Don’t know if you’ve tried this before, but there at a few guides for getting the mod working on Linux. This might help?

https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=147190

The mod has been consistently going since 2005, so they’ve had a lot of time to build up assets! There’s a lot of snazzy new features, but everything still aims to integrate with Freelancer’s original setting and lore. Mixed success, but it works more often than not. There’s a community Discord if you wanted to take a look around or ask questions.

Do you know where that link happened to be? I’m wondering if it could be dredged up with the Wayback machine.

We’ve got a Discord server if you want to drop by and take a look around. :)

Yep! Discovery alone has been going since 2006, and has had a 24/7 multiplayer server running consistently that entire time (barring minor outages from faults and attacks). Pretty incredible really.

I also don’t like thinking about it because I first registered an account on their forum in 2007… really puts the inexorable march of time into perspective.

You can host your own server too, although there’s a few steps you need to follow to get FLServer working properly. There’s instructions on the Discovery forums for that.

Freelancer is 2003 Microsoft abandonware which still has an online mod community. Most prominent is probably the Discovery mod, which hosts a 24/7 RP server.

https://discoverygc.com/

BBC Good Food is quite good. The website is basically a big book of recipes, but tailored to all levels of experience.

When they ask you to do something, there’ll usually be a hyperlink to an article covering that particular thing.

Often there will also be demonstration videos as well, which can be handy.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/

That’s a hell of a nostalgia trip. Freelancer is probably my all time favourite game, and I had literally a decade of fond memories of Disco before I eventually drifted off.

What’s it looking like these days? The pop count and surviving factions were looking a little sad the last time I checked in a year or two ago.

The two YouTube links from Haelian in my summary set up the context for why this is really hard, and then commentary on the actual run itself.

Those last few seconds were absolutely hair-raising, even if we already knew how it was going to end!

See you in 200 hours, enjoy!

Also, if you’re playing for the first time maybe don’t watch those videos until you’ve completed at least one run for spoiler reasons.

Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.

Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.

Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.

That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.

It just blows my mind to see all the different ways people will bend over backwards and then contort into a pretzel to try and blame the US for causing and perpetuating a war that Russia is exclusively culpable for…

since C2PA relies on creators to opt in, the protocol doesn’t really address the problem of bad actors using AI-generated content. And it’s not yet clear just how helpful the provision of metadata will be when it comes to media fluency of the public. Provenance labels do not necessarily mention whether the content is true or accurate.

Interesting approach, but I can’t help but feel the actual utility is fairly limited. For example, I could see it being useful for large corporate creative studios that have contractual / union agreements that govern AI content usage.

If they’re using enterprise tools that build in C2PA, it’d give them a metadata audit trail showing exactly when and where AI was used.

That’s completely useless in the context where AI content flagging is most useful though. As the quote says, this provenance data is applied at the point of creation, and in a world where there are open source branches of generation models, there’s no way to ensure provenance tagging is built in.

This technology is most needed to combat AI powered misinformation campaigns, when that is the use case this is least able to address.

So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.

With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.

This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.

The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.

The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).

Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).

Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.

You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.

Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.

Data Protection shouldn’t be a relevant issue - at least not in the sense that it forcss them to delete accounts. When you process data under the GDPR, you have to identify a lawful basis.

I assume that transactions through the eStore would be handled under the contract basis, with the hosting of the game in the library forming part of the contractual relationship. That would enable them to maintain an account for as long as the contractual relationship persisted.

That basically means GDPR doesn’t force them to close an account, they close an account based on their policies because they choose to. That’ll be based on their T&Cs, so things will fundamentally circle back to whether their T&Cs are legitimate and lawful.

It is possible that a data subject could potentially raise a claim for damages under the GDPR, on the grounds that the deletion of their account is a breach of contract that amounts to an availability data breach.

Wait… why doesn’t the USA have a system like this already?

I always found cryptobro preaching about instant cash transfers perplexing, but this explains a lot.

Maybe Amnesia: The Bunker is something to look into. I’ve not played it myself yet, but the reviews I saw made it sound like it might meet most of your criteria.

Oof