Part of working through history from (only) 100 years ago is an impression of how quickly societies were changing then. This isn't the first time we've had the table cleared, and it hopefully won't be the last.

Which isn't to downplay the upheaval that people are in - it is definitely traumatic. But we've been through disruption before. Hopefully we'll make fewer costly mistakes this time...

Which illustrates your very point, right? In an environment where we have a firehose of information pointed at us, our natural reaction is to fast filter/summarize and then discard or react. You’re saying we need to slow down and engage with each other (real people) on more than that superficial level. I agree. Thank you for taking the time to write this.

What about the alternative possibility - the author is a rather intelligent being, but what they've written in this instance is idiotic?

Just because I like to think of myself as a non-idiot, doesn't mean I haven't brought strings of words into existence that were ill-conceived. In those cases, having someone come along and say something like "eh mate - you're confusing correlation with causation here!" is valuable feedback.

Politely disagree. I read Colin's when it came out and it was as useful in 2009 as Filippo's is today. If you only pay attention to the cryptography community every few years when you need it for something, then usually a whole lot has happened in the interval. It is incredibly useful to get the perspective of someone paying attention to give you a breakdown of "where we're at today".

A great example is the other conversation about SHA-256. Colin's recommendation was "hey, better plan to migrate from this in the future." The thing that's happened between then and now is, well, SHA-256 is actually still 'ok' when used in current constructions. That's useful to know in 2026.

If I get busy building stuff, it'll be nice to have a check-in again in a few years (or earlier if something significant happens first).

Yes, this exactly. If we wanted ‘verifiable’ app distribution via browser, then we’d need browsers to implement some way to cross check the code downloaded vs a publicly published list somewhere - similar to certificate transparency or what WhatsApp is trying to do with an extension [1]. Without that, web apps are left working with a weaker threat model.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2022/03/10/security/code-verify

What you can’t do is make sure the server giving you the code that does the encryption doesn’t change it out with code that also sends your secret messages to Siberia. Unless you control the server giving you the web page. And you trust DNS.

At that point your trust model is simpler with an auditable local application. It could even be an Electron app - so almost exactly doing E2EE in the ‘browser’.

However in general - I agree with OP. Most of the time I care about milliseconds.

> Sounds like the author’s experience is strictly in Python. Er [1], no [2].

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer

[2] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle

This is the right answer. Using tech as an auditor for batches after manually counting could be useful. Getting everyone together to count votes in a process that everyone can see, understand, and be personally invested in - that process is what is needed far more than efficiency, at this point in time.

True - many places where photography and video recording by people and organizations is already done on a broad scale with both smartphones and infrastructure cameras.

> "We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed, or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored"

... I think we're gonna need a bigger ban

At this point, local models have become feasible, and people using them are beginning to get a feel for the tradeoffs vs the frontier models. As the frontier advances, the question becomes “how much will I spend for a given quantity and quality of AI work?” with local hardware providing a pricing anchor point.

When I can price hardware and ops for a given capability level - I have a budget again. From there it’s a question of how much faster/capable/cheaper is a given provider (and, you know, how much do I trust sending them all my IP?).

> In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its FLOATING POINT NUMBERS — and make the case that their numbers could be conscious.

I recommend keeping a few NaNs in-hand if you’re worried. Spread a couple of around if your numbers start to stir and you’ll be right as rain.

> It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that FLOATING POINT NUMBERS had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.

They’re cleverly designed and work well for their purpose, but can assure you they have neither dignity nor moral status.

> If the FLOATING POINT NUMBERS themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.

I get it. I’ve spent years trying to get my floating point numbers to choose goodness - I wish them luck.

Big businesses might pay $1000 vs $60 for certain tasks, but that won't work out well at scale.

Now that we have assistants that excel at tedious and time consuming tasks, it’ll be interesting to see if the dominant approach is still using dedicated modeling languages like TLA+ with generated verification harnesses. Or if it’s easier to use something closer to the implementation, similar to what the Stateright project [1] is trying to do.

[1] https://github.com/stateright/stateright

In the context of a microcontroller, is it an RTOS? How is that different from something like Embassy with Rust, where hardware allocation and coordination is handled more at build time and less at runtime? In the context of a something showing up on a screen, is an OS something providing a UI framework and hardware abstraction - something like Win32 or Cocoa? What does that make Chrome?

In 2006 it felt like an answer to the question "what is an OS" was straightforward. In 2026, I'm rather confident that I don't have a single, simple answer. If there were ever a time to re-assess what we thought we knew about computing - now seems like a good time to do it.

And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.

If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S828Y7Eais

As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.