This is interesting, though I'd point out that "consensus" actually means something different than a simple majority agreement. It means "broad agreement". Almost nobody would consider a 51/49 vote split among a large group as consensus; and even 3/2 in a committee of five would be a stretch, especially if the two in the minority are united on an opposing alternative proposal.
I'm not sure that invalidates the core of the post, though, since I think a different consensus criterion could be substituted without losing the substance of the game.
"Consensus" in this post refers to the "consensus problem", which is a fundamental and well-known problem in distributed systems.
It's not about political consensus.
However, the paper that introduced it and proved it possible, Lamport's "The Part Time Parliament", used an involved (and often cited as confusing) "Parliament" metaphor for computers in a distributed system
"Consensus" in distributed systems need not be limited to majorities; it really just requires no "split brain" is possible. For example, "consensus" is achieved by making one server the leader, and giving other servers no say. A majority is just the 'quorum' which remains available with that largest number of unavailable peers possible.
As feedback to the author, I made the same mistake initially. It was only around halfway through when I realized the voters in question didn't necessarily care what they were voting for in the usual preferential or political sense, only that they were trying to have any consensus at all.
Looking back at the page again from the top, I see the first paragraph references Paxos, which is a clue to those who know what that is, but I think using "There’s a committee of five members that tries to choose a color for a bike shed" as the example, which is the canonical case for people arguing personal preferences and going to the wall for them at the expense of every other rational consideration, threw me back off the trail. I'd suggest perhaps the sample problem being something as trivial as that in reality, but less pre-loaded with the exact opposite connotation.
> it really just requires no "split brain" is possible. For example, "consensus" is achieved by making one server the leader, and giving other servers no say.
Which is funny, because that actually describes political consensus as well, functionally, even if it’s not what people typically think of as the definition.
If you can effect enough of the right censorship or silencing or cancelling, you can achieve consensus (aka no split brain, at least no split with agency)
And that’s before we look at whether the participants form a quorate group (sufficient people are present to make a valid choice).
Then we could consider whether all participants have the same voting power. My son has a strong vote on what to paint his room but much less on where to go on holiday.
Need to consider whether the votes could be hidden and revealed at the end to avoid intimidation.
Because there are no instructions at all about what will happen when you click, I almost immediately created a "transporter accident" where I spawned in a new shape that intersected with an existing shape. They became locked together, and this new compound shape seems to exist as some kind of physics engine edge case. It struggled madly to find a low-energy state, rolling and jittering around, sometimes seeming to almost stop, and then gain energy again from nowhere and start moving again.
Yeah. I fast clicked quite a train, and its now shuddering and scootching from fear or ecstasy. Its hard to tell.
EDIT: If you click in place at the bottom you can create some interesting "solids". And after a few they start fighting it out.
EDIT: A cool effect is to make a "solid" with one or more open shapes attached. They go springy spinner ballistic berserk.
When you fill up the space in 2D & wireframe modes, their rad moves look like living geometrica bacteriosa. In 3D & wireframe they look like they are ... well, doing things.
Also, you can hang them from the roof. Give them legs and arms.
If you create a couple layers of loosly connected shapes across the bottom, it acts like a powered trampoline.
Way too fun. This needs to be the next big casual gaming brand after Angry Birds. I want to solve problems with them. Shoot at them. Shoot them. A two-player shoot out would be hilarious. Definitely drop things on them.
I made something that looked like someone in a body bag just woke up and were trying to frantically find their way out. Not gonna lie it wasn't not a little disturbing...
Am I the only one who finds this post weird because this is a solved problem? I've worked for 18 years at companies where everyone had to badge into every building. There have never been lines of people waiting to get in. Once I worked in a 12-story building. Of course, the badging wasn't in the elevators: the elevator lobbies on each floor had doors with badge readers.
The feel of the piece is that the entire effort was misguided, when the real story seems to be, "My company was somehow unable to implement something that every other company does easily."
The author's expectations seem strange. Take another example:
a = b = random.random()
I would not expect a and b to get different values. It would be very strange if using `[]` had different behavior than a function call in the same place. Am I out of step here?
You seem to have forgotten the point of your comment, which was to offer an analogous case where surely one wouldn't expect two different values ... but the fact that lists have reference semantics and numbers (not just "constants") have value semantics (that's the issue, not mutability--variables containing numbers are mutable in Python--they don't contain a reference to an unmutable number ... numbers are always copied into the cell) makes all the difference in the world. If one actually does analogize from your example, then one might well expect changing a to not change b since it doesn't in your example ... they might not realize that lists have reference semantics and thus think that a = b = [] copies an empty list to a and copies an empty list to b. That's how it works in Perl with `@a = @b = ();` ... changing @a does not change @b.
On top of all that, the OP made clear in the first paragraph that they didn't have the expectation that you ascribed to them ... they did understand that [] has reference semantics and changing a changes b all along ... but they apparently occasionally have a lapse in their mental model where they forget that (or perhaps they introduced the bug by naively/blindly converting some Perl code ... I've seen that happen.)
I won't offer corrections of additional errors or respond further in any other way.
What expectations? The author states right up front "I've known of this behavior for a long time".
A somewhat trickier example of the same issue is using [] as a default parameter value ... though there are warnings about the problem with that (it's the same list on every call) throughout the documentation.
Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age
Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a feeling.
To quote McEnroe, commentating Wimbledon this year: "Father Time, undefeated." Djokovic is mentioned in the article and has only just ended his dominant era, and is still ranked 4th in the world at 38. So we did get some very long runs in there, and I would imagine just 3 years ago or so people would have expected some mid to late 20s/early 30s guys like Zverev or Fritz to be having their turn. Both of whom, some asterisks.
Instead we got this young duo / lightning in a bottle situation; and I expect that both Sinner and Alcaraz are likely to be playing dominantly into their mid 30s barring injury, or maybe Alcaraz buying a nightclub in Ibiza and retiring.
Yeah, this article is quite funny in the context of today's men's tennis landscape, where an entire generation of players (90s born) were effectively blocked from the big prizes by being sandwiched between two generations of all time greats. Money is obviously an important factor in the growth and development of most athletes, but the article seems to be downplaying the importance of inherent talent and ability in sport.
A possible factor on your observation is females athletically peaking earlier.
Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant age difference between men and women for both top 10 player lists and top 100 player lists
Pretty important! More fans mean more sponsorship dollars, which mean better coaches, food, &c, which means better conditioning and training for the match, and thus a higher chance of winning and getting more fans and more sponsorship cycles.
I actually think it’s great. The level playing field can get a bit overrated. Hungary entrepreneurs will intuitively understand the parallels.
That was my first thought, but then again, players with a large fan base are more likely to get a wildcard into an event they don't directly qualify for.
Or players with that potential are likely to get resources investment earlier in the pipeline making them more able to perform well on non-subjective criteria
its possible tennis has become more of an established business now and players are being groomed by cartels as a cog in the machine, compared to the more self made outliers of the past.
I know nothing about tennis, but I think the general point still stands.
Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.
With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge economies of scale and social interaction means huge network effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest people in 2025 got there from tech.
Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal with it.
Okay, I will take the contrarian position. As I read this I kept waiting for the part where he somehow repays all the hospitality he has received, if not directly to those who gave it, then forward, somehow. Instead, all I got was new-agey rationalization.
To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation. I learned from hitchhiking to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement to the stranger. It takes some practice to enable this exchange when you don’t feel desperate. Ironically, you are less inclined to be ready for the gift when you are feeling whole, full, complete, and independent!
The things he lists are not reciprocation. The paragraph strikes me as a long-winded way of saying, "It takes a special mindset to beg from others when you're not actually needy." Indeed it does.
One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.
Not only does he rationalize a life of asking for and taking from others, even the very poor, without any material reciprocation, but even admits that he is not sure he would have done the same for another person in his position.
When the miracle flows, it flows both ways.
No. The attitude of humility and gratitude with which one is obliged to receive another's charity is not itself a repayment. The social contract around this kind of hospitality is that everyone gives and receives materially; if you are taking now because you have nothing to give, then the expectation is that you will give to someone else later, not simply walk the earth taking and taking. It's a prisoner's dilemma, and we only all benefit if we all cooperate. Calling a person who takes but never gives back in a material way a "kindee" is just sanctifying the defector.
(EDIT: please note that I'm not advocating against offering hospitality, only against taking it with an attitude that you will neither repay it nor pay it forward, because just the act of accepting it is somehow holy.)
By these quotes, it was created to serve "a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system", and the service of help in studying the garbage traffic was offered in exchange for gaining controll of the address(es).
I'm not sure that invalidates the core of the post, though, since I think a different consensus criterion could be substituted without losing the substance of the game.
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