea, boss." "Yeah, good plan." "Good idea." The American left the meeting thinking that everyone was on board with the idea, and that they were going to do it. His Japanese colleague corrected him (in private), explaining "Didn't you notice the pause?" Sure enough, nobody implemented the idea (because they all knew that the boss had understood the message), it was never brought up again in the meeting (because the boss had, indeed, understood the message), and everyone got to save face, because nobody had had to contradict the boss.

People from other cultures generally want the same things you do. (With some exceptions that can be important). But how they go about it can vary wildly, and it's important if you're going to be working cross-culturally to get someone who understands the other culture to sit down with you and explain the important cultural-conflict points you're likely to run into.