His personal criteria for attractiveness is pretty funny (emphasis mine): "Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall *at least two* standard deviations above the norm".

I'm perplexed about the wider community's strange enthusiasm for Discord. As another user noted, fundamentally it's IRC with multimedia. Why are people promoting it so enthusiastically? Even if we accept the very controversial idea of 'Get Support On Discord!', the actual product itself is nothing special. It's only a marginal improvement over other similar products we already had. All of this is leaving aside very real concerns about how user data may be used in the future.

It's IRC with multimedia that someone else manages but you control who can use it.

And a lot of people who use it have never used IRC.

And it has an app that has the same name as the service. That makes it a whole thing, like Instagram or TikTok. It's really eye opening to see the number of people who never considered that reddit the app is a separate thing to reddit the service/site.

The wider IT community is still very much a small niche. We often forget that.

> the actual product itself is nothing special.

I wouldn't agree. Aside from Slack, Discord built the next highest quality browser-based chat and voice app, targeting consumers vs enterprise. It's well engineered, reliable, and has a simple user interface (mostly).

Chat is about the only thing Slack does ok.

Video & voice on slack is pretty bad.

Yeah, that was the essence of how it became popular to begin with. It was the first time I'd ever seen an irc experience for the masses, thanks to browser tech improving.

I've always thought their video conferencing was better than Google, but eventually zoom just took over. Never tried voice and felt like that was just tacked on because it became trendy due to Clubhouse etc.

Because they were seemingly the first ones to a) get that combining these features together in a way which is easy to use and administrate was valuable and b) implement them somewhat competently. Most of IRC and the various other alternatives commonly mentioned are stuck on A even just for plain text chat before you get to multimedia, and most would-be competition that gets A either fails at B or got there too late. Privacy concerns are so low down the priority of users that there's pretty slim chance it will be enough to sink discord's first-mover advantage.

IRC with multimedia that works so well people use it all the time, and persistent message history and being able to see messages from before you joined a channel are very useful!

That would be enough by itself.

But it's so much better than IRC in so many ways. Sure, you can run your own IRC bouncer for Libera on that "shell account" or AWS micro-instance you're always running anyway, but who except the nerdiest wants to do that? Even then, you don't get to see past messages when you join another channel, unless there's some history bot or archive page, both of which are clunky. Also don't forget to do the NickServ rituals with each network. And you still don't get good multimedia, which most users expect now as normal communication culture.

Throw in a good UI (compared with alternatives except maybe Zulip, and not including search!), link previews where the sender knows exactly what the receiver will see, markdown-style message formatting, enough metadata to link replies, and succinct emoji reactions that don't spam the channel, and if you feel like using them audio and video conferencing that just works with no additional setup.

I say all that as someone who used to use IRC daily, including running an archiving bouncer and admining a community channel, but I no longer bother. Admittedly because I was busy and ill for a while I lost my registered NickServ username (it expired), which also ended up breaking channel admin, so that was a bit demotivating. When everyone left Freenode for Libera, I just stopped using IRC.

I also say it as someone who strongly agrees with the Discord complaints about projects using it in such a way that most of their useful documentation is being continuously created then effectively lost now.

To Discord's credit, they made a great quality, polished product with an understandable network effect. But it's a shame it's not easy for projects to make their channels publically archived and searchable, and of course it's a shame it's neither an open network nor an open source product. And that the search and search UI are awful.

I'd say given the types of projects I see using Discord (mostly open source, even the commercial ones), Matrix still has a chance of taking over eventually, if Discord doesn't open their network somehow. But there's a high friction against it, both for existing projects because their chat history and users can't be transferred, and for new projects because of their need to meet users "where they already area", i.e. on networks (Discord, Slack, Telegram etc) where the users you want tend to already have accounts and apps already running.

I landed on this very strange, albeit lovingly crafted, site: http://www.cmkosemen.com/snaiad_web/snduterus.html

I felt compelled to share the strange experience with everyone else.

Conworlding is a big thing, although people mostly work out the politics and history of invented nations, or their languages, fauna is a very honorable pursuit too!

If you jump up a level, you'll find a rhyme to it. He's a relatively well known artist and has a moderate internet following.

Someone please correct me if I'm way off the mark here: I assume the reason behind this purchase is to keep Windows relevant as a gaming platform. It looks as though Windows is becoming less relevant overall as a computing platform, and alternative platforms such as Steam Deck are beginning to pose a major threat to one of their major market demographics: Gaming.

Is that true? The game I developed for Steam Deck is actually the Windows application (it runs under Proton on Steam Deck).

I suspect most developers are also doing this. No harm to Windows there.

Maybe it's the Xbox getting left behind?

It's the Xbox. They've been on a huge campaign for exclusives for a while now.

Windows has been a decent development platform for Linux via Proton. ;)

Maybe they are just worried about the long game of Proton eventually eroding MS's share? But this looks more like propping up Xbox and Gamepass than Windows losing share (at least short term).

I'm confused how you came to that conclusion. Steam isn't threatening Windows gaming because a linux installed device sold 2m units. An Windows is still very relevant for computing despite more enterprise trying to move off Windows to avoid licensing cost.

I think the reason is much simpler and smaller scale: Microsoft has always been behind in the gaming space and a huge 3rd party company with valuable IPs can bolster some incentive to buy Xbox and even PC's. It also further gives value to gamepass which seems to be their big focus this generation.

> Brooklyn resident

> freelance designer

The first article reads like a parody.

Being rejected by someone who lets brand-loyalty to billion dollar companies dictate their dating preferences isn't even 'a blessing in disguise'. It's just a plain and simple blessing.