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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.



  • Mostly on a conceptual level, those things aren’t problems for me, because stuff like browsing for a file seems like an inefficient approach in most cases. I’m a simple man, I swipe up, I type a few characters, I receive. There’s no wait time for my search term to be indexed, even if I don’t know the filename I can search the filetype to get a quick filtered list. There’s no “making me use a folder”, I can access all files in all folders as well as apps or settings the same way. Hell, I can copy an emoji to my clipboard just by typing “:)” or similar. 4 inputs total including the swipe and hitting return. Definitive, repeatable, no visual identification necessary. Once you’re acclimated it feels like the liberation of being able to type without looking at the keyboard all over again.

    But then, these are the preferences of someone that used to uncheck “show desktop icons” even on Windows/GNOME 2.x. Not so much to avoid clutter, I just don’t quite understand the point of the ‘visual arrangement’ as such. Either I would need to look at many things before I’m looking at the thing I want to be looking at, or I would have to memorise its location - and both of those seem like inefficient contrivances of Windows. Admittedly, my downloads folder is a pit of endlessly accumulating random useless junk. But who cares? It’s no less functional to me than when it was empty.

    A few other notes:

    • There’s a Nautilus extension for individual folder colours, and global colours are set by your GTK theme.
    • gnome-shell-pano is the clipboard manager I’m using and I’m pretty happy with it. Opens in uh, GNOME-style I guess, a bottom bar.
    • As of GNOME 44, there’s a list of background apps exposed by opening the shell menu, with each background app showing an X next to it to close without restoring the task.
    • In Debian I can also access the task switcher by simply mousing over to the top left corner of my display. Default behaviour, I’m sure you can replicate it.
    • The alt+tab behaviour is different. I can’t think of a reason why I’d need to minimise a task only to restore it though (or even alt+tab really) when I can just swipe up.
    • If there’s no difference in behaviour between LMB & RMB, it’s because the function you’re looking for is in a different castle.

    Upon first use of 3.x I too felt that the lack of universal context menus implied less functionality as a whole. I don’t think that’s really the case though.

    If I were using a mouse and also had an app/game fullscreened, then and only then would I have to shudder perform an extra keyboard input.

    I guess the bottom line is, GNOME doesn’t really aim to replicate Windows.


  • What were the problems or areas where you identified inefficiency? I’d agree the “settings” app is overly minimal. Personally I’d rather use the terminal for most things that wouldn’t necessarily have an obvious specific location in the GUI. In general, customisation outside the terminal leaves something to be desired, but I don’t mind how it looks by default. In rare cases I do logout and switch DE’s to Plasma but usually it’s to figure out how some function is named so that I can search up a way to do it efficiently in GNOME, then I just do that moving forward.

    I would guess that the main factors are 1. your machine and 2. your use cases. On my laptop for example, I’ve found that three-finger swiping up on the touchpad to get to the task switcher is about as efficient as possible for almost all of my use cases. From there, I’m either clicking on a pinned app (including my terminal if I’ve identified I need it), clicking on one of my open tasks, or typing a few characters for the file, app or setting I want and hitting return. Including typing things like “word” to run Libreoffice Writer. In that way, my experience of GNOME’s ethos is to enable the widest range of functions possible using the fewest inputs, with the caveat that this is only the case certain machines and for people that enjoy things like gestures and hotkeys. I have a bunch of shell extensions like a clipboard history/manager, an on-screen keyboard toggle, toggle to prevent auto-sleep etc. It’s pretty much everything I want.


  • gila@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you dislike HR in workplaces?
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    2 months 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.





  • 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.


  • 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?!