pteraspidomorph

It sucks that Google is probably using OSM data to check what they are missing and adding it to their maps

If only. Maps are still super broken around where I live. I personally mapped everything in OSM (which thankfully is used by most third party services these days) a couple years ago, but Maps is still people's primary source for routing and traffic related stuff.

Remember it's also coming for you:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require...

The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too

Have you tried foliate? Their embedded reader works quite well for me.

Maybe because a lot of users still have those games wishlisted?

I can confirm that it got more stable for me in 2025. Good job!

I had this problem with Facebook 15 years ago. Nothing new, but as always, people will avert their eyes until it begins to affect them personally.

And we're still getting passwords changed periodically or requiring a number, upper case letter, symbol...

I'm an European engineer and I can confirm that our tech is often broken and customer-reachable people are usually obtuse and hostile about it. We don't even seem to properly implement our own legal requirements. Sometimes, Americans implement the RGPD better than we do.

As someone who has been on Discord since the beginning, runs Discord communities and writes Discord bots, here's my list of three things that I believe would make a viable Discord competitor:

- Free without requiring self-hosting;

- Absolutely frictionless community access - here's an invite link, you can start chatting immediately;

- High quality voice calls with screen sharing.

I don't think there is a competitor that hits all three points right now. Screen sharing in particular is often disregarded by developers who have limited interaction with Discord and don't truly understand the platform. It was not an original feature, but it is Discord's killer feature. Because screen sharing is also impromptu videogame streaming.

OK, but you're not the one making that decision and you don't know/can't control how that decision is being made.

That has always been the case, yes, though I'm not sure what you mean by "illegal" content. There is only a small overlap between NSFW and illegal content, and the NSFW filter has never been concerned with, uh, violating photograph copyright or something.

You don't have to take my word for it, just check it yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-related portion of the behavior I described was implemented for the UK months ago.

The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing content for legality rather than age-appropriateness, wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?

Here's how Discord works. A third or so of its features, such as forum channels (EDIT: I think this specific example was wrong; stage and announcement channels, but not forum channels) or role self-assignment, are locked behind Community Mode. After enabling Community Mode, server owners are NOT ALLOWED to turn off content filtering anymore, meaning that by default, content in every channel may be filtered out by systems you cannot configure.

The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content.

This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode" (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices:

- Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public;

- Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);

- Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).

RTS like Age of Empires were more geared towards combat, and base building existed only to supplement that. Whereas in games like Pharaoh and Caeser you could plan your city if you wanted to.

My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).

It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.

Of course not, everyone knows there were only five Istari in total, Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown and the two Blue ones that were kidnapped by aliens.

I used Nova for years and went through this research before, having tested many alternatives. Octopi is what you're looking for. It can do pretty much everything Nova did for me and more besides. They also update often with improvements and fixes!

I'm happy Airvpn is rarely mentioned in mainstream vpn lists and don't typically mention them myself (sorry airvpn folks, but here's my apology) because I suspect its relative obscurity is in great part the reason it works so well. Not only reputation - it's technologically good too, supports all the payment methods, good prices, lots of exit points, no nonsense. I've been using them continuously for several years.

If you enable privacy.resistFingerprinting in about:config I believe instead of trying to prevent fingerprinting entirely, it's supposed to make things annoying for the fingerprinters by regularly changing the various spoofed factors.

I only own Index controllers, not the headset. I have a mixed tracking Pico 4 setup and wireless functionality is definitely one of the pluses; the higher resolution panels also make a significant difference (the Frame and the Pico 4 seem to have the same resolution). This is basically an open Steam-backed Pico 4 that's superior to my hardware and definitely superior to the Index. Here's a comparison:

https://vr-compare.com/compare?h1=0jLuwg808-j&h2=w8xCM-oPA

The 1000hz tracking frequency is from the Lighthouse tracking system, which the Frame loses. For that and other reasons, I am not convinced the controllers are better than the Index controllers. Personally I think it's likely I will keep using the Index controllers, since I have the whole lighthouse setup and I own trackers as well.

I'm led to believe there's only so much FOV you can get out of pancake lenses? This is already spoecced to be the best pancake FOV seen to this date.

As an Index controler and Pico user: The back straps are pretty much essential for any serious use; the controller purportedly includes finger tracking (capacitive) but you can't really open your hand without dropping the controller unless you have the strap.

If as I currently intend I end up purchasing this device, I will definitely endeavour to obtain the controller straps as well as the top strap for the headset at the same time, and I recommend others do the same.

As a current and frequent user of this form factor (Pico 4, with the top strap, which the Steam Frame will also have as an option, over Virtual Desktop) I can assure you that it's quite comfortable over long periods of time (several hours). Of course it will ultimately depend on the specific design decisions made for this headset, but this all looks really good to me.

Full color passthrough would have been nice though. Not necessarily for XR, but because it's actually quite useful to be able to switch to a view of the world around you with very low friction when using the headset.

Yes, while VRChat does a lot of things right, the VRChat company definitely doesn't seem trustworthy in the long run. It's an aggressively walled garden where the company has full control over both content and narrative, and we're starting to see more aggressive pushes for revenue, with the major new features in recent months being subscription-gated or addiction bait (stickers, baubles, random reward boxes, etc). I'd love to see an open, federated VR social environment, but how do you get people to use it? Many VR users aren't technologically savvy at all.

There are currently two much smaller competitors that are perfectly usable but lacking community buy-in. Chillout, which is similar to VRChat, with some improvements the community has wanted for years, but missing some of VRChat's (admittedly excellent) homemade functionality, such as better IK code, better bone dynamics, etc. And Resonite, which is more similar to SecondLife, possessing a cross-world inventory system and in-game content authoring tools.

Conceptually, it reminds me of DropMix by Harmonix. The physicality of it was really cool, but it also ended up being really unsuccessful, and I can imagine why: - Compared to a traditional board game (well, most of them), it was expensive and hard to procure; - Compared to a pure videogame, it had many moving parts that are more difficult to transport, manage, store, etc; - Since it was a multiplayer experience, that created added friction on top of everything else (everyone needs to be in the same place as the rare, expensive gadget and parts).

The issues seem exacerbated in this idea, however I think it's just as cool. I would love to play on it.

There is no target audience in this planet that benefits from less options or less features.

I'm currently involved in UI design and, to my frustration, adding more options or features seems to send a vocal minority of the user base into a foaming-at-the-mouth violent rage. It's like any change resets the entire contents of their brain, and it's our fault we're making things so confusing for everyone...

And let's not get started on how we're wasting time adding things that they don't personally need, and therefore no one could possibly need, ever. No, clearly by adding this sorting method, we must have directly stolen development time from the feature they want, which is a personal attack directed at them and every member of their family going three generations back.

I'm happy they didn't choose to go full authentic with quirks mode and table-based layouts, because Firefox has some truly ancient bugs in nested table rendering... that'll never get fixed, because... no one uses them anymore!

Speaking as someone who has been running discord servers since 2015 - plus I maintain my own discord bot and am deeply familiar with the API - it's absolute garbage as an issue tracker. People really need to stop using it for that.

I think part of the problem is that they confuse the semantics of nomenclature. "Servers" are not really servers, "forums" are not really forums, and so on and so forth.

Can you please restock the Dr Pepper already?

I read that and my mind filled in "...from outer space?"

I thought they used to aggressively ban users on custom clients. They even got rid (years ago) of their API for non-bot clients. AFAIK they are currently against their terms of service.

Oh boy, I didn't even notice until I read your comment!

It probably depends on whether there have been hundreds of thousands of severances in the industry in recent years or not... People would probably quit if they didn't have to compete with an insane amount of people to get a job at this time.