phtrivier

In the XXIst century in France, it sure does at the moment. We'll see.

Yes, that's how it works in science fiction show for teenagers from the 60s.

It's painfully hard to compare that to the real world.

But at least, sci fi viewers can graduate to more serious shows with increasingly complex narratives (B5, bsg, I hear good things about the expense, etc...) then discover the really dystopian shit when they realize they live in it - or decide to become tech entrepreneur to get rich building the dystopia themselves.

But you can't blame the storytellers from trying to tell a better story than the news...

May the kid inside you, who once believed in the "good folks", rear up his metaphorical heads once in a while.

Is there a single company that "owns" that ?

Two observation:

1. This must be a nightmare to plan the maintenance of a nuclear-heavy grid (as we have in France.) Any nuclear project must be planned 20 years, including just "keeping" what you built 50 years ago. So, assuming they're not stupid and are reading the changes in batteries and PV, anyone working on that knows that, potentially, during the 8th year of a 10-year construction plan, your all plan will have become obsolete.

But, if, for some reason, the evolution is not skyrocketing, and if you _don't_ plan on maintaining / replacing your plans (assuming that "batteries and EV will just solve it"), then you take the risk of, well... not having enough electricity.

So I suppose it's a trade-off between "the risk of have too expensive nuclear capacity", "the risk of loosing face and shutting down a plant construction because it's useless", and "the risk of not having electricity".

I suppose the calculation is that, if you do the first one (as we're doing, as far as I can tell), you end up with sunk cost, but your reactors are there, and you can always find something to do with it...

2. Is there an "Ormouz of solar" scenario ? What would be a SPOF in the solar + battery rollout that could bring the solarpunk world to a halt ? Obviously it's less at risk because, once the PVs and batteries are out of chinese factories, they will produce electricity no matter who rules in Beijing ; but, appart from Xi (who already controls pretty much everything we consume, at this point), is any particular country / corporation gaining leverage if the whole world goes full PV+B ?

Yes. But I'm slightly less worried about deliberate mishaps (which tends to leave trace or organisation) than pure mistakes (which go unnoticed, except for malicious actors who are better at hiding their trace.)

Hanlon's razor, etc...

But then, let's deal with the elephant in the thread : are Estonians trusting their infrastructure enough to be sure that élections won't be tampered by a particular neighboring country with well-known skills in cyber security ?

I've been an overseer at election booths several times. I kept a good look at the transparent ballot box, along with complete strangers. In the end, once, I may even have inadvertently recognized my envelope and bulletin during the opening and counting - because we where very very few people to choose that candidate in my polling station :D And I was lucky enough to follow the president of the polling station to the town hall where armies of public servant where doing the addition, and I checked the CSV on next Monday, etc, etc...

Nope. Vote tallying is public with random overseers, in transparent boxes watched by a room of people from diverse opinions, with random inspections - precisely because we DO NOT trust the system or the people who count the vote.

Which has always been my biggest beef about digital vote. I'm all trusting the people writing voting software to do their best, actually. Being a Software engineer myself, I'm more concerned about bugs and hacks than deliberate tampering by the government. Especially in an age where AI agents can access pretty much anything ever connected to an electric plug...

So there is a tool that remembers who you voted for. That's great to convince your bully that you actually did what they told you.

However, how do you know you're one of the X votes displayed in the final tally ?

Exactly, it means someone you could prove to someone else how you voted, which is the sine qua non condition for creating a vote economy. That's actually the main reason behind trying to keep the vote secret, much more than threats of intimidation for opposing parties voters, etc...

I know the answer is "you don't", but suppose I vote vote electronically for candidate A. In the end, the candidate loses with 764 votes. How do I convince myself that my vote was counted in the 764 votes, and that it was not a randomly chosen number (with a RNG skewed around "plausible" scores) ?

A though for the people doing the "boring" engineering at Tesla (like, you know, enhancing the range of the vehicles, improving security, making FSD closer to reality, etc...), who used to get some light (remember "battery day" ?), and are now on the backbench while the sycophants gets the budget for vanity projects like this. At least, at Tesla, the sycophants are _smart_ and pull out cool demos. Not the case in every "new clothes" kingdom.

At this point, a status bar color when gh is down would be enough.

Ok, I have to ask : is there a way to get a "cartridge" to insert into the theranos machine ?

I would love to have the machine "function" up to a point (except, actually doing the analysis results in a "NotImplementedException" of some kind.à