GP means inefficient in the sense of cost. Paper ballots add costs. Partial manual audits / hand-counts add costs. Full audits / hand-counts add a lot of cost, and in particular hand-counts require a lot of staff in order to yield results on election night.
The costliest item is counting by hand, so... don't. Use ballot scanning and counting machines and then implement a timely partial manual audit to demonstrate that the BMDs and BSCDs functioned correctly.
Yes, this is how I meant it. But that is also a feature. Imagine you have to implement an election between two factions in some fictional country with a heated political climate and many uneducated and candidates that would literally accuse each other of crimes against humanity. How do you maximize the chance for them to begrudgingly accept the result?
One very good way is to get their followers into the actual collecting and counting process with independent observers in a way that they can't just cheat, but in a way that they can also perceive whether the other side cheats.
And you do that through all the levels of the election process. That is incredibly inefficient compared to everybody pressing a button on an app in their phone, but it gives you something that the phone app cannot: the loser party will know to a certain degree that their loss was legitimate (if the process was carried out correctly).
While with the phone app, who knows? Not even an expert that wrote the code of the app could guarantee that everything went without interference. And even if there wasn't any interference and we can mathematically guarantee it: the problem is that people need to believe it. And that means trusting experts, which may or may not be biased.
Meanwhile with the paper ballot the system is simple enough for most followers of each party to intuitively grasp whether something fishy happened. They just need to make sure every vote is counted and none discarded.
I agree, but if your location has abandoned hand-counts then justifying the extra expense and extra logistics complications can be infeasible. Thus in some places it is easy to justify taking a detour through machine counts + immediate partial hand-count random sampling statistical audits designed to detect machine malfunctions with high probability.
As I wrote in another comment we had to repeat local state elections because of problems in the paper process - including shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote, ballots being delivered to the wrong locations, and in some cases voters being turned away.
While I’m a proponent of the paper process let’s not pretend it immediately means you can be confident about the election
Oh, you absolutely can and it worked in your state. There were problems with the process and you had to repeat the election for people to be confident. People can understand all problems of the above.
With some abstract math and computers? Any real or imaginary issues are incomprehensible to most of the voters and concerns can be easily shooed away.
If we are talking about the Berlin elections there had to be great public pressure for the election being repeated. Officials denied any impact on the final result. Afair courts had to be involved. Pretty shameful. The whole thing didn't further my trust in German democracy.
It definitely didn’t help with trust even though I think German democracy is still mostly fine and something worth fighting for- but I guess that’s a different topic
The credibility comes from who took the photo. The next logical and easy step is for this metadata to flow to the user agent. I'll know that it was taken by a legit journalist photographer. And id not, I can have my user agent make it fuzzy or replaced with
a kitten photo.
I think this is where we are headed. This feature seems useless on it's own since someone will eventually find a way to extract the key from the iphone and sign any image. But if they could make it so every iphone uses it's own key and the photos show "Taken by xyz" and it's linked to their icloud or identity somehow. That way images shared around will still be able to be linked to a source that you can choose to trust and the viewer can know it wasn't modified from what that person shot.
Then we might move to an age where photos which were not signed by someone will be treated as fake.
You may have forgotten that the world is driven by screenshots, and so a screenshot of a picture with the `(X) Verified by Apple to be Joe Schmoe` tacked on will be just as good as real verification for a lot of people.
What we need is almost something like the classic "press C+A+D to log in" or the idea of "above the browser pane"... something an image cannot show you unless it's legit. Perhaps a personal thumbprint icon that is different for each viewer, so you know its your device telling you that something is real and not just some mock fake thing?
I don't think we'll treat them as fake but they would probably undergo more scrutiny - perhaps in a crowd-sourced manner that provides an overall score of probable legitimacy.
State actors, professional criminals will have same or better capabilities and do not hesitate to use them. On defense end we'll have only "pay bigcorp" option.
OSS models can help to fix infra especially for folks who would never do it themselves. We do not know yet what final effect would be and it doesn't seem sky is falling now or in near future.
"people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow and distractor respectively, it would be awesome if more specific examples would be used in place.
> State actors, professional criminals will have same or better capabilities
State actors do but they are not unhinged enough to use this to cause massive loss of life, unlike random crazy people with access to a computer.
Professional criminals don't have access. Please explain exactly how you expect a professional criminal to get access to a non-safety-tuned Astra/Fable equivalent.
> OSS models can help to fix infra
You can work with the vendors of critical software to fix infra first, without giving every random crazy person access to something that creates cyber/bioweapons.
> "people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow
You don't think people will die if OSS models make it easy to create a bioweapon, or make it easy to hack hospitals, infrastructure, and the like? Please explain your thinking.
It's very easy to order all of the raw material needed to create a virus, the challenge is in making a viable one. But models make this easy.
Same for cyber. Hospitals, emergency services, and infrastructure like power plants are not sufficiently hardened to withstand an attack from Fable-class models.
Criminals don't need Astra or Fable. Get a bunch of GPUs, a good enough open weight model and a custom harness. What the model doesn't have in its weights it can research the Internet. How do you think black hat hacking is being done right now?
On bio: while it's easy to order all the raw material, there's the whole process of culturing bacteria/viruses/etc. that isn't trivial, and while a LLM might help in explaining stuff for rookies, there needs to be somebody physically working on it. It's not automatic. Once you get to this level, you'll find that any undergrad biologist or chemist can already make bio/chem weapons, and you don't see it happening. Terrorist groups already employ biologists or chemists that are supporters of their cause, no need for LLMs.
On cyber: aside of the question of why critical infrastructure is on the Internet on the first place (ah yes, lowest bidders, people not caring enough, business not giving IT/OT budget, S in IoT standing for security etc), if the available models can't handle cyber tasks, how can you defend yourself? See the HF "attack" that HF had to use GLM-5.2 to investigate what happened. This is the best argument for open models. Unless of course, you are the AI model creator or somebody they authorized to use their sanctioned model/harness and want to create a moat for their business.
Check jet engine weight and include in the calculation. One weights 2200-3700 lbs according to same source that quotes 45.9 seat miles per gallon. Vs 125 pounds for electric engine.
I’d guess comparable for a 30-seat regional, you’d probably want to compare with a PT6, especially since this aircraft is prop driven. That’s only about 250lb dry.
The thing I quoted is more for bigger jets with much larger engines (it was the first reasonable looking source I found). In any case their hybrid has four engines, two electric, two conventional, so you are really should think of it as needing to haul two extra engines on top of what a conventional only jet would have.
What is the goal? Having fancy crypto or people being confident about elections?
If spreading the trust is the goal what makes you say "inefficient". It is orders of magnitude better then any crypto system.