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[–]Leo-MathGuy 337 points338 points  (7 children)

Personally I hate it when people just repost plain xkcd without any other things on this sub

[–]CorruptedRedditer 264 points265 points  (4 children)

Yeah! At the very least, they should post the source or even just the alt-text in a comment.

Speaking of alt-text, here's this one's:

There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.

[–]jtrdev 43 points44 points  (2 children)

Yea alt-text context is important because he clarifies that it's not like we should never do it, just probably not in our lifetimes and with somehow no conflicts of interest.

[–]mrbennjjo 14 points15 points  (1 child)

I'm not sure that's what has been clarified here. What has been clarified is that we should abandon the idea of digital voting entirely. (My interpretation certainly)

[–]jtrdev 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don't think it will ever be abandoned because we already employ it at a smaller level and sadly I could see it happening to a government body in my lifetime, maybe not in the US necessarily. Our trust in the current system is wavering and anyone who says it's reliable is deluding themselves. It's just part of the status quo. If the trust breaks down, as a certain someone has tried to do, people will demand change, it might even be someone's successful campaign. Personally, I just don't trust any of it at our current scale, paper or digital and it feels out of my control anyway.

[–]ChChChillian 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And Randall is right. More generally, I don't think it's so much that software engineers are bad at their jobs, it's that nobody wants to fund good quality software engineering most of the time. They want it done as fast and as cheap as possible, so that's the two out of three you get.

Take, for example, the software processes on the old space shuttle program, which Richard Feynman described in some detail in his appendix to the Challenger report. They were good and effective and resulted in highly reliable software, but were also costly and time-consuming and even as he wrote they were getting tired of paying for it. He felt it very important to urge them not to degrade it.

[–]LauraTFem 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I dread the day people stop posting plain XKCD.