This blog post from Derek Lowe discusses the requirements in more detail. Specifically, I think the following quote answers your question:

The RCP average shows that Biden was in the lead nearly the entire time. On October 7, 2019, at Warren's peak, she just barely edged into the lead for a single day. Other than that, Biden was always the favored moderate (i.e. non-Sanders) candidate.

I feel like people on Slashdot often complain every chat service is just re-inventing IRC. But adding voice/video chat that works in a web browser is legitimately a useful feature for a chat room system. And, they're silly, but people like emojis.

What would you propose as an alternative? Mumble and Matrix look like the closest alternatives I can find.

Mumble does not look user-friendly enough that I would be comfortable recommending it to non-techies. Among other problems, it doesn't appear to have a web interface and there is no official Android app, although it sounds like the unofficial one works fine. I'm fine with putting in some work to set up a server (see my sig: I'd much rather host my own chat server), but clients need to be easy enough to use that my friends won't give up and go back to Facebook Messenger (and accept that they have to find other workarounds to talk to anyone boycotting Facebook).

Matrix didn't work very well last time I tried (Android app crashed trying to make a simple voice call multiple times) but that was several months ago now. Hopefully it's better now? Maybe I should try again.

I do pay for Discord because I want them to keep being able to host their chat service. It certainly has issues, but it seems better than the alternatives for what I want out of it.

Some states do in fact require a notary for an absentee ballot, or, at least, used to. For example, Oklahoma does but they apparently recently added a COVID-19 exception. It looks like Missouri does as well. Looking at this list of all the states, it looks like no other state requires a notary, although some accept a notary in place of multiple witnesses (erm, unless I missed something skimming that list).

He's talking about the Motor Voter Act which directs DMVs to make it easy for people to register to vote when they get a state ID or driver's license. Of course, you have to attest that you're a citizen just like when you register to vote any other way.

And the list of people who are registered and who vote in each election is public, so if non-citizens voting were actually a thing that happened, it should be easy to find evidence of it. The fact that no one is putting forth anything other than vague insinuations to that effect suggests it's not actually a problem. This article from Time agrees.

That complaint is a new one to me. What are you talking about?

There is a very clear divide between progressives and establishment democrats at the municipal level. I live in Seattle, which isn't one of the cities you list but has similar problems of officially being controlled by the "liberal" party but the municipal policy effectively greatly favoring current land-owners over renters (according to this site, 46% of the population, but likely non-citizens are overrepresented as Seattle has a lot of immigrants), homeless, and future residents.

Because Washington state has top-two primaries (instead of Democrat and Republican party primaries), this divide is very visible in Seattle politics, especially in our mayoral race last week where the primary had the eventual winner establishment candidate Jenny Durkan with 28% of the vote and the two leading progressive candidates each with 17% of the vote (and another with 12% of the vote; if only we had ranked choice primaries...). One of the main issues was that Durkan wanted to zone for less new housing and slower. And she won in part because home owners think that increases their property values. But "increased property values" is bad for anyone who wants to live in the area who does not presently own a home.

If you want to see progressive housing policy, look to Seattle Transit Blog calling for upzoning near any major transit route. Multiple people in the comments put forth arguments for eliminating zoning limitation on residential construction entirely. These policies are not even within the Overton window of political discourse at the level of campaigns for Seattle city positions.

It's called Moravec's paradox:

This paper gives an interesting summary of different assumptions about how detailed a brain simulation needs to be and what they mean for when simulating a brain would be feasible (assuming Moore's Law continues indefinitely, which is obviously not guaranteed). The classical estimates go as late as 2201 depending on what assumptions you accept. See the tables on pages 79-81 for the summary. The quantum estimate is just a question mark; they didn't even bother computing the cost of using classical computers to simulate an entire human brain as a quantum system.

What about Drizzt?

A couple cool projects I've seen on making good use of dark silicon are GreenDroid and Chlorophyll, both of which are recent research projects on compiling for weird architectures that are specially designed to be energy efficient. If it's specialized for different applications that you want, then Anton is the closest I've seen; it's specialized for running physical simulations so it can do things like protein folding.

I agree that statistics require careful interpretation, and any claims made based on statistics require critical thought to determine if they are using statistics properly. There is, after all, another study someone else referenced in this thread that concluded the exact opposite by studying the proportion (not absolute number) of harassing tweets sent to a set of 65 celebrity Twitter accounts. I am unsure what your discussion of domestic violence statistics adds to this discussion other than giving an example of another emotional charged area where statistics are complicated.

The link I reference had two parts: (1) the actual study that showed the fake users created by the researchers which were identical except for gendered names resulted in 25 times as much harassment directed at the bots with females names and (2) the references to previous studies showing that reports of harassment are much more common from women. The assertion made by the article is that (1) supports (2). Note that in (1) the same researchers are the ones coding messages as harassing or not, so there is no separate subjectivity of men vs. women on what messages constitute harassment. That's why I cited it: it answers the question of "Do women get harassed equal to men and are just more vocal about it?" In fact, the data suggests women are less vocal about it.

No disagreement there. The article is about abuse/harassment, not trolling, so the title is misleading.

While a complete census of internet trolling has not been conducted, it turns out there are statistics and they do support the GP: here's a study showing women get harassed at a much higher rate than men.

and

As obnoxious as that is, you can disable that "feature" in the settings. That said, I mostly use Firefox because it does a much better job of respecting my privacy both by default and with more plugins for it.

My general strategy for performing simple tasks like generating a barcode or merging PDF files is to just do a search on my distro's package manager and there's usually a tool to do what I want (although it sometimes takes a bit of guesswork to figure out what it would be called). I don't remember what I used last time I needed to generate a (non-QR) barcode, but Debian only has one package simply named "barcode" which can probably generate whatever type of barcodes you need (also, there's tons of websites that will do it for you as well). For merging PDFs, I believe I've previously used pdfshuffler, which works fine.