gila

joined 1 year ago
[–] gila@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] gila@lemm.ee 28 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] gila@lemm.ee 39 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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

[–] gila@lemm.ee 14 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] gila@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] gila@lemm.ee 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] gila@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] gila@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] gila@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

[–] gila@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago

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.

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