max51 (u/max51) - Readit News

max51 commented on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure theregister.com/2026/03/1... · Posted by u/jjgreen

mattashii · 2 days ago

Possibly, ballot sheet size?

The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum.

This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot.

There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.

max51 · a day ago

The US has roughly 10x more population than Canada. The solution is really simple, just hire 10x more humans to manage the vote counting.

Paper voting worked for thousands of years and was at the core of the foundation of this country.

There is no need to compromise the results of the election just to scale in a slightly more efficient way. If you need 10x more people because the volume is 10x higher, just hire 10x more people.

max51 commented on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure theregister.com/2026/03/1... · Posted by u/jjgreen

t0mas88 · 2 days ago

While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between.

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.

No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.

It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.

max51 · a day ago

>I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database

If it's counted electronically from the database, the piece of paper is completely worthless. Unless you can get the entire voting population to give you their paper and then count them, you will never know if the count is right. If a hacker switched 15% of the vote from one party to another, how could you tell from a piece of paper that tells you who you voted for?

max51 commented on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure theregister.com/2026/03/1... · Posted by u/jjgreen

Muromec · a day ago

>The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.

The systemic failure is not in a voting system in this case, unfortunately.

max51 · a day ago

Then why did it happen 3 elections in a row?!

We had front-page news about how the election was "hacked by Russia" and trump cheated for over a year after his first win in 2016 (let's not pretend that keyword was chosen accidentally); They tried to put him in jail for it. In 2020, trump did the exact same thing and went even farther with it. And in 2024, the DNC tried again to claim cheating happened.

How many cycle of this BS do we need to go through before we accept that elections need to be done properly and safely?

The entire point of a democracy is that elected leaders get their legitimacy and their acting power from the certainty that it was voted by the population. Not everyone will agree with their ideas, but the majority do and we all agree to follow their lead because that's what the population want. If the vote is compromised, everything falls apart.

If the "will of the people" turn into the "will of an intern at Dominion who fucked with the code and rigged the election" or "the will of Pakistani hacker", it breaks the entire system.

max51 commented on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure theregister.com/2026/03/1... · Posted by u/jjgreen

jfengel · 2 days ago

The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up.

It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.

We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.

max51 · a day ago

>And it turns out it works pretty well.

Does it?

This is the third election in a row where the losing party claim the election was not legitimate and/or hacked.

max51 commented on BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time press.bmwgroup.com/global... · Posted by u/JeanKage

labcomputer · 8 days ago

> No trolling: What is wrong with that?

Because you can't define a named custom formula by composing the built-ins. So every cell is just the same copy-pasted formula string. When you need to change something, you have to change it everywhere and pray that you didn't miss one usage.

I can't count how many times I found a bug in a spreadsheet because someone (who might be me) missed one or two instances.

max51 · 7 days ago

Yes, you can define your own named custom formulas in Excel.

I prefer to do it with VBA code because I find it easier to manage, but it's also possible without VBA using just the built-ins in the spreadsheet directly.

max51 commented on Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025) therecord.media/denmark-d... · Posted by u/robtherobber

dh2022 · 16 days ago

Not anymore. Today I tried to copy paste a string of 15 ascii characters into an Excel cell. Excel spun around for 20 seconds then blurted out an error that "the data is too big". I hit F2 (enter cell Edit Mode), pasted the 15 characters in the edit window and this was I was able to get the data in the cell.

Excel has gone downhill massively.

max51 · 14 days ago

Can you name a single product that is comparable?

If it doesn't have something equivalent to Pivot Tables, it's not even worth talking about.

max51 commented on OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation techcrunch.com/2026/02/27... · Posted by u/zlatkov

AnimalMuppet · 14 days ago

"I give you $30 billion if you use it to buy $30 billion of stuff from me" doesn't sound like a very good investment. Is Nvidia expecting more back than it puts in? Enough more to make the deal profitable?

Or is it just to keep Nvidia from crashing?

max51 · 14 days ago

"I give you 30B$ worth of hardware that costs me <10B$ to make in exchange for 30B$ worth of shares in your company" would be a more accurate description.

max51 commented on OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation techcrunch.com/2026/02/27... · Posted by u/zlatkov

_fat_santa · 14 days ago

IMO this looks largely like another circular investment. Amazon's investment is tied to OpenAI using AWS for their Frontier product and I assume Nvidia's conditions are that OpenAI continue buying hardware from them. Then there's SoftBank though given that those are the same guys that invested heavily in WeWork, I assume this is just very brash bullishness on their part.

From my perspective, I hope that OpenAI survives and can pull of their IPO but I just have that nagging feeling in my gut that their IPO will be rejected in much the same way that the WeWork IPO was rejected.

On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves.

When their IPO hits later this year I hope that it's the former case and there's actually some good underlying fundamentals to invest in. But based on everything I've read, my gut is telling me they will eventually implode under the weight of their business model and spending commitments.

max51 · 14 days ago

The "circular investment" is mostly start up companies using their stocks instead of cash to pay for server hardware and cloud computing. There is a few extra steps in between that make things look weird and convoluted, but the end results is really just big companies giving hardware and getting shares of ai companies in exchange for it.