Don’t forget when they were a roofing company, too.

Oh, don’t worry. He can just buy them from himself using taxpayer money via subsidies from his other company like he did last year. If you’re an American taxpayer, you’ve already bought one.

The shadows look fine to me. There’s a floor lamp visible at the right edge. The curtains are close to, and higher than that floor lamp, so the shadow goes up the wall and away from the lamp. The bookcase is further away and close to the same height as the lamp, so the softer shadow goes up only slightly. The “bottles” on top are close to the wall and therefore cast a soft shadow to the back wall from whatever unseen light source is lighting the subject from the front.

Totally agree about the identity of the objects on the shelves and the existence/placement of the mirror, though. It probably is AI, but I’m actually more impressed by the consistency of the shadows.

Whoops! That’s the Lemmy logo and therefore an ad for Lemmy. I can’t believe you’d abandon your strict no ads stance like that. Get that advertising bullshit off my screen.

Don’t believe it’s an ad for Lemmy? Go post that on Reddit and see what happens.

The mod’s last comment from a month ago is discussing an automod bot. It’s possible that they’re completely AWOL and the deleted comments you’re seeing are from the bot. Being the sole mod of a community and abandoning it to a bot instead of looking for new human mods is still shit list worthy, though.

Wow! You’ve played GTA6?!

Even referring to them as “T9-letters” is a massive neologism. Those letters have been on telephones going all the way back to the very first rotary phones when you were first allowed to dial a number yourself without talking to an operator. Before, you’d tell the operator you wanted “Wabash 3 - 1234” and they’d connect you to number 1234 on the Wabash 3 exchange. To dial that same number when the dial telephone came around, you would dial WA3-1234, or 923-1234.

Here’s a great film from 1940 introducing people to the idea of dialing on a telephone and explaining how to use the letters: Internet Archive Link

It’s ok, though. All she has to do is take off her glasses and let her hair down.

It wasn’t Rick Astley’s head on Vanna White’s body that gave it away?

Not only that, their company is worth over $500B more than it was when they rebranded as Meta. They were valued around $1T at the time and around $1.5T today. So they have completely failed to accomplish anything of value or substance, anything that improves life for anybody, or anything at all related to their entire metaverse concept in that time, and yet the market has deemed that they should continue to skyrocket in value.

Which was a backronym that they specifically created in reference to “the gimp” from Pulp Fiction. It’s not just an innocent coincidence.

Part of that is because it wasn’t a throwaway movie tie-in game. The E.T. Atari game was appalling shit that came out the same year as the movie after a full 5 weeks of development and was definitely a throwaway tie-in. Goldeneye came out two years after the movie because the team thought it was the raddest shit ever and wanted to make it a good game. By the time the game came out, the movie was already long gone from theaters and had been out on VHS for almost a year.

I think it’s optimistic to think they would even care about a boycott now. By volunteering to cross the lines that Anthropic wouldn’t cross, they’ve achieved Military Industrial Complex status. It doesn’t matter if you don’t pay for a subscription, you’ll fund them with your tax dollars whether you want to or not. Their mass surveillance tools are too valuable to let them fail, so they’ll get propped up and bailed out no matter what.

The crazy thing about the calendar is that it’s right. A year ago, I wouldn’t have even expected an AI generated image to get the correct number of days in a week, but not only does it get that right, but it correctly shows that March has 31 days and that March 1999 started on a Monday.

The placement isn’t that much of a giveaway either. Five or ten years before this hypothetical photo, that desk would have been just a desk, which is exactly where you’d have put a calendar. Old habits die hard, and I definitely knew people who still hung calendars next to their computer desk.

It’s only going to continue to get harder to tell.

It is the way of my tribe to not let any part of the pickle jar go to waste. All of pickle juice must also be drank.

Originally they were there to notify first responders in case of an incident where the driver is incapacitated. You used to see them held up with suction cups so they could be removed when the baby was, in fact, not onboard. It seems like that original meaning has been kind of lost, but they didn’t start out as a “please don’t run into me” sign.

The cup knocked onto the ground is a nice touch.

Banjo Kazooie Jiggies of Time

It’s a romhack by Mark Kurko that makes Ocarina of Time into a Banjo Kazooie game. It’s really well done and I’ve heard it’s even compatible with the recently recompiled PC port of Banjo Kazooie.

No, the wings would be fine. A 737 carries up to 48,000 lbs of fuel in the wings. Plus, when it’s in the air, the wings are supporting and transferring all of the lift holding the plane up and all of the thrust moving the plane forward. Having a couple dozen people on the wings isn’t going to make them fail.