quilombodigital

Joined 9 years ago

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Oct 14

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Comment · 8 hours ago

Am I missing something?

I couldn't find any parallel constructs in the language. So, as I understand it, it's a regular language that gets compiled into a graph, and the runtime parallelizes the execution of that graph.

This factorial won't run any faster with more cores, since each step depends on the previous one:

  fn fat(n: N64) -> N64 {
    if n <= 1 {
      1
    } else {
      n * fat(n - 1)
    }
  }

This other version can run in parallel, but only because the algorithm was deliberately written that way:

  fn fat(n: N32) -> Nat {
    if n == 0 { 1 as Nat } else { prod(1, n) }
  }

  fn prod(lo: N32, hi: N32) -> Nat {
    if lo == hi {
      lo as Nat
    } else {
      let m = (lo + hi) / 2;
      let left = prod(lo, m);
      let right = prod(m + 1, hi);
      left * right
    }
  }

So the programmer still has to think about parallelism; the language just removes the need for threads and locks.

Also, as the graph grows, sequential dependencies still limit the speedup, and more cores means more data moving between them. How does the hardware deal with that?

Comment · 8 months ago

I was trying to roast this guy because I figured a burn-in test should accomplish the same thing he’s doing. But no... I had to ask the great oracle, GPT (General Purpose Truth), and it told me the guy is actually doing something worthwhile. How are trolls supposed to survive in this inhospitable era?

Apparently, multi-year storage tests are still valuable for validating whether those estimates match reality. Who knew...

Comment · 9 months ago

thats why I said I only miss the option to verify my vote history. I dont need to know how my vote got there, I just need to verify it at the place that sums all votes.

Comment · 9 months ago

yes, I dont see why it should not be open sourced publicly. maybe send someone with an eidetic memory to audit it. :)

Comment · 9 months ago

It is false your affirmation that they are not audited by public organizations.

Entities can register to see the source code in a controlled room. In 2024 for example the party União Brasil checked the code.

In 2025 during the official audit 149 entities registered to check the code and attack the machine. Universities, ONGs, political parties, etc.

Please check you facts before posting what you think

Reference: https://www.tse.jus.br/comunicacao/noticias/2025/Dezembro/te...

Some of the attacks performed: https://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/arquivos/relatorio-parcial-d...

One thing I agree with you. It would require another big country effort to break it.

Comment · 9 months ago

In Brazil we have been using electronic voting for decades.

See, here we always had issues with corruption, and thats why we had to implement it.

The thing is that we always had major issues at the city level elections, because many small groups dominate different regions, and they just controlled the election officials, influenced voters, disappeared with ballot bags, and did all types of crazy stuff. It was pretty common at the eighties exchange votes for gas, dentures or even tubal ligation.

For all this reasons, a specific voting registry was created in 1985, and an electronic voting machine was used for the first time in municipal elections in 1995. This solved most issues, and elections started to be a lot easier, there was A LOT of confusion in the past. After it was available in all cities in the country, they started to do national elections.

The main idea here is that this is a government endeavour, not a private company. There are so many security layers that I think that only another external government actor would have resources to attack it.

These machines have special hardware, the encryption keys are loaded at the election day by the government, the machines are there only for the 8 hours of voting, then came back to a government deposit, they account for every machine, they are audited before and after, they randomly choose the election officials, the machine prints a receipt for the voter and the stats of votes of that machine. Each person has an election location and room/machine, so schools are used. If a machine has problems, they have to on the fly generate new keys for a substitution. In 2024 they used 570.000 machines at the election.

When the election day finishes, they place at the door of the room the machine receipts, so any ONG or international organization can verify. After it they take the machine to a central place where they connect to them and trasmit the data, and in one hour we know the president. During these decades we had presidents from the right and from the left, and all cities and states, so you can say it works just by seeing all this power cycling all the time.

I agree with the article in the sense that we need paper confirmation, and that we cannot trust the voter machine, but I think Brazil solved this by making sure to control the machine, and printing receipts and making then available to any public organization.

I particularly think that only one thing is missing in this technology, technically speaking, I would like to have a personal key with an ecc key created by me, that would allow me to insert this card when voting, so it would encrypt my vote, store and send to the server, so I could, using my card (even online) check for my voting history, connecting all the endpoints. It is still anonymous, but verifiable by me.