Christmas morning my phone broke (shutoff at >50% and wouldn’t turn on at all). The day before a flight. When all of the stores to get a quick replacement were closed. And the only way I could get any info about my flight was by having my email’s 2FA keys, which were on my broken phone, and the only backup was on my desktop, which was 500km+ away.

Had to walk our catsitter through sending me the backup, and then rush to a retailer this morning to buy a replacement before my flight. Was not a fun experience, or a fun way to spend all of my Christmas money 😅

It’s certainly still better than the US’s current first-past-the-post system, but it has a critical flaw where a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which could be abused by people trying to “game” the voting system. In reality, something like approval or score voting would be more representative of voter’s desires.

See Nicky Case’s excellent write-up on how that can happen: https://ncase.me/ballot/

I will always upvote that ncase ballot link, it’s so well-written.

Lots of people here are arguing for Ranked Choice, but Nicky’s write-up shows that even though it’s still better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, something like Approval or Score voting are much better options.

This is a form of score voting, and the specific form you discuss is the method used to elect the members of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (although they call it “Support”, “Neutral”, and “Oppose” instead of “Upvote”, “Abstain”, and “Downvote”).

I was all-in for ranked choice voting (and even started working on an app for it) until I learned that a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which is extremely counterintuitive, and a flaw that I don’t think any voting system should have.

Nicky Case wrote a fantastic explanation about how that can happen, plus exploring many other voting methods: https://ncase.me/ballot/

I still think RCV (and really anything else) would be better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, but I’d definitely prefer some type of approval, score, or STAR voting over it.

!bestoflemmy@lemmy.world

Stock Android pushes a Google account really hard, but you can technically avoid it. You won’t be able to download any apps from the Playstore until you sign into a Google account, BUT you can download F-Droid from a web browser, and from F-Droid you can download Aroura Store, and get all of your Playstore apps from there.

Or you can just use a degoogled ROM instead, which makes it a lot easier to avoid the Google account by default.

Even though I don’t play many MMOs anymore, I still boot up Old School Runescape every now and then. It’s still a good time.

I’ve also heard good stuff about STAR WARS: The Old Republic, but have yet to try it myself

A surprising amount of games support linux anti-cheat now: https://areweanticheatyet.com

Oculus does not work, but that’s expected for a Facebook product… Valve Index and HTC Vive work pretty good. I’ve personally played 5-10 VR games on linux with an Index I borrowed from a friend

There’s no one-liner that will make the importance of privacy “click” for most people, since it requires a bit of abstract thought, but this site is the closest I’ve seen to it: https://www.socialcooling.com

If you want to do something about it, check out privacyguides.org, or the lemmy community (and instance) run by its owner, !privacyguides@lemmy.one

It’s possible they want to support Steam Deck without supporting the rest of linux desktop, which would just be… dumb. The Steam Deck, in Valve’s own words, is “just a PC” anyway.

Considering they unbanned all the linux users last time though, this is likely just another mistake.

Thankfully Lemmy somewhat negates this with their ranking algorithm. “Hot” is the default for comments and “active” is the default for posts, which according to the Lemmy docs, both “Counterbalance the snowballing effect of votes over time with a logarithmic scale.”

Basically, if a newer comments gets some upvotes, but still has fewer upvotes than older comments, that new comment will still be shown near the top at first. Then after some time passes, the algorithm slowly shifts to sorting more by “raw” number of votes instead of taking time into account.

There was a big Lemmy discussion about that article 2 weeks ago too: https://lemmy.world/post/467454

For even more counter-measures, going to plug privacyguides.org, as well as the lemmy community (and instance) that is run by the owner of the site, !privacyguides@lemmy.one

I think it works on non-beta Android Firefox too. I just meant stuff like Jerboa, Mlem, etc; mobile apps you download from an app store.

I found that the “language selection” box was bugged on desktop and wouldn’t actually apply my settings, but when I tried it on a mobile browser, it worked and I no longer see really any foreign language posts.

You can double check if it worked by trying to type a post/comment and then hitting the “select language” box. If only your selected languages appear, it worked.