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gila

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gila ,

LiveCaptions

gila ,

Yes, both are upscaled p2p releases

gila ,

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 👴

gila ,

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. 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.

gila ,

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 ,

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 ,

Yes, venom is poisonous. It is a subset of poisons that are injected via bites or stings.

gila ,

Same, the last straw for me was the ‘white lives matter’ Yeezy fashion show.

gila ,

Game pass numbers stalled out because Microsoft stalled out on adding blockbuster games since Starfield, which was poorly received. Check the numbers once the new CoD, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., ARK, Indiana Jones all get added towards the end of the year. CoD in particular will likely show the reports about them reaching full saturation to be false

gila ,

Everyone is better off without game pass (though MS have had the capability to do it for a long time before they launched it, and that infrastructure was largely just going to waste). IMO it doesn’t change that the millions that show up to buy CoD every year will be direct marketed game pass as a way to get it for $20 instead of $70 and that will be highly successful

gila ,

That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.

gila ,

I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm

gila ,

Hot, then once I’ve read everything switch to Active to check popular posts I missed, then back to Hot and there’s usually some new stuff

gila ,

I’ve had a lot of thinkpads and currently use an ideapad flex 5. I prefer the smaller form factor for a portable machine I take travelling or out to biz meetings etc. The autorotate and touchscreen work great in Debian with gnome-shell out of the box. No pinch-to-zoom but I believe that works on KDE plasma out of the box.

gila ,

Same shell, mine has Intel CPU though

My (re)discovery of roguelites

I don’t really like roguelites. At least I always thought. The only one I really tried was the Binding of Isaac. I never progressed far, I never really got the hang of it and had a lot of unsuccessful runs. I finally gave up on it. So I went for years without trying new ones. Until Hades. I played it quite a lot and had a lot...

gila ,

I really liked enter the gungeon. It was one of the first roguelites I played. It’s fairly basic in terms of mechanics compared to some newer entries in the genre. But it’s just good arcadey fun. Bonus is that it runs on a lot of systems. It’s still one of my go to’s for plane trips or other offline scenarios

What is your preferred way of downloading youtube videos?

I’m looking to download a number of educational youtube videos for future reference. Looking for a reliable way to download videos. OS is Ubuntu. FF extensions and docker containers all good. I don’t really want to install an executable on bare metal unless it is a flatpak....

gila ,

Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec

gila ,

Metroid Prime series are more “action games” than FPS’ per se, but they are must-plays if you haven’t, & might scratch that itch. There’s a switch remaster of the first game, none yet for Prime 2 or 3 but it’s likely they’ll come out leading up to the release of the recently-announced Prime 4

gila ,

Moving a joystick is fundamentally different to moving a mouse. With a joystick there is a spring constantly acting to center it - no equivalent force when using a mouse. So you need to get a feel for estimating that force and accurately counteracting it in various gameplay scenarios. That’s a completely different “muscle” to have a memory of vs. using a mouse I think

Also, modern controller joysticks generally are not great. Most have medium to large deadzones in the center by default. I’d recommend reducing them for more responsiveness. It comes with the tradeoff of being more susceptible to stick drift. But that isn’t something you should be afraid of. It’s a physical impossibility for their design to not wear over time. I’d recommend recalibrating and adjusting settings regularly. At the end of the day, replacing joystick modules only requires screws (no soldering) so it’s cheap and relatively easy.

If you’re really serious you could get some hall effect joystick modules. That way you wouldn’t need to recalibrate often and could keep a consistently small deadzone setting without encountering drift. i.e. default settings from like dualshock 2, when stick drift was just as apparent but people hadn’t gone crazy over it yet.

Minecraft would be fine for learning fps movement in a relaxed setting.

gila ,

It can become surprisingly complicated with axial deadzone settings, but that’s not really important to understand. The simple concept is it’s the zone in which the stick is moved but no change in movement is registered in-game. The complication that is added is mostly related to more precise calculation of where that zone is

gila ,

Meanwhile NASA’s next flyby depends on Elon Musk fixing Starship. I’m sure that won’t get delayed again.

gila ,

I grew up near gas hubs, where it’s normal to have gas mains at home, have family employed by producers. They’ve been spinning this yarn as long as I can remember. It has not clean energy by any stretch, this is just the basic sales pitch for natural gas unchanged for like 30 years

gila , (edited )

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

gila ,

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

gila ,

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)

gila ,

Only for citizens of countries part of the visa waiver program, which doesn’t include China. Neither is there any visa waiver program for Australians entering China

gila ,

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

gila ,

Doesn’t work on Twitch for me (using Firefox). I’ve had some success using ‘Purple Adblock’, but it works by connecting to a public proxy in an ad-free country for the duration of the ad - so it has issues during peak and can get you stuck in a loop

gila ,

Thanks! Got the script from the TwitchAdSolutions GitHub and it seems to work well

gila ,

Xcloud streaming does indeed work very well via Greenlight. I’m also using GeForce Now combined with PC game pass via gfn-electron so I can play Diablo. Very happy with it. On debian bookworm btw

Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?

Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being...

gila ,

How do I defederate from posts complaining about lemmy.ml admins being tankies? Hasn’t the instance required manual signup approval for the whole last year? Complaints about it being a flagship instance and the resulting bad look for the platform are total non-sequitur. The problem is absolutely, totally, without caveat, solved by lemmy’s blocking functionality. If you don’t like that they created popular communities, tough titties. At the core of the issue is that these complaints are pushing a decentralized platform to conform to their worldview. That just isn’t how it works.

/rant

gila ,

He had a line about it on his song Gorgeous

choke a South Park writer with a fishstick

gila ,

It matters insofar as there aren’t any normal, well adjusted people that are Kanye stans anymore. I was a top 0.1% Kanye listener - one time my friend even had a Kanye birthday cake made for me. Completely dropped his music after the white lives matter shit. For those that casually enjoy a song or two, his antics just don’t occupy that much of their headspace.

gila ,

Hey thanks, its been quite a journey for me in terms of how I think about all sorts of things. It’s a shame that his influence is so intertwined with all things hip-hop for me that I can’t really enjoy the genre as much anymore, when I truly consider it to be one of the most emotive and compelling art forms in modern music. But the substitute outlets I found for my fanaticism, like king gizz, or just touching grass, don’t leave me feeling internally conflicted about whether my engagement is morally justified, which feels nice.

It is pretty disgusting that Apple still chose to put MBDTF in their top 100 albums though. It’s not even great as far as KW albums go; it’s like a self-caricature of one. For them to choose it over something like College Dropout comes off as fellatio on someone that doesn’t deserve his spot on the list

gila ,

Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome

gila ,

archive.is/96Woj

The company made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews …

… making the feature rely less heavily on user-generated content from sites like Reddit

So it prefers the results that Google normally deprioritizes? I guess we have that in common

gila ,

They didn’t make that the default. What was discussed was a way to make it default (add www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as a custom search engine)

And the comments on those posts said we should actually use DDG instead lol

gila ,

The main difference is the potential issues on console aren’t game-specific. If a new game comes out on PS5 and you have a PS5, you can have good confidence that you can simply buy the game, install and play it without needing to consider anything else. No need to understand how your system compares to the game’s recommended requirements, no manual configuration to optimise performance, no Denuvo arbitrarily slowing down your games. You make a good point about modern consoles not working out of the box per se either, but consoles are undoubtedly still much simpler to get reasonably working.

gila ,

PC’s being better value is a new development too. Most current gen consoles were purchased while GPU prices were very inflated. It’s relevant for next gen (especially with consoles already being sold at a loss) but not so much the current one. Future looks bright for PC gaming, if we can manage to excise the tumor that is Denuvo

gila ,

If they were vaping a whole 30ml bottle @ 50mg/mL per week, yeah probably. That’s a pretty extreme dependency. I don’t know anyone ingesting that much nic, after 7 years in vape industry / over a decade vaping myself. I’m not in the US though, Juul kinda fucked things up over there

gila ,

Just as a thought experiment, what you’d really wanna do is change the salt nic formulation, i.e. the acidic compound which is added to freebase nicotine to convert it to a salt. This directly shapes the pharmacokinetics of the resulting nicotinic effect from vaping it, which is what leads to the common knowledge that salt nic hits harder, but doesn’t last as long as freebase. That isn’t universally true at all, but is a result of the salt formulations that are popular in the market.

I worked with a scientist that once formulated a 20mg/mL solution for me that had similar throat hit to the 40mg/mL products I was using & had a very steep onset curve, and I found it to still be very satisfying even immediately after swapping. It wasn’t a successful product though because for the consumer, 20mg = 20mg & 40mg = 40mg

Guess my point is that the novel ways of using tech to improve weaning off nicotine using vaping do legitimately exist, but they don’t have a place in a free market so we won’t have it while regulators stay luddites on the issue

gila ,

It’s possible, but frequency is determined by more factors than simply relief from nicotine withdrawal. It’s also possible that reducing concentration very slightly doesn’t change the overall equation enough to actually drive behavioral change. But I’d agree that outcomes are better secured with conscious intent. I think quitting successfully and meaningfully means learning resilience against compulsion to engage in behaviors driven by chemical reactions in the brain, which this approach doesn’t do at all.

gila ,

Yeah upon rereading the story there’s no shot, tampering with 50+ bottles of eliquid without breaking the break-off band or messing up the plug. Anon is basically a fly by night compounder

But yeah, 35/50mg are the default strengths for majority USA salt nic eliquids off the shelf, the standard set by Juul upon first entering the market (though arbitrarily Juul measures by weight rather than by volume, so their pods are actually 59mg/mL)

gila ,

Pay for real-debrid and set up a kodi addon like Seren on a streaming box. You’ll get an equivalent experience to paid/official streaming platforms without having to pay for them all, including browsing popular shows without having to download them ahead of time or manage a home server. It’s still torrenting under the hood, just a lot more convenient

gila ,

I’ve heard good things about Stremio + Torrentio. Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent? I think the discovery in addons that have this makes a big difference. I have many different categories to browse that might sound similar, e.g. Trending, Trending New, Most Watched, Most Popular. But each one has a specific and plainly disclosed ranking methodology and that’s very useful to avoid constantly being recommended to watch The Office, Breaking Bad, cowboy soaps etc

gila ,

I’m mostly only using CCWGTV, both the original 4k model and the budget 1080p one. Neither have performance issues for me (except before filtering out 4k releases on the 1080p model)

I’m just aiming for the simplest/smoothest experience as possible, not so much for myself but so that I can mail it out to my mum who lives out in the bush and just tell her to enter her wifi password and open kodi. She’s able to manage from there without having to worry about hdr/dv content compatibility with her display, or default audio language/subtitle display etc.

In kodi you can edit settings.xml for IPTV Simple Client addon to point playlist items to a given category in Seren, make a playlist linking to those categories a favourite, and configure Kodi to open to the favourites menu on launch. That way she has a fully on-rails and custom experience based on her preferences from the point that she runs it.

gila ,

Doesn’t happen in Aus anymore following multiple investigations into banking sector misconduct over past couple of decades. Informal overdrafts are now illegal here for most accounts. But it sure as fuck happened to me too. Multiple times, I still remember it was a $35 fee anytime my balance went below zero. I was just a teenager with undiagnosed ADHD overestimating how much I had left. We didn’t have online banking yet, I couldn’t just check. And that was a significant part of my pay. Cunts.

gila ,

It also explicitly states in the posted screengrab that the opting-out user’s workspace won’t contribute to the underlying models. How would that be separate from using info on their workspace as training data for any kind of model? My interpretation of that is the data would be used to inference on the models, not train them.

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