Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean we shouldn’t normalize it.

Just because nobody cares doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to normalize them.

🤚 yo.

I came over in 2023, like so many others, in protest of the API changes. Originally, I was sad that there were so few users here, but actually it pretty quickly started to feel more comfortable. I still maintain an account over there, but I haven’t posted there in ages. I like it better here.

“Wing” has started to lose meaning, yeah. All of the explanations I’ve seen for this have essentially described women moving left and men moving right. To call either move a move into a “wing” seems pretty unfounded.

He hasn’t announced or anything. Neither of them have. The pollsters just provided some hypothetical names to compare; I don’t know who other than Vance or Jr, but if I had to guess I’d say probably people like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ted Cruz.

All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

True, and I guess I’m not sure which one is more prevalent, but this one is the one I hear most often.

Correct. Gerrymandering means several different specific ways to cheat by drawing the districts, but one way is taking a district that’s going to be a blowout for you—say, you’re expected to reliably get 88% of the vote—and sharing that 88% with a nearby district, where you’re expected to get maybe 37%. If you draw the lines right, you can get two districts where you win with 66% of the vote, instead of winning one and losing one.

But why stop there? 88% is a huge lead, and in first past the post it doesn’t matter how much of the vote you get, so long as you get more than the next most popular candidate. It may require some truly unhinged district drawing, but what if you could get, say, five districts where you’re going to win with 46% of the vote, due to a strong (but not strong enough) third party spoiler candidate? Now you’ve spread out the voters in that 88% area and used them to bolster four other districts that you were going to lose (or were going to be competitive) into solid and reliable wins, or at least turn solid victory for the opposition into a competitive contest.

Except, oops, the guy at the top of the ticket is a literal supervillain except without any superpowers, and now it’s starting to weaken that original 88%. Now, instead of one blowout district, and instead of five solid wins, you’ve got, maybe, two competitive contests and three solid losses. If you’d left well enough alone, you might’ve still been able to win that blowout district with 58%, but because you got greedy you’ve lost everything.

Took me a minute, too.

That…seems so obvious, now that you say it.

That’s not about Bob trusting Grace specifically (that’s a premise of the entire operation), it’s about trusting that the letter Alice handed Bob was actually signed by Grace.

I mean, counterpoint: paid, enterprise editions of Linux have existed for decades without destroying the libre versions, and as long as it’s fork-able, it always will. But increasing adoption, even of the “captured” versions, will benefit libre code lines; in obvious ways, such as when enterprise developers commit their changes upstream (Google still does for Android and ChromeOS); but also in less obvious ways, like making development for Linux more attractive (resulting in more compatible software) and in making the OS paradigms more familiar to the layperson and the junior dev.

Well and truly noted. I was unaware until I got called out on it, so the whole experience has made me wonder how often I do that sort of thing without realizing it.

Pretty hypocritical on my part, since I’m usually on team hey-actually-read-it-before-you-comment.

That could very well work, yes; but I think that would require Bob verifying Grace’s signature, and that would require trusting that Grace didn’t make a unique signature that she only used for Alice, and making a note of who verified it.

There might be a way to verify those signatures with public keys in a way that didn’t require Bob to tell Grace that he was verifying the signature, which is still rattling around in my brain.

Are you kidding? I might actually stop buying new games and make it through my backlog now! This is great!

I’m inclined to say no. Reducing the problem down to its most basic parts: Alice is authorized to talk to Bob, but Bob doesn’t know that. How can Alice prove it?

Bob has to assume that anyone asking to talk to him could be Mallory, who isn’t authorized to talk to him but will always answer “yes” if asked whether she is. So the authorization he gets has to be from a trusted third party; it can’t come from Alice.

Grace is a trusted third party. If Alice doesn’t care about privacy, and is okay with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob and with Bob knowing Alice’s identity, Alice can just tell Bob, “here’s proof that I’m Alice. Show this to Grace and she’ll confirm that I can be here.” This is SSO, essentially.

If Alice doesn’t want Bob to know who she is, but is ok with Grace knowing that Alice talked to Bob, she can ask Grace to give her a secret code, and give that code to Bob, who can check with Grace to know whether or not that code corresponds to someone who is authorized.

If Alice doesn’t want Grace to know that she’s talking to Bob, though, she runs into a problem. Because there’s no way for Grace to send Bob a message without knowing who Bob is, he can’t ask anonymously, and because there’s no way for Grace to confirm that Alice is authorized without knowing who she is, Grace will always know that Alice has asked for authentication to talk to Bob.

Adding Dave in as a trusted fourth party could solve the problem—Alice asks Dave to check with Grace, and lock his answer in a bag with a unique key that only Dave has. Then Grace could give the bag to Bob, who doesn’t need to know who Grace is to pass the bag to Dave and ask him to unlock it. But Alice would be trusting that Dave won’t keep records on which bag corresponds to which person.

I don’t think that’s a surmountable problem. I’ll have to think about it some more.

Nope, you’re right. I just read the words and assumed it was one of the terrible ones.

This one is just…math.

You’re right. I honestly just assumed it was one of those intentionally engagement-baiting posts when I saw it and didn’t even process the problem itself.

In fairness, this one isn’t nearly as bad as most of the ambiguous problems that get passed around on Facebook with multiple parentheticals and such.

Your word problem is excellent.

Whoa, you went from 0 to 100 on rage super quick. You ok buddy?