See my first bullet point:

“I don’t like either option”: pick the lesser evil or vote third party

Honestly, that was the option I had hoped for when I made that joke. I‘m happy for you.

So? What are those reasons?

• “I don’t like either option”: pick the lesser evil or vote third party
• “But Harris won’t stop the genocide in Palestine”: neither will Trump.
• “My vote wouldn’t change anything”: it would. See OP.
• “I can’t vote because I have to work”: vote by mail. Demand that elections are held on a Sunday or national holiday like in most other western democracies. (As an aside, I wonder why conservatives haven’t pushed for this yet. Voting on a Sunday and setting up polling stations next to churches would probably help them a lot)
• “I can’t vote because I can’t physically get to a polling station (disabled, sick, too far)”: vote by mail
• “I can’t vote because my state’s ruling party won’t let me”: you should be furious about this and do anything in your power to change this.

Did I forget any? Probably. Enough to change the election outcome in the majority of states? Most certainly not.

Yes, the US have some fucked up rules that make voting hard for some people and for that exact reason urgently need a voting system reform. Make voting easier and make changes that break the two party system.

Honestly, here in Germany we’re infamous for still using fax machines for half our bureaucracy and even we manage to do it better than you. Here, elections are always on a Sunday when the vast majority of voters has the day off. Every elegible citizen gets a letter a couple of weeks before the election, informing them of their assigned polling station, based on their primary home address. If for any reason you can’t be at your assigned polling station on election day (you work on Sundays, are on vacation, whatever), requesting a mail-in ballot is as easy as going to a website and entering your address and a PIN from the letter. Alternatively you can request one by mail. If for any reason you don’t get that initial letter, figure out which polling station is the correct one for you (usually the closest one; ask your neighbors), show up on election day and show some government-issued ID. Done.

Sooo… have you decided yet, which one you want to be?

How would software support improve?

• Less fragmentation between multiple different ways to install software (Ubuntu-derived distributions currently have apt, flatpack and snap while some software is available in neither so I have to manually download a binary or even compile it myself)
• Better support for certain use cases like… I don’t know… fractional scaling which Windows has supported since Vista
• Simplified system settings. People make fun of Windows splitting settings between the “new” settings app and the old control center. On most Linux distributions, I may have to set some things multiple times for my window manager, my compositor and so on… again, scaling is the main culprit here but themeing has similar problems.

Basically fix the few things that work better in Windows, even for power users, ideally without sacrificing the flexibility that makes Linux so awesome.

Edit: bonus suggestion though this one is kind of tricky to do without sacrificing flexibility:

Less fragmentation between distributions. Recently I had some driver problem (can’t quite remember what) and googled a solution. I found a solution in a support forum for a different distribution than what I had. Looked good but in the end it didn’t help me because the config files were in completely different locations, default configs were different, packages had different names and they recommended using some UI tool to configure the device that wasn’t available on my distribution or at least I couldn’t find how to install it.

For myself, I’ll eventually figure that out. It takes me a few hours that I could spend on something productive but whatever, we’re geeks, we do shit like that. But now imagine my mom calls me about that problem. She probably won’t have the same distribution that I have because we have entirely different use cases. Good look troubleshooting that over the phone. With Windows, I can rely on 80% of all users having one of the latest two versions (so currently 10 or 11). The fix that works on my machine will probably work on theirs and most things I find online will apply to what they have. Same for macOS.

Edit 2: For context, I run Ubuntu and Debian on quite a lot of headless machines such as servers and embedded stuff. It works great and I wouldn’t want to miss it. But on desktop, I’m still in Windows and won’t leave for the foreseeable future. Every few months I try setting up some desktop linux and every time it takes less than a week to annoy me so much that I’d rather wipe the whole thing and install Windows than figure out how to fix that mess of two different display servers, five different desktop environments and two entirely incompatible GUI frameworks in a trenchcoat.

A friend recently commented “Of course you have ADHD! Just look at your apartment! Spots that are important for your hobbies are designed with surgical precision and everything else slowly sinks into chaos.”

He might be right.

iPhone 12 Mini. I loved my 5S and first gen SE and I still can’t understand why phone manufacturers these days insist on making tablets and calling them phones. I just want something that fits in my pocket. I would probably have switched to Android years ago but I haven’t found a single Android phone with a small form factor, decent performance and decent camera.

One common answer is the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center which is mainly one really tall room.

Oh yeah, gods forbid anyone plays a game that hasn’t been sold legally for decades…

Ah alright, then they must have changed it since I last added a new app. The last few years I just published updates and they all went through almost immediately.

I doubt that. From what he said somewhere on Pixelfed, the beta is only on Android right now and you don’t need approval to publish something on the Play Store. From personal experience, apps appear within a couple of minutes. On iOS, the usual approval time would be 3-4 days.

„Does chease_greater sometimes manage to not shit their pants?“. Doesn’t matter if you phrase it as „ever“ or „sometimes“. Either way you imply an expected norm.

The thing is that the way you phrase those questions sounds like you are seeking confirmation rather than clarification.

From a physics perspective, devices that create heat are by definition 100% efficient. Where else would the energy go than into heat?

I don’t want to be rude but the way you phrase your questions sounds a lot like you have a certain opinion about Russia and China that you want us to confirm.

I don’t think we have an expert on Russian and Chinese law here so all we can do is google stuff for you.

From the Wikipedia article it seems like at least Russia has a functional legal system (though one that works slightly differently from the ones we might be used to). The expectation that the government decides who is guilty regardless of the truth sounds like an exaggeration born out of an „us vs. them“ argument, similar to „democrats kill babies“. I‘m not an expert though, so don’t listen to me and instead look for independent sources.

Wikipedia has an article about this topic. In both China and Russia, the conviction rate is over 99% although this seems to be a quirk of the respective systems. In both countries, it seems to be common to dismiss a case (before or during a trial) when an acquittal is likely. For Russia this brings the overall conviction rate down to about 70-80% which is similar to the US. I‘m too lazy to find numbers for China but I’m sure if you follow the sources in the article you can get there.

For those who want the old tabs back: under settings -> appearance, you can set the ui density to compact (sorry, can’t tell you the exact name, I have my system set to German)

The expectation that people in office jobs can be productive for 8 hours per day.

I get it when it’s a 20+ year old game where the remake just has modern graphics, some quality of life upgrades and maybe content that was cut in the original. That way, the new game feels more or less like what we remember from back then.

What I don’t get is remakes of games that are less than ten years old, still run well on modern platforms (i.e. PS4 games on PS5). Often it’s a matter of taste which version looks better and the new one has bugs and performance problems that the old one didn’t have. Looking at you, Until Dawn remake…

Honestly, this whole thing is a mess… first a countdown, then a website with basically no information and that’s only the start.

More than 24 hours after signing up, I finally got an email with just about zero information:

Hi @dfyx,

We’re thrilled to welcome you to Loops.video!

We’re in the process of onboarding all our new users, and we can’t wait for you to experience the magic of short looping video.

Keep an eye out for another email from us later tonight or tomorrow (depending on when you signed up). It will have all the details you need to get started, including how to create your first Loop.

Welcome to the Loops community!

Regards, The Loops Team

And from some random comment that dansup made on pixelfed I found out that this beta is only for Android. Apparently, iOS will come later and there is no info on a browser-based version. That info should have been on the website. Also, what about selfhosting? This is the fediverse after all…