bss03

I do or at least I have in the past. If the caller will answer my Google call screening, I'll answer or call back.

There's always been a issue of sample not matching population, and a variety of methods to correct for that. But, I will admit there is some limitations to that, and I don't quite understand where the limitations are. (I love math, but I failed statistics once, and barely passed the second time. I prefer symbols and proofs and closed forms...)

While that is also my pet name for JD, keep in mind it is aspirational, not historic.

Nope. I don't know exactly what happened there, but after ABC bought it, Nate was gradually phased out. He found alternative funding.

Sssh, Top Sneaky.

There are still people that distrust government as a general principle AND still believe the GOP is the party of "small government" so they will vote for whatever name is next to the R.

He's not an idiot. He is funded by Thiel. He has been politically captured by authoritarian capitalism, so I'd be wary of any models he produced that aren't independently audited for bias.

I think polls are useful, and the monte carlo simulation approach for turning them into a electorial vote probability is good, but there "too much" magic sauce left over for me to trust the outputs from Silver or 538.

Most people never become auto-didacts. Most auto-didacts still benefit from formal training because above average gross performance can mask subtle mistakes until the mistake becomes root cause for a significant error.

Under significant pressure (like a well-written dramatic fiction, but almost never IRL), most doctors will be willing to perform a procedure without formal training, but under normal conditions, they know it is not worth the additional risk.

Some people hate it, including some independent developers. I wouldn't mind going without it, if there was a Free Software library management alternative. I want something to track what I have installed (because I've "lost" things and reinstalled them before) and something that has a decent uninstall.

I also get some benefit from the store integration, but I can understand developers being annoyed at the 30% "steam tax". I'd gladly purchase using some other method, if I didn't have to sacrifice library functions from previous paragraph.

"users will be frustated and leave" exactly the same thing can happen to an instance that adds an instance (or wildcard domain) block. I'd be very surprised if no instance has ever rolled back a block.

Users don't need to worry about instance blocks on ActivityPub, any more than they have to worry about DNS RBLs for email.

if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it

This is the case right now.

There's good reasons GMail doesn't do that, but there's absolutely nothing technical preventing from doing that, and I can't think of anything that legally prevents them from doing that.

Using another ActivityPub-based interface is a LOT to ask for many users. They want a simple to pronounce name, they can stick in their browser's universal bar and be on a sign-up page in less than 3 clicks without making any more choices.

😞

There have been some complaints about Mastodon for years; both specific ("quote tweets") and vague (get rid of shitty, often bigoted replies for profiles with a lot of followers or with a marginalized identity).

Mastodon largely hasn't implemented them. Maybe Bluesky has. (I don't have a BS account.)