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Cake day: June 8th, 2026

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  • Hah, I distinctly remember the first time I discovered the pressure sensitivity in MGS 3. I was hiding inside of a locker, and pressed a button to lean towards the grate and peek out. I lightly pressed it, and Snake barely leaned at all. I couldn’t really see what I needed to. So I mashed it harder. But I pressed it so hard that Snake slammed his face into the metal locker door with an audible thud. The noise alerted the guard and I was caught.

    The fact that they even thought to program in a “slam face into whatever you’re peeking out of” mechanic has me rolling now that I’m thinking about it. It really is peak Kojima.




  • That would honestly be a better representation, but it won’t happen. Once it is in progress and things have started going up, lawmakers will quietly keep the project funded so they don’t have to deal with the construction eyesore indefinitely. Dems will just see it as “we want to get it done before his term is over, so our guy doesn’t need to deal with finishing it when they’re in office next.”



  • While I agree, the way the article is worded makes me suspect that is the name of the crime they’re accused of.

    Sort of like how Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse”, because the jurisdiction it occurred in strictly defines rape as penis-in-vagina sex. And since he “only” (ugh) used his fingers, it wasn’t technically rape as far as the law was concerned. But the judge who oversaw the case later had to clarify that it would colloquially be referred to as rape, even though that wasn’t the technical term that the lawsuit used. Because Trump was trying to use the “well I wasn’t found liable for rape, so she can’t say I raped her” argument in his defamation lawsuit.



  • I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.

    After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.

    This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.

    And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…


  • I actually enjoyed the Pattinson Batman movie. It was a callback to the Detective Comics origins. Hollywood tends to focus on the action, but Batman in the comics is first and foremost a detective. So the Battinson movie was focused on that. And for most of the movie, he was basically just a dude in a hoodie with a bike, riding around town looking for clues. The Riddler was a great villain for that kind of movie, and doing it any other way would have reduced Riddler’s entire character to just another punching bag.




    • Instances have disappeared with user databecause admins had no usable backups.

    Some of us consider that a good (or at least impartial) thing. Many Reddit users discovered how difficult it is to actually delete your data when they migrated to Lemmy. Lemmy’s userbase tends to be very privacy-focused, so harping about “it’s easy for your stuff to get deleted” isn’t the win you think it is.

    Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you “look like a bot.”

    I mean… I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content. And I don’t mind reposts, but I do mind untagged reposts. Leaving your stuff untagged feels deceptive at best. Like those “tales from Reddit” YouTube accounts, that just read old Reddit posts verbatim and call it “content”.

    • Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can’t even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.

    I haven’t personally experienced any file size limits, but I mostly use external media uploads for in-comment images. But at least for me, (and I’d say I’m a fairly average user) the file size limit has been fine.

    Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )

    I’m actually a little confused by this one. Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans? Or that posts shouldn’t get deleted when a user gets banned? Because either one fundamentally breaks the reasons for a ban system existing in the first place. Imagine if you were an admin who banned someone for posting illegal content… But banning them didn’t delete the illegal content.

    • Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.

    I don’t concern myself with who can see my posts. I post for myself and my own entertainment. If other people don’t want to see my posts, that’s fine with me.

    • Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they’re trusting with years of their content.

    Again, “content” is ephemeral. Lemmy doesn’t track your total karma like Reddit does, so what are you actually losing? I can see an argument if someone is a longtime troubleshooter. Because that kind of “help I’m having an obscure problem and the only Google result is a Reddit post from six years ago” content drives a lot of traffic to Reddit.

    But I’m not worried if my shitposts vanish. In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts. On this account, I live in the southern US and work as an audio technician for live events. You think that’s actually true though? It may be based on shreds of truth, (I have enough experience to be a competent audio technician, for instance,) but it’s not actually true. Every single new account gets a new persona. Having my old posts vanish is a benefit, not a drawback.

    I’m not trying to say your complaints are invalid. On basically any other social media platform, your complaints would be perfectly justified. But you may be barking up the wrong tree, because the “drawbacks” you are complaining about are the exact reason many of us are here. I want my posts to vanish eventually. I want my old content to be purged after a reasonable timeframe. If a hurricane six countries away kills the server this is hosted on, and there are no off-site backups? Cool, I’ll take it as a chance to start fresh like I do all the time anyways.



  • Oh, I agree. My point was simply that if a restaurant is trying to ditch the “mom and pop” vibes and get professional photos for their menus, it’s not something that is done on a whim. It’s not just a “snap a pic with your phone and post it on your menu” type of thing if a restaurant is trying to look like more than a family owned joint.

    And that’s before we even get into the actual menu design, because a well-formatted menu is designed to draw customers towards the most profitable items. All of those highlighted and “chefs special” menu choices that are in big bold bright letters in the center of the menu, with accompanying pictures? Yeah, the restaurant has done the math on the raw ingredients and prep time for each menu item, and those featured choices are the items that are most profitable for the restaurant to make. The goal is to encourage people to buy the things that make the most money. Those small menu options that are tucked away in the bottom of the menu like a footnote? Those are the least profitable. A good menu layout can increase dine-in profits by upwards of 10-20%, simply by encouraging people to order the most profitable items.

    And while I don’t agree with using AI for the food images, I can see how a restaurant manager would balk at a $10k professional food photographer bill. Especially when that also requires closing the restaurant for a day, (meaning a day of lost profits) so the photographer can work with the cook staff for the photos during a dedicated photography session. Why would they eat that massive cost, when they could generate a “good enough” (meaning the majority of people won’t notice or care that it is AI) image for free in a few minutes? Again, I don’t agree with it, but I can see why a restaurant manager would see it as an attractive alternative.


  • I used Google Timeline to prove I was at work one time. This was back when I was freelancing. My client tried to say I was stealing time, because I had an off-site meeting that ran long. They were threatening to withhold a few hours of pay, even though I was at the worksite the entire time. I pulled up my timeline and used it to prove that I was, in fact, at the meeting site for an extra few hours. Being able to de-Google that functionality has a lot of value to certain people.


  • Yeah, the 5v charging (especially if it says 5v on the label) is an immediate giveaway. Authentic controllers don’t use proper USB 5v. But USB circuitry is cheap and extremely easy to implement, and it uses 5v as the standard… So lots of Chinese fakes default to using that.

    And this is true for a lot of things, not just PS3 controllers. If something doesn’t normally use 5v USB, the cheap Chinese one almost always will. Because (again) 5v USB is dead simple to implement. Those circuits are already figured out. No reverse engineering or custom chips required. They’re basically just drag and drop. So that’s what a lot of cheap Chinese knockoffs default to using.


  • Food photography is actually an entire branch of photography, and a lot of the photos you have historically seen haven’t been real edible food. For example, the milk in the bowl of cereal on your cereal box? That’s usually white Elmers Glue. Because real milk won’t sit below the cereal, and will be too watery. It also allows them to precisely set the individual cereal pieces (rings, flakes, etc) in place and the glue will help prevent it from floating around.

    The ketchup on a burger is usually thick red paint, applied around the edges of the rubber pickle with a syringe. Because they want to make sure the ketchup looks like it’s squeezed around the pickle (rather than being squished into the burger bun), and they want to make sure the ketchup is showing around the pickle juuuust enough to be obvious, without obscuring the pickle.

    The funny part about food photography is that the methodology is largely regional. For example, Japanese audiences largely expect a burger photo to have the bun sliding off of the burger, like so:

    Originally it was done to prevent the bun from obscuring any of the ingredients. But now it is a sort of cultural thing, where lots of menus do it simply because that’s what the other menus do. But it also means that Japanese burger photography is done using different materials and methods than western burger photography. But to use the second image as an example, that runny egg yolk on the right burger is probably some sort of inedible yellow paint. Because the photographer wants controllable color and consistency, and cooking is rarely consistent enough for that. The glaze on the meat is probably some kind of clear-coat rosin or spray. The egg was probably cooked hard and then sliced with a scalpel to create that perfect wedge slice for the yellow paint to be added. Etc…



  • Hey, always glad to see the MECFS guy in the wild. My wife is suffering from major chronic fatigue, (it’s seriously life-altering), so I wanted to let you know that your posts don’t go unnoticed.

    And yeah, the whole “jury vs grand jury” and “indicted vs convicted” thing is a pet peeve of mine. Because authorities prey on the public’s lack of knowledge about the legal process, to shift blame away from themselves. Once you know the difference (and understand the relationship between a prosecutor and the grand jury) you’ll consistently see news stories of prosecutors hiding behind grand juries to shift blame away from themselves. But it’s always framed by the news as “the prosecutor brought the case to the grand jury, who refused to indict” because the news is complicit in keeping the cogs grinding.