It's not a full replacement for Discord, but it's working towards that. If you just want a basic server for yourself and friends with emotes and voice chats, Revolt works. If you want polls, events, threads, forums, etc., it can't replace your setup. I think the goal is to be a full Discord replacement in the future, but it's still a work in progress (such is often the case with FOSS software maintained by hobbyists).

I don't think people take dry heat seriously. Humid heat is obviously dangerous because you can't sweat the heat out of your body as efficiently, but dry heat at these temperatures feels like walking outside and holding a hair dryer to your skin. It's so fucking hot. You can feel the sun touching your skin like its physically reaching out. You sunburn from 5–15 minutes in the sun without sunblock. And it doesn't cool off either, not really. Temperatures stay in the high 80s and low-to-mid 90s all night. "But it's a dry heat" is really dismissive of how dangerous an unwavering 90–120° is, in this case for weeks on end.

This is the argument I see to defend use of the word and I've never understood it. Where I am (west coast-ish of the US), the word is used very specifically to mean autistic. If you ask someone not to say retard, they say autistic instead. If you ask them not to say autistic, they say special education. If not that, slow. If not that, someone who takes the short bus. Unambiguously the people here use the r slur as a slur against autistic people. They use it as an insult towards allistic people to degrade them as lesser. Same as calling a straight person the f slur. Maybe it's different in other parts of the country, but the r slur is absolutely used as a slur against autistic people where I am.

It's probably not a bluff. They've pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there's not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There's also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?

The entire time. Obligatory "what Hamas did on October 7th was horrendous," but if you look into the history of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, it's pretty understandable (although not justified) why something like that happened. Israel has been the bad guy from its conception.

Israel has been particularly monstrous the past few months, but this is something it has been working towards for decades. Only recently has it felt willing and able to go this far without its allies pulling their support.

what does this mean

Every time people say that google search results "just don't work anymore" I can almost never get anyone to share a specific example of a search not working on their end. The few times people did give a specific example, google gave me exactly the result they claimed it wouldn't give, and on the first try. I genuinely don't experience this grand breakdown of google everyone else claims to be struggling against.

There are genuine issues (like ai images overtaking specific search results), but overwhelmingly google finds me what I'm looking for even when I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for. The few times it falls short, I try duckduckgo like everyone recommends, but the results are always worse.

I can't possibly be the only one whose search results still work great.

I think it's an anti-joke referencing the go ahead fucking die bike lane meme

Hi, I'm one of the people who stopped playing when EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) was introduced. I and most of my friends stopped playing for 6+ months. It genuinely became unusable for some of us between the time that EAC blocked modding and the time that most of the features that mods added were finally implemented into the game natively. The development speed and communication also shifted drastically since that event and it genuinely feels like a different team. We know what's going on behind the scenes now and get to actually have an input in upcoming features in a way that we didn't get to even just a year ago.

A lot of us have decided that these changes in development speed and communication are enough to warrant coming back. Those who disagree have left entirely for alternatives like ChilloutVR that explicitly allow modding. Things died down because the situation changed. The problems that were caused by the decision have for the most part been fixed. The people who still don't trust VRChat work on ChilloutVR now.

Also, VRChat has had a sizeable increase in its playerbase. People leaving the game was noticeable, but any lingering effects have been smoothed over. There are just a lot more people playing now.

tldr: yes, things have changed a lot. no, the people who were angry didn't "go back after a week" like some other comments suggest. a lot more people play this game now and the developers are more transparent with what they're working on. the problems that were caused by banning mods have mostly been addressed.

You can count on one hand the number of cities we have with actually usable public transport. It's pretty bad.

At least part of it is that NASA is good at marketing. They make cool shit and hype up the public so we all know how cool it is too. Soon they'll be launching a NASA+ streaming service that's completely free. All their video and live content in one place. They're genuinely one of the coolest public entities I know about, and part of why I know about them is because they're so good at marketing their projects to the lay public.

Moving out of hell is cheaper said than done. Most Americans can't even afford an emergency $500 expense. Vacancy rates are near historical lows but housing costs are at all-time highs. Finding somewhere to live is hard, especially if you don't have middle or upper class income. Most of the people risking their lives by not moving don't have a choice.