There was a boa constrictor under my toilet seat today.

So the recent midterm elections in Argentina were curious to me in one specific sense: people kept talking about the "boleta unica" and while I understood the concrete meaning, I couldn't quite work out the "delta" - how did it work before (context: BUP or boleta unica de papel basically means a single paper ballot, which, outside of electronic voting, seems like "duh, that's how it works, no?"). So here's the rather fascinating reality: the previous system was as follows: each political party produced its own ballot papers! Then when you went into the voting booth, you had to choose the one you wanted, and to maintain voter secrecy (more on that in a mo' ..), you put it in an envelope (still in the private voting booth), went outside and dropped your envelope into the "urna". I'll let you sit on that idea for a moment ... One obvious problem (among others!) is that the adversarially minded voter can simply remove the ballots of the party they hate, while in the private booth. But there's an even more evil idea to partially remove voting secrecy: the political operative gives the voter, in advance, a ballot for their own party (possibly marked somehow), and demands that when they come out of the voting station, the voter hands them an unused copy of the ballot of the other party. Es una locura. Probably there's a lesson about blind signature schemes here somewhere ...

Working in VSCode and having the AI auto-complete whole sentences at a time when I'm trying to write code comments completely throws me off. The thing is I'm always scared to turn off AI features because they're useful, but some of them are getting so intrusive.

The sarcasm 😆 https://www.audacy.com/podcast/the-bugle-weekly-57ef3

With the drama of BIP444 I've seen a lot of people confused about the nature of soft-fork vs hard-fork. This might help: Back in the block size war we had a lot of similar confusion, mostly because it isn't really very clear cut. Some people talked about "evil soft forks" to try to get rid of the simplistic notion: "soft forks are much better and hard forks are much worse" which tends to persist (naturally). The problem is that whether a fork is contentious or not is *much more important* than whether it fits the "soft" or "hard" technical definition. When a fork isn't contentious, then the soft vs hard distinction (restricting the ruleset or relaxing it) really matters a lot, because "passive" network participants (imagine a piece of hardware that will never get updated to a new bitcoin version, in the extreme) will be fine with the first and not with the second. When a fork *is* contentious, and miners, following economic incentive, end up choosing different rulesets to support different bitcoin users, then the chain genuinely forks into two histories. The fact that one ruleset is more restrictive than the other is part of the story but doesn't change the fundamental point that we have a chain split. This of course did actually happen meaningfully with bitcoin-cash in 2017. The term "evil soft fork" was some people trying to shake others of the misconception that if a fork is "soft" it's not coercive and not forcing action on anyone; that's definitely not true *if the fork is contentious*. #bitcoin

Or you could actually prove it without a third party, cryptographically, using a ZKP... View quoted note →

I don't agree with every word, but this general perspective is badly underrepresented. View quoted note →

Anyone running recent Tor builds with HiddenServicePoWDefensesEnabled set to true? What I'm mostly confused about is if onions have it switched on but their clients are on older versions or just incompatible versions, how does that work? #tor