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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I pirated the “piano for all” video course and found it pretty easy to follow. It starts with basic rock piano from the first unit.

    Aside from that, youtube videos with Keysight or similar MIDI visualisation plugins are a fun way to learn, compared to reading sheet music. I started with tutorials for zelda and animal crossing etc songs to keep myself engaged and it worked well, found myself wanting to just sit down and jam new tunes all the time. I just put my laptop into tablet mode and set it on my sheet music stand and pull up the videos, start at 0.25x speed and progressively increase speed as I get more comfortable with it



  • Have we as users already given up on self-curation via blocks and filters? It seems an essential consideration for the design of this platform.

    The recent wave of posts add nothing new to the discussion that I can tell. Maybe we need a sidebar link to help remind people of the instance federation principles, and perhaps help guide them toward use of the features Lemmy provides?

    I appreciate the agnosticism. Preserving federation should never be considered as indicative of any position held by the instance, it’s just what’s best for the network.

    I don’t have much to add to the local community but have been really pleased that I’m able to interact with most other instances from this one and plan to donate when I can.



  • gila@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlvaping
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    14 days ago

    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.





  • 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’.


  • How are you elucidating Satoshi’s intent? The Bitcoin white paper doesn’t say anything to indicate it would predicate a utopia. It puts forward decentralisation as meaningful. If you don’t think it is, chances are it’s because the existing centralised systems cater to you. That’s great, but there are millions in the global south for whom that isn’t the case. For whom those systems serve to restrain and restrict. For whom there is no reason for a “better use case” than simple and fair value transfer they don’t have access to. IMO, that empowerment alone justifies the means, by which I mean proof of work. As real value transfer always has a cost, whether or not it’s realised by the transactor at the time of the transaction. And under any non-anarchical system of government, someone is realising that cost. PoW doesn’t worsen that cost, it is more transparent about it.


  • 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.



  • 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