That’s it, yes - each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressmen, including senators. Most states award all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the state, with no proportionality to it at all - only two states (Nebraska and Maine, neither one large) do anything proportional with their votes.

With a system like that it’s easier to see how things can end up with the less popular candidate winning - they can, for example, sneak by with 50.1% of the vote in just enough states to win, but bomb it out with 20% of the vote in all the other states. That’s an extreme example specifically for the purpose of illustration, but less extreme versions of that are usually what happens.

The electoral votes also aren’t distributed entirely fairly - the number of electoral votes per person tends to be larger for less populated states. The less populated states also tend to be Republican states. So in a very real sense, each person’s vote counts for “more” in those states, and “less” in states with high populations. I don’t believe it’s really possible to fix this problem without vastly increasing the number of electoral votes, but congress currently has its size capped at 535 members for what I consider not very good reasons.

Yes, the whole system is trash from the ground up. But much of its structure is defined in the constitution itself, which is very difficult to change.

Faithless electors have never once affected the outcome of a US election.

This is not correct. The electoral college is exactly as susceptible to giving the win to the person with fewer votes as it was in 2000 and 2016. It’s also not an issue that’s due to any state in particular and is not an issue that can be solved by individual state action. The NPVIC would fix it but requires the cooperation of many states and is not in effect, and has stalled pretty hard in recent years.

The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it’s dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that’s pretty secondary to me.

Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web

13 sextillion transistors is about 1625 billion transistors per human, though - or just over 200 iPhones’ worth of transistors per person. That’s still about an order of magnitude higher than I’d have guessed.

Kinda seems like the best of both worlds to me: Votes are counted by machine, while leaving an auditable paper trail

For what it’s worth, as a Floridian: What we actually have these days are ballots like this that we fill out then feed into a scanning machine.

Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.

Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.

Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.

I dunno about the iOS version, but on the desktop and Android versions both you can also disable them directly from the new tab page itself.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

Regardless of their motivations this seems like a big positive. Forced arbitration clauses should be illegal and unenforceable in any context where it isn’t customary for both parties to have legal counsel reading over the contract. And it’s appalling that waivers for class action lawsuits are legal at all.

By default they do block quite a bit. The “Standard” tracking protection option in their Settings page says it blocks Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, tracking content in private windows, cryptominers, and fingerprinters. They have a strict option with a disclaimer that it may break some sites or content that does a bit more.

So they’re already blocking as much as they reasonably can without affecting legitimate functionality, and they have an option to block even more.

As for “Why offer them anything?”, my guess is pragmatism. They’re a lot more likely to succeed if they propose a system where the users give up nothing but companies can thrive anyways, vs. a system where the users give up nothing and the companies in charge of everything just burn to the ground and die.

I notably don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not I think they’ll succeed with this feature. I think their intentions are pure, though, and that it legitimately offers no privacy risk to users at all. I think the best chance it has is something like government mandates. Maybe there’s also a future where they somehow get Google on board for PR reasons or something. I wish them the best of luck.

I look at it as a pragmatic attempt to work within the system we have to shift the internet away from its current nightmare dystopia of user tracking and information selling, and toward a system where all parties can be reasonably happy, with companies being able to receive aggregate anonymous data that helps them operate efficiently, without compromising even a tiny bit on user privacy.

Editing to actually respond to your question about who Firefox is built for: Definitely the user. But users don’t exist in a vacuum. Mozilla can and does consider the entire ecosystem their products and users exist within, and can take steps to make that ecosystem, the internet, a better place for users. The best part is that their actions often make the internet better for everyone - not just Firefox users.

Nothing here is incompatible with the principles of free software. The feature isn’t for the “sole benefit” of advertisers - it’s beneficial to users specifically because it attempts to shift the paradigm from one where they have essentially no privacy regarding their online activities whatsoever, to one where they give up literally nothing about their privacy.

And they are not selling data - I believe that to be a straight-up lie. I’ve searched extensively to find out if anything is being sold here. I have no doubt at all that if they were, the headlines would be about Mozilla selling user data, rather than about tracking users.

From their FAQ:

The system is designed so that neither the advertisers, nor the websites with the ads, nor Mozilla can ever tell which specific users had their activity contribute to the data being reported.

The current paradigm is that the vast majority of internet users have their activity tracked across a vast majority of websites. It’s that dozens of large companies have access to information about which websites you’ve been to, when you visited them, and what you did there. That they can and do sell this information to other companies, who usually have as their primary goal using that data to somehow extract money from you to them. Users who block tracking like this are a tiny minority.

The new paradigm would be that the companies in question know none of that, and instead get told information like “approximately 7 out of 487 people who saw your advertisement on [x] went on to purchase your product on [y]”.

I would call that pretty paradigm-shifting. The only absurd thing here is that this is somehow being used, loudly and repeatedly, to make it seem like FIrefox is somehow worse for user privacy than its competition.

People feel betrayed because that’s the narrative they’re being fed - the number of times this same exact story has been posted in the past few days is staggering, as is the number of anti-Firefox stories that have been posted in general over the past few weeks/months. But almost every time one of these anti-Firefox stories comes out, just a small amount of digging shows it’s a whole lot of narrative or even outright misinformation piled on top of nothing at all.

The truth is Mozilla did nothing here that harms or has the potential to harm its users or their privacy, and in fact they’re actively trying to build a system that, if successful, would be a paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy. Mozilla is a legitimately good tech company that has made and continues to make the internet a better place, which makes the recent coordinated push to demonize them as an enshittified boogeyman all the more bizarre, especially considering who their competitors are.

Cross-posting my comment from the post you cross-posted (and possibly created your account just to post?)

After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like that users with pre-existing installs should have been asked to have it turned on (for optics alone, apparently), or that its mission of replacing tracking cookies is unlikely to succeed. But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.

Would the southern shape here also qualify as a triangle?

What if you went the short way instead of the long way, creating the spherical triangle people usually use - then is the “outside” portion of the triangle itself another triangle?