If you define methodological validity as surviving the “How can this be wrong?” or the “What alternative explanations are there?” questions, then it is easily dismissable. What alternative explanations are there?

I can’t see how AI can’t be done in a privacy-respecting way [edit: note the double negative there]. The problem that worries me is performance. I have used texto-to-speech AI and it absolutely destroys my poor processors. I really hope there’s an efficient way of adding alt text, or of turning the feature off for users who don’t need it.

Thanks for the reply! Here’s their 2024-5-8 reply for reference:

Hi! Our engineers have conducted a thorough analysis of this threat, reconstructed it experimentally, and tested it on Proton VPN. We concluded that:

• the attack can only be carried out if the local network itself is compromised
• our Windows and Android apps are fully protected against it
• for iOS and macOS apps, you are completely protected from this as long as you’re using a Kill Switch and a WireGuard-based protocol (our apps use WireGuard by default, and if a user wants to use something other than WireGuard derivates, they’d have to manually set it up). Note that Stealth, WireGuard TCP, and our Smart protocol on iOS/macOS are all WireGuard-based.
• for our Linux app, we’re working on a fix that would provide full protection against it.

Sounds like you’re playing a traditional TTRPG. Is it absurd to suggest something a little different? Sorry if this is not all too helpful; I just hope it gives another perspective on maps and games :)

More and more, the groups that I am a part of prefer games where the map is our imagination. My friends and I prefer games that dynamically and consistently create dramatic situations (in or out of combat), rather than a game that is basically a rigid combat simulator. We prefer dramatic games that focus on actions rather than stat comparisons.

Sometimes a map drawn with paper and pencil helps, but we use it to clarify complex situations rather than limit our combat to the rules of a rigid combat simulator.

I agree. And that’s exactly my point 😅

The way string of any material is woven should be durable. But plastic can be a magical material. It doesn't cool when wet, regardless of whether it's got fat on it (unlike wool, which requires lanolin). And its cheapness makes it readily available to billions of people.

To be clear, yes, we should avoid overproduction and overconsumption of plastic. Yes, we should research cheap ways of making durable and waterproof/still-warm-when-wet clothes that are biodegradable. Yes, we should require good filters in every washing machine and dryer so that we don't get full of microplastics.

I think most of the criticism on Telegraph regarding how Matrix handles rooms and events are addressed by the work behind linearized matrix: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en&q=linearized+matrix+messaging&t=web

EDIT BEINGS HERE

So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded “enshittification”, Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.

Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.

This does not mean that it’s not problematic that their code is closed-source.

EDIT ENDS HERE

I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.

For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.

It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.

Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.

It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.

“Elections”, " representative", and “federal” could exclude many non-American and non-Canadian countries.

Edit: Oh, silly me. I misread. I thought you wanted to exclude American stuff, not “political” stuff. Well that’s another conversation. Is there something that is not political? Is there something that doesn’t comment on the distributions of political goods such as significance, relevance, resource allocations (including time and attention), or value judgments?

I know encapsulation is desirable in part because of security. I figured something similar could happen by removing the ability to import anything from another program. However, I struggled to think about other situations in which no imports were desirable, and so I wondered…

I see how majority judgement could be seen as a subset of range or score voting.

A crucial difference between range/score voting and majority judgement is that one uses numbers and the others judgements. A majority judgement ballot could list all the possible candidates or options, and for each of them, there’d be a list of possible judgements. You can say that you consider a candidate “terrible”, “bad”, “meh”, “good”, “amazing”.

The idea is that humans tend to think in terms of judgements more readily than with numbers. A good ballot would find what words evoke useful judgements for candidates, as each group of voters has its own social language.

For example, with my partner we have a list of movies that we vote on. We have judgements that include “I’ll leave the house if you play that sh*t”, or “Omg yes!”. It’s great to add a movie to the list and find that one of the judgements in our made up ballot matches our personal judgements so well!

This is something I think majority judgement can do better than range/score voting: it can reflect human judgements better than with scores. In that way, it is more intuitive than range/score voting.

One benefit of majority judgement is that leaders chosen through it would know the judgement that they came into power with. If someone is elected into a powerful role knowing that half of the voters think they’re “ideal” for the job, that’s quite different than knowing that they were elected with half the voters thinking they were “inadequate”. This means, ideally, that the legitimacy of incompetent leaders can be reduced.

Note that the amount of possible judgements in a ballot can vary. To make things quick and easy, I’ve had silly elections with three judgements, such as “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes”. I’ve also had elections with nine judgements.

If you want to reduce the probability of having multiple winners, more judgements are a good idea. In general, the amount of judgements should depend on what the stakes are (higher stakes should go beyond just a couple of judgements), how many options there are (few options require few judgements), and the amount of voters there are (few voters require many judgements).

I think the reason for using the median is so that a judgement can be chosen as representative of each candidate. In the “nope”, “ok”, “omg yes” example above, if the median of the winning candidate is 3, you can tell the candidate that the score that they were chosen with was “omg yes”. If the average of the winning candidate is 2.4, you can’t really translate that as succintly, given that 2.4 is between “ok” and “omg yes”.

I hope it’s clearer why I love this voting method!

Do you know about majority judgement? If you know about it or check it out, what do you think about it? What do you wonder about it? Do you want to challenge something about it? What would you want to explore about it?