Sometimes you set up a process just before you need it and look back and feel so grateful someone had that idea
@ca_covid has a way to report errors with the data, since sometimes we don't get all the info, sometimes vaccines run out, etc
until a few days ago, we just had a feed into a discord channel of these, and folks could triage and fix them
then we added the "oh no ping", a special ping to various people that would happen whenever an entry had 2+ unhandled errors
most of the errors are minor, but if you get two for a site it's definitely something that should be prioritized, even if the actual error is not a big deal
today we started getting many more of these, and because of this ping we were able to triage and fix them quickly
we try to handle all the errors, but some get handled slowly, some quickly, and being able to prioritize is important
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
this made folks wonder: "hey surely that's not the only place with this problem? maybe we can tell them to make sure they're in the system!"
we then could just call a bunch of pharmacies of the same chain in the same county (we have a list!) and tell them to do this. It worked!
a cool thing we could have done, but didn't in this case, would have been to go a step further and retarget our phone banking efforts to that county, with a broadcasted change to the script. We have that tooling.
so @ethanhs is new to Mathematica and was wondering why array indexing starts at 1
and the reason behind it is actually pretty weird and due to some interesting language design choices. i thought y'all would enjoy it
Mathematica has a wonderfully quirky functional language that does a lot of things really well. I enjoy using it a lot, though I don't get to use it much these days
so first, some basics. arrays ("lists") in Mathematica are declared with curly braces, and are indexed with double square brackets
they have to be double square brackets because single square brackets are function application (e.g. `Sin[x]`), and parentheses are for grouping
So I'm seeing a lot of misunderstandings around voting systems, especially when it pertains to voting machines. It occurs to me that people may not have a clear idea about how they actually work, and what properties they try to uphold, and how they try to be fraud-resilient.
So systems like these interest me for the same reasons cryptography does -- they're interesting constraint sets with complex dynamics, and are kinda fun to roll around in your head with various situations.
This year I signed up as a poll worker to help, and to learn more.
This thread will mostly be about how voting in Alameda County, CA works. I'll try to highlight properties considered important more broadly, but the exact dynamics of what I describe are county-specific.
Good post! Worth noting that undefined and unsafe are not synonymous -- there's a subtle difference. UB is a property of the entire program; a line of code can trigger UB in the context of the whole program.
Whereas unsafe is a more local concept; things can be unsafe even if they don't trigger UB in the context of the whole program, unsafe is about whether or not they *could* trigger UB by only mutating safe code in the program.
The simplest example is that having a safe-marked function foo() that lets you dereference arbitrary pointers can still not be UB if you "use it correctly" (or don't use it at all!) but it is unsafe.