> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash
I beta read for a popular american author and they started using spaces too.