That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen,

It could happen sometimes, although it’s admittedly rare. Maine has an independent senator, Nebraska has an independent senator who’s running a strikingly close race against the Republican. In Alaska a couple of years ago the same thing happened although the independent didn’t win. I think Jesse Ventura was an independent in Minnesota. But they are one-off cases and not a systematically viable across the whole system.

You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.

Not only did they literally not say that… actually no, let’s just pause on this. This is so confused it’s actually kind of amazing. Explaining how first past the post works is not saying don’t vote third party. You could still like a third party the most independent of electoral concerns. And explaining the strategic reasoning for choosing one of the two major parties isn’t the same as saying you “should” vote for them in a moral sense.

Voting to enact a ranked choice voting system isn’t the same as voting for a third part. You could want rank choice voting even if you favored one of the two major parties but don’t want them to lose narrow elections when they might be the winning coalition. You could hate the third party and still want rank choice voting. You can both support a third party and support rank choice voting and understand that they are two entirely separate things.

And I suppose the cherry on top is you referred to them as “you” like it was a single person in a comment chain where it’s three comments by three different people.

Truly a magnificent multi-layered piece of confusion, chefs kiss, five stars, two thumbs up, etc etc.

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don’t work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don’t even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn’t work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it’s easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won’t work on stub articles, and just janky because you’re manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don’t have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you’re trying to do a quick copy you’re going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it’s possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they’re probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it’s not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you’re signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it’s a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

Probably my 2008 Suzuki Reno. It’s coolant system was made of such brittle crumbly plastic that it would crack and leak out all the coolant, and I didn’t realize this at first I didn’t know to look for it, so I get off the highway after driving 20 miles just in time for huge plumes of white smoke to be coming out of the front of my car.

I got it fixed only for it to crack again and leak again. And it became this nightmare of whack a mole where I’m constantly adding coolant, constantly checking my temperature gauge, constantly bringing it in to be fixed.

And then the whole engine died on the highway and I had to pull over while driving to my new job.

I wouldn’t rely on them for predictions, but I do think they can be a reasonable proxy for people’s beliefs and/or assumptions. And I would say they at least loosely track the truth…

NBA betting is not perfectly predictive, but there’s a reason the Celtics are at the top and the Pistons are at the bottom.

Trump outperformed polling in both of the last elections, and the polls are much closer now, so if he even just outperforms the same amount as before he wins.

I think the polls have tried to correct for this, and I also believe Kamala has huge and sophisticated ground game operation aimed at turnout while Trump’s team seems completely disorganized. So I wonder if that advantage in operational sophistication counts for anything.

I know this is not the point, but “begs this question” is the oddest construction of that phrase I’ve heard yet.

It turns out that Meta’s Threads.net platform is building a groups feature that they curiously named Loops, and we feel the need to polish the app and Loops platform further so we can maintain the communities expectations.

Ugh. Already being bad neighbors in the fediverse.

It’s comments like this that concern me. It’s extrapolating on a worst case hypothetical, and setting it equal to a present day reality of Google’s hundred billion dollar advertising empire.

It doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be concerned about, but I think you need to understand the difference between possible bad thing, and fanning the flames of mob mentality.

Remember how Google wasn’t always evil?

You know who also also wasn’t always evil? VLC. And guess what, they’re still not evil! Even though they have turned town tens of millions of dollars that would have compromised their software. So, what does that prove? Maybe that measured concern should be combined with an ability to be nuanced on a case by case basis.

But it means we’re probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.

Exactly. It’s a different variation. I think the Mozilla stuff is more a sleepwalking echo chamber than an intentional campaign, but at a certain point the difference doesn’t matter.

I still don’t want to see any unsolicited ads and this feels like the initial steps to try to make it more palatable to eventually try to force users to accept ads back into their lives.

Right, there’s still a slippery slope issue here. I actually think it was a good thing that Mozilla was coming up with add-on products to create a revenue stream. I would love to, for instance, pay for a 2TB Mozilla Drive over Google Drive. I would rather do that than the ads.

Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like “oh there’s already too many adds” and I was like wait, what? They’re not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn’t suggest that.

The “Mozilla bad” crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it’s an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it’s kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.

I don’t see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla’s income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there’s no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There’s nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it’s place but I’m not sure that would happen.

I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there’s a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on “distractions” like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.

Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google’s disproportionate finances and monopoly power.

Did I miss something? I don’t think the browser is going to be full of ads?

I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

Excuse me! I would never buy a thinkpad.

It’s really interesting how the right has embraced moral relativism on a case-by-case basis. Often it is a strategy to quarantine/localize ideas, so as to avoid the need to reconcile them to any broader worldview.

It’s also a strategy for insulating ideas and events from history that they want to shelter from criticism, like criticizing slavery, theocracy, monarchism, etc. I’ve seen real cases in the wild where criticism of slavery was dismissed as “presentism”, as inappropriately imposing present day moral values.

Between Dale and Amelia, the Earnhart family has been through a lot.