gila

It was back around 2018 that I was first learning the ropes in b2b sales, but I do think I felt similarly about people being able to detect parts of what I’d written that were copypasted, not lead-specific. So I just stopped copypasting stuff, wrote short nice genuine emails, opened up to the people that wrote back. Called the ones that didn’t. Always hated phone calls beforehand, but some good experiences on a few early calls definitely eased my nervousness.

I remember the first time I had to call the director of a big competitor, he was like “What was that? I can’t hear you, I’ll have to put the top down. I’m joyriding in my [luxury sports car] right now”. I found that extremely funny and it really broke the ice. And once I was able to be casual with him, I found it easy with pretty much everyone.

Literally the state of California would have lower CO2 emissions today if Tesla didn’t exist.

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.

For what it’s worth, Mozilla did release a Firefox nightly test build a couple of months ago which included a proof of concept vertical tabs feature: https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/02/mozilla-released-a-firefox-nightly-test-build-with-vertical-tabs/

Still not clear whether they’re gonna implement it properly though

There has been a lot of investment into exhibition matches over the past few years, and into a Major League Cricket domestic competition which started in 2023.

There have been failed attempts at domestic leagues in the past, but MLC is a T20 competition. That’s a shorter and more accessible form of the game where a match generally takes around 3 hours to complete.

That could make a difference, because it’s a lot easier to keep kids interested for a few hours vs. the more traditional formats that could last anywhere between 8 hours, up to 5 days.

It’s only a 1-month season though, 25 matches over the course of July. I should hopefully make it to a few of them!

There’s this music video made with OpenAI’s Sora model, which is pretty cool but I think also showcases its limitations. It looks quite realistic, but for anything longer than a few seconds, the tech is mostly only good for a stylized fever dream / infinite zoom aesthetic.

It’s a better concept than the movie described in this post though, which seems to just be trying to pass off the use of chatgpt instead of writers for the script as some clever critique on the use of AI. You know, by unironically doing what they’re critiquing.

For actual coherent long-form AI-generated video, I think something fundamentally needs to change about the approach to training.

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

The resulting song would be useless to everyone, including you. In the hypothetical eventuality where what you’re asking for is implemented, only a tiny minority of the tabs you’ve collected will be of the slightest usefulness to you, ever. Fundamentally, why did you ever open a given tab in the first place? In the case where you ever need to recall it, it will be trivial to open it again in a fresh browser session. You acknowledge googling is easier than managing bookmarks in these volumes, and you’re right. That’s what you should do. Your current approach is simply hoarding.

I run it as a pwa using an extension. The only extensions I have running in the pwa container are ublock & sponsorblock. No custom user-agent or anything else. Never had an issue

Your overall point seems to be that despite the wide acclaim on launch & yourself / your peer group’s historic enthusiasm for blizzard games, you came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth engaging with the game via word-of-mouth. What is there to argue about that? The reasons you shared generally don’t ring true to me, but I’m not the arbiter of your collective impressions. At the start of this comment chain I tried to elucidate genuine reasons to dislike it - either reasons that haven’t been already addressed for a significant part of the game’s lifecycle, and aren’t ones where D4 is simply guilty by association with blizzard or another of their games. I think the reasons you’ve given generally fall into these categories.

• on initial dev/community response, I agree specifically vulnerable damage didn’t take long to be revealed as overpowered & that cheapened the launch meta. The first dev stream primarily served to address that issue. I’d agree it was significant enough an issue to warrant addressing quickly, but I’d disagree that the response was outside the scope of general expectation for post-launch corrections to the meta of an ARPG. Here I think you’re mistaking the acknowledgement of any fault with the game as going into “damage control” mode, likely due to the issue being played up by commentators. I acknowledge they went into that mode later - following the S1 mid-season patch.

• on sticking with bad design, or the intention behind it, it’s hard to respond about the examples you’ve given because the fact both minions & dungeons have been reworked exemplifies that isn’t true. Minions received small updates in S2, buffs & further reworks in S4. Many of the more annoying dungeon affixes were removed for S2 - lightning storm affix was also removed for S4. You could certainly argue that they were intentional parts of the design during the development stage, but that dev time was straight up sacrificed to improve it, so it’s clear to me they aren’t staunch about really any part of the design. Indeed following the codex reworks, running a normal dungeon is no longer necessary at any stage of the game (except for the sorc lvl15 quest). You can still get aspects that way if you want, but you can also get them all from salvaging gear over time. It’s optional content, and additionally there are many small tweaks over the seasons I’d describe as “surprises” - minor things like new animations for normal mobs in particular locations, spider elites creeping down from the roof of a cave, and other small touches that cumulatively make dungeons more interesting / less repetitive. These are mostly not mentioned in patch notes and as such have been almost completely ignored by commentators.

• on monetisation, as someone that has had multiple battle passes, they aren’t worth it. There’s simply very little motivation to buy them or any of the individual paid cosmetics in the game, because they aren’t meaningfully better than the free cosmetics. My toons don’t wear my paid cosmetics - it’s literally more interesting to go without transmog. The free cosmetics are good enough & that way there’s at least variety in what’s displayed on the loading screens. When you refer to monetisation as a problem with this game, my question in response is - acknowledging the state of live service game monetisation is generally predatory - how could it be less so in D4? Isn’t an entirely optional system that doesn’t involve fomo about as good a place as you could expect the monetisation to be in?

There are 2 exceptions in my mind regarding generally anti-consumer stuff (the isolated incidents I referred to earlier). That is 1. additional DRM that was in place during the early access period for purchasers of the collector’s edition, and 2. the dark pattern implementation causing unintentional activation of S1 battle pass tokens for that same group. These are both things I disagree strongly with on principle, and if anyone dropped the game because of them - I’d agree with them. Indeed when my buddy ran into DRM roadblocks during early access, I promptly refunded my collector’s edition and purchased the standard one upon launch instead.

Now in regards to yours/your friends initial impressions, I think it’s worth considering the impact of external factors such as Blizzard’s reputation, and the general launch state of the litany of games released post-covid delays during 2022-23, both of which I think served to negatively impact interest at launch. IIRC it was their first major non-WoW release following the revelation of issues that culminated in the DFEH lawsuit, and the resulting major changes in company structure. I actually think D4’s launch state is pretty admirable overall in light of those issues, but could certainly understand if Blizzard fans were trepidatious about continuing to support them at the time. Against a backdrop of failed major launches, it’d at least make a lot of sense to wait for post-launch independent feedback.

And likewise if they had held off until that S1 midseason patch where everything was nerfed to shit and people logged in to find their builds suddenly needed extensive reworking, I’d agree with anyone dropping interest in the aftermath of that. I did too, temporarily.

Lastly, keep in mind that they had Megan Fox advertising the game in Superbowl ads. I don’t think it’s the case that D4’s launch state was bad and caused a noteworthy player exodus. I think that ARPG’s simply aren’t that mass-marketable, and that advertising reached a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t pay D4 any mind, and that group just aren’t generally interested in that kind of game. And so once they reconciled how it was advertised vs what it is, they stopped playing. From my perspective, that isn’t meaningful in terms of analysing whether it’s a good game.

The term benefit by definition means an advantage when compared to the ‘norm’. In places where healthcare is socialised, you don’t really have ‘benefits’ associated with your job. “Ensuring everyone has good benefits” is just socialising with extra steps.

Good luck passing that through the current American political system. He might as well promise UBI lol, what a crock.

I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.

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

I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.

I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.

Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.

I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.

I was gonna get it, except they only had it on california rolls with surimi. Can’t stand that smelly processed shit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_IV#Reception

There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.

I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers

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

That’s just not consistent with the reality that Diablo 4 was released to wide acclaim. Wolcen was far worse than D4 in almost every area. I think you just got farmed for engagement, because contrarianism is trendy.

So that the timestamp adjustment can be propagated via uploader or user comments across YouTube clients on all platforms… i.e. to avoid having to hardcode each adjustment for each ad on each video on every client