RCV was also on the ballot in Colorado, but for some reason they bundled it with a “jungle primary” for governor and a bunch of other seats, where the four choices on the ballot for governor in the general election would be the top four from the ranked choice primaries, regardless of party (so you could end up with four options from the same party in theory). The latter addition was pretty unpopular with both parties, who put out tons of messaging against it and especially conflated it with RCV. It got voted down with a significant margin.

I’m not opposed to either measure, but I’m really struggling to understand why they rolled the two together into one ballot initiative instead of separating it. Alas, I’m just a lowly voter not privy to such advanced political reasoning. Fortunately most of Colorado’s other ballot initiatives went well, at least according to my preferences.

I don’t have a problem with it playing a song way out of nowhere, but what if does do is play the same like 20 songs over and over and over when I let it try to recommend things. Like the songs it picks are decent recommendations but damn could I have something different?

And while we’re venting, its recommended album feed for me is surprisingly good, except that half the things it recommends are singles releases. I don’t want to see those please let me just se albums…

At least they fixed the bug where “repeat album” would constantly turn itself on.

It’s not useless, it removes a lot of the tracking cookies and such and sponsored links loaded with telemetry. Theoretically you can also get the benefits of anonymity if you proxy through Tor or a VPN, which I originally tried to do but turns out Google at least blocks requests from Tor and at least the VPN endpoint I have and probably most of them. Google or whatever upstream SE can still track you by IP when you self host, but its tracking is going to much less without the extra telemetry cookies and tracking code it gets when you use Google results directly.

But yes, practically you either have to trust the instance you’re using to some extent or give up some of the anonymity. I opted to self host and would recommend the same over using a public instance if you can, personally. And if privacy is your biggest concern, only use upstream search providers that are (or rather, claim to be) more privacy respecting like DDG or Qwant. My main use case is primarily as a better frontend to search without junk sponsored results and privacy is more of a secondary benefit.

FWIW, they have a pretty detailed discussion on why they recommend self-hosting here.

I’ve always gotten the impression it was mostly intended to be self hosted. I’ve self hosted it for something like a couple years now, runs like a clock. It still strips out tracking and advertising, even if you don’t get the crowd anonymity of a public instance.

This is the paradox of polling, there’s no way to tell. Either could be better, both could be wrong, both could be right. There is no such thing as a poll with no bias, because the only way to take a tryly unbiased poll is to know the outcome of the race a priori.

I’m willing to believe someone could have voted for Trump the first time in good faith. Voting for him again after seeing the shitshow of his first term, however…