gila

Clancy as in Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch, likely did have a hand in it. Not that the user’s makes any sense, given this decision also negatively impacts Hasan

From around 2016-2020 the most popular devices were just a series of incrementally adding more pointless shit, which is why it’s like that. They’re not that popular anymore.

To address youth vaping. The outcome of that has been that youth vaping is significantly higher than in other OECD member countries, and kids are now getting them from the ‘vape dealer’ whom may have other illicit drugs available. Cigarettes aren’t banned, only made unaffordable via progressive excise tax. That’s had its own unintended consequences of launching a new market for “chop chop” i.e. illegally grown unprocessed tobacco, as well as black market imports that sidestep the plain packaging laws, and tobacco gang wars in Sydney and Melbourne.

The disposable black market & associated disproportionate rise in youth vaping in Australia results from the illegality of all vapes, not just disposables. It’s hard to imagine it becoming a burgeoning black market predicated solely on that vapers find the highly available, better value, relatively environmentally friendly option untenable. Overall a sensible move I think coming from a pro-vape perspective

Wild Hearts comes to mind. Koei Tecmo PC ports are bad at the best of times, but many of the performance problems present in the Steam version mysteriously don’t exist on the EA app version which released a few months later without Denuvo. Just like, buy the game again if you want your product to work I guess.

[email protected]

This app live captions any output to your sound device locally https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions

Whether I mute my output device, or selectively mute a tab or app it still works fine.

There’s a similar feature baked into Win11, not sure whether that is processed locally/privately though

Given you got it online, I assume you built it? Before buying anything, I’d recommend doing some basic retuning to ensure optimal tension and that everything is still positioned well, as things will move around over time. Installing a new groupset would be worthwhile for the experience, but I think you’re better off saving for a new bike. With the entry level Shimano sets you’re more or less paying for the brand name, and in my experience it’s unlikely to make a big difference. You’ll still have a cheap frame, likely with less than ideal geometry and materials used for its construction. That could bottleneck its performance regardless of your groupset, and the sets used on the more recent cheap bikes I’ve had weren’t all that bad anyway. Provided you’re able to get into most of your gears, prevent your chain rubbing on the derailleurs and don’t have weird noise indicating energy being wasted or other specific performance concerns, it’s probably fine as is. It might help tide you over if you’re struggling with your current setup though.

On the other hand, it’s not like we have 600lb bears charging around. Pretty much all kinds of attack by our land animals can be thwarted using the ancient & mysterious art of wearing enclosed shoes & pants.

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO’s significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn’t really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn’t going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its “like a family”, but really there’s an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would’ve been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That’s fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren’t actually different from other companies like I had thought.

LiveCaptions

I’m sorry, I meant to respond about the lack of BBC archival footage, as it had to be archived to be able to compile it. You’re right that it was probably shot straight to VHS.

I remember the VHS we watched was presented as a compilation of episodes with a new introduction and interludes so my guess is there was some kind of professional reproduction of the episodes themselves

The groups forming the roots of digital media piracy established ‘the scene’, which holds itself to rules and has particular distribution methods. For example Usenet was popular for many years. https://scenerules.org/

By P2P I’m meaning these are ‘non-scene’ releases, just something a random person on the internet cooked up and released somewhere, in these cases by feeding some prior standard definition release through an upscaler and creating a torrent from the output, which involves certain considerations.

We can’t exactly determine the pedigree of these files, but we can say they are lossy transcodes, that is they first existed in a compressed format and later were re-encoded by the upscaler to another compressed format.

While the upscaled may look sharper to your eyes, data from the files as they were before that process was inevitably lost due to this transcoding. If we define “quality” as the amount of information from the original presentation that was retained in the output, then the standard definition versions are definitely higher in quality than the upscaled ones.

I’m not meaning to use the term in any perjorative sense, but it’s useful information to have. If an official HD presentation is ever made from the original film, it would certainly get a ‘scene release’ that would look better than these ones.

Could do that, or sideload the APK from https://repo.jellyfin.org/files/client/androidtv/

D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.

You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.

Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.

Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!

From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.

Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.

Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴

Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases

Lineage OS doesn’t include google apps or services. Jellyfin works though.