I like how many games they give away for free, but tbh I've never played any of them there. Some of those games I decided to buy later on Steam anyway just to do achievements (epic launcher doesn't have achievements, cards, any meaningful statistics, etc).

Text is identical, this is not AI, more like a cheap autoposting script. If AI was actually used, it could generate wildly different text every time, it could even use what user said in some post as a context to suggest something to him. That would actually be the only reason to use AI here.

Yes, this is response payload it gives when hitting "Reply" or "Post" from certain VPNs:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": {
    "code": 403,
    "message": "Posting & Uploading blocked from VPN/Tor"
  }
}

When consuming APIs you often want JSON in successful scenario. Which means, if you also have JSON in unsuccessful scenario it's a bit more uniform, because you don't have to deal with JSON in one case and plaintext response in other. Also, it sometimes can be useful to have additional details there like server's stacktrace or some identifiers that help troubleshoot complex issues.

Doomworld for new maps and mapsets for Doom 2 and Heretic.

I just checked this again, first for game I had there for free but bought later on Steam - City of Brass - and couldn't find achievements anywhere. I then looked into Fortnite and League of Legends - also no achievements. I then found there is "my achievements" link somewhere in my profile, from where I could click "browse games with achievements" and turns out, from few dozens games I own there not a single one has achievements.

I also use Proton VPN. Most issues were with DE servers I tried, multiple DE servers (like DE#526) didn't work for me, but some others seem to be working. I also tried some other countries and they were working.

Well, something like this is actually quite popular in modular synthesizers community. They have one type of modules called "Clock generators" which generate gate/trigger signals for given BPM (Like 1/4 or 1/8 or 1/16 rhythmic pulses for 120 BPM for example) and another type of modules called "Bernoulli gates", which basically allow to specify probability of input signal going to the output. Those beat-skipping metronomes with configured probabilities are then used to trigger notes or samples or whatever. Also, this is modular where you can modulate almost everything, including BPM itself, but that's a different story... Stochastic music approaches like this are often called "alleatoric music".

4chan's /v/ is a great example of regular heavy astroturfing

Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim.

As a side note, Morrowind is also quite big still. /r/Morrowind has 178k members and is very active. Project Tamriel Rebuilt regularly getting updates. OpenMW getting more popular.

If the site tries really hard, they can control serverside how many seconds of ad you watched to decide if you can access any content whatsoever. Something like this is already present on Twitch iirc. So in the endgame the only universal detection-proof solution I can imagine is AI/GPU based adblocker that will visually detect ads on your screen and overwrite them with something else without actually skipping.

Because it protects you from ISP or targeted MITM. Lets say your ISP decides to spy on users or someone cuts into the internet wire going from your appartment to ISP, without VPN they can fully see and modify all http traffic as it's totally unencrypted, in https traffic they can't see the content but they see domain names of sites you are visiting and exact time when you are visiting them. With VPN 100% of your traffic is encrypted and in similar situation absolutely nothing is visible or modifiable. Someone can MITM on VPN provider itself, but it's not really suitable for targeted scenarios, because those wires are in other part of the world than you, those wires are much better physically protected and even if malicious actors succeed they will have very hard time filtering traffic from different users from each other.

Definitely all those Udemy / Coursera / Whatever paid courses for "Data Science", "AI" and whatever else is popular recently.

I believe old style means linear threads and other oldschool UI choices, not just look/aesthetics. That one has tree comment structure similar to all redditlikes, which (I believe) is relatively a recent invention? Have you seen comment trees like this few decades ago?

I enjoyed it like 3-5 years ago, but since then it shifted significantly towards kids and that was probably a morally respectable move given how many kids are playing but I don't like it anymore. Graphics is top-notch, don't confuse your subjective dislike of the style with it being unfinished or underdeveloped.

Do they lose their karma after deleting the post?

Dread Delusion:

• Great plot, lore, and writing in general
• A lot of moral dilemmas to solve and hard choices to make
• Choices don't change much in gameplay, but they change a lot in writing and that is interesting to read
• Doesn't handhold player much, but is way smaller than Morrowind for example, way less content and side quests and thus feels more linear
• Lowpoly/lowres and kinda rough even by lofi standards, but certain consistent aesthetic which creates coherent worlds that are fun to explore
• Combat is way too easy, even bosses are not challenging; recently hard mode was added, but I haven't tried
• There are some minor bugs and glitches

I got 401 from lemmy.world with the following response payload:

{
  "success": false,
  "error": {
    "code": 403,
    "message": "Posting & Uploading blocked from VPN/Tor"
  }
}

PS: yeah, I know it says it's 403 in payload, but in response it's 401

The only tree structured texting thing from back then that I remember is mailing list conversations. If you remember any names of old forums like that, it would be interesting to research. Maybe there are still screenshots or archived pages of those.

Works for me as well. Thanks for a good find, I have much better ping with german servers than some other other exotic ones that are working.