juhanima
Still, if you had the authorities to announce a product of large primes - whatever that means - how do you know they announced the correct primes and not something they made up? I'm afraid any clever cryptographic scheme you come up with falls the victim of the same dilemma: if you can check that your vote was counted right, you lose anonymity. Also how do you check no fake votes were added?
As far as I know, the Estonian voting system works in two stages. First there is an authenticator, that verifies that each given vote is signed properly, is only given once and can be counted, without looking at the payload. Then it anonymizes the votes and signs the result file which is transferred to another system which counts the votes. The communication is unidirectional so that the front-end doesn't get any feedback from the back end save some data transfer acks.
As I said, a decent job. It's not perfect in any meaning of the word. It's practical and it works. People trust it because they trust the people who designed it and run it.
However, the Estonian governement has made a different choice and I salute that they are at least trying to do everything by the book and in the right way. Publishing the source code is a part of that. Estonia is a high-trust society (which is an incredible achievement in itself, considering they were a province of the Soviet Union only forty years ago) and they have the most functional e-identity system in the World. Voting is just a part of it. It does make many things easier and also helps economy if you can trust - and verify - your fellow man.
That being said I think the Estonian voting system does a decent job of being trustworthy. Publishing the source code is a big step to the better as well. As far as I knew the system was written in Java but seems like they have upgraded it in Go. Good job! Probably the best in the world.
Seems legit to me. The oldest news item is from 2021. The domain name is new, but there seems to have been some rebranding lately. The product used to be called Pocket RentalOS and even that seems to be fairly recent rebranding [2]
[1] https://pocketos.ai/ [2] https://pocketos.ai/news/pocket-rebrands-its-luxury-rental-m...
This had the result that a single farmer was not able to cumulate any kind of a buffer of surplus against a lean year. As a countermeasure the subsistence farmers developed a collective loyalty model, where it simply was not socially acceptable not to help the neighbor, who had lost their crops. As long as at least some of the members of the community had a decent yield, the whole community survived.
Reading this was very eye opening to me and it at least sounded plausible. ACOUP is often mentioned here, deservedly. This was one of the best gems I have found.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
I haven't studied neuroscience so I don't know how you define consciousness. I have read Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness..." which in my untrained opinion makes a compelling case that consciousness is a hard term to define.
I'm not sure if ChatGPT also cumulates its previous answers in the context. It might do that as well.
The illusion of sentience comes from this. The new answers reflected what you said because the prompt was different and included the previous discussion.
This is a feature of the user interface, not the language model. The only reason why the language model would respond diffferently to the same input is the artificial randomness mixed with the input. Without it it would be totally deterministic and not appear very intelligent at all.
In order to play the game of go effectively one needs to have a model or theory of how the game of go works. That's a very simple model that can be defined by a few relationships easily. That's why it is fairly easy for a neural network to learn how to play the game of go very effectively or even infinitely effectively.
A lot of what happens in the world can be modeled in a similar vein by a very simple mathematical model like the game of life. But there is also a lot that cannot. I do believe that eventually also human understanding is just a model of the world that we feed input from perceptions and gain output as opinions, but it is way more complex than the current large language-trained models.
For a very simple example, a LLM would answer a prompt the same way every time unless it wasn't fed some randomness. Can you imagine any sentient being that would respond the same way every time if you asked the same question three times in a row?
I cannot. I would imagine any sentient object would give a different answer every time. The first time it would give you an honest answer based on what it knows about the topic. The second time it would be a little embarrassed that you repeat the question, as if you hadn't heard the first answer. The third time it would be pissed off and think you are a troll.
An LLM does none of this. It doesn't remember you or your previous questions. It just keeps hallunicating.
Anyway: here is the pdf made by ps2pdf: https://juhani.xn--mkel-load.net/public/oodbif.pdf
University education does not need to be expensive. On the contrary, it can be free.
What's more alarming is that it seems those 32 years old files at ftp.funet.fi are mostly unreadable by now. Back then I thought PostScript would last but alas! that is not the case. Ghostcript can show just about the cover page and that's all.
Libreoffice does a little bit better with the DOC-file but it's still not quite right.
So if there is anything to learn it's about persistent document formats. I wish I had known about LaTeX back then.
Cannot help feeling good of seeing it's still there. https://www.funet.fi/pub/sci/computer/oop/
Only curiosity value is left probably, but back then it felt like magic to be able to publish something like this on my own. Half a dozen people even asked for the diskette, which I sent to them.
So to me it sounds like this: you hired me to make a wall of bricks around your garden. I did it and presented you a bill: bricks 100$, mortar 20$, work 300$. Then you say I cannot charge for work as that's intangible and I have to restructure the bill by allocating the cost of work to the tangible objects. So instead of charging for work I split the cost of it by two and charge a bricklaying fee of 150$ divided by the number of bricks for each brick and another 150$ for mixing the mortar. Because I'm pissed off by your awkward and unpractical accounting requirements and not going to start figuring out any more complex or more realistic ways of dividing the cost between the materials, when everybody knows that it's the bricklaying that counts and not the bricks or mortar.
And that's how you get very expensive mortar or 600$ hammers.
Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture.
Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.
It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.
I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy.
Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.
Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare was a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.
Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.
...and deploying the keys involves setting UEFI in the Setup mode, which is protected by the firmware setup password.
Granted, I didn't verify where the keys are stored and in which format once deployed. But it would be pretty disappointing if they were just copied to another place without any encryption or signing authorized by the password.
This is very off-topic, but I cannot resist mentioning that when the ship was recovered from the bottom of the sea in 1961, one of the first things discovered from it was a miniature statue of Finnish olympic winner Paavo Nurmi. One of the best pranks by the student association of the Helsinki University of Technology. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/62jm2z/til_i...