I’m usually a patient gamer type. I think I got Hades in 2022 or 2023 on discount. I’ve also never purchased an early access game. But I’m seriously considering this one.
Main thing holding me back is that I just don’t get to play games very much this time of year, and I probably won’t have much time again until Fall.
Lightning bugs are really cool! Where I live, people are usually surprised to find out that there are dozens of species native to the region.
A few years ago, I went on a trip to a different part of the US and they had a species of lightning bug where they all flash synchronously. Instead of flying around the yard, blinking seemingly at random like all the lightning bugs I’d ever seen up to that point, the synchronous ones crawled around in the bushes and trees and then when they flashed, they all flashed at the same time. It was super cool to see.
Another thing I’ve noticed about adult lightning bugs is that the populations can vary greatly from year to year around here. We might have a year or two with large numbers of them each night during the warmest parts of the year, then a year where they are few and far between.
As soon as I saw this scene, I immediately thought of Lemmy users and how it would speak to them. So, not surprised to see this posted here and getting some love.
I won’t speak for all “white dudes” but I know why I do it.
First, my thermostat is just different from average. If it’s 70F/21C, there’s a very high chance I’m going to be sweating, especially if I’m indoors and there’s limited air movement or I’m outdoors and there’s any bit of direct sunlight. Shorts make that a bit more bearable.
Second, given my warm nature, the climate where I live and my lifestyle make wearing shorts practical for much of the year. In the “colder” months of the year, it’s usually a case where it’s cold in the morning but warms up to a reasonable extent during the day. Guess what? I have an indoor, office job. I don’t give a flip about how cold it is during the early parts of the day because I’m going to be indoors where the temperature is pretty much guaranteed to be above the 70F/21C limit I mentioned in my first point. By the time I’m off work and out of the office in the evening, it’s warmed up to the point where shorts are totally appropriate and comfy (for me). Sure, I could waste time and energy doing multiple wardrobe changes throughout the day, but that’s just bullshit and quite frankly, stupid, if I don’t have to do it.
Third, who gives a fuck? Apparently a lot of people – as it’s very common to get questions or comments when I wear shorts during colder weather that lesser humans can’t tolerate in shorts. I don’t go around acting as the fashion police for your stupid crocs or question your multiple changes of clothes per day like you’re Beyoncé doing a concert. So leave my cargo shorts in the middle of winter alone.
The definition of these “generations” is arbitrary and subjective. The reality of the matter is no such person exists. So, I completely disagree.
Even if everyone in the world agreed that Gen Z is all people born between 1995 and 2010 (which would require you to be ignorant, naive, or just plain stupid), it ignores the reality of things like geography, culture, time zones, etc. Literally hundreds (if not thousands) of people could have been born at the exact same moment of time, but due to the magic of time zones, some would be Gen Z, others would not. That’s super arbitrary if you ask me.
So, it’s more like theoretically some person is the oldest member of Gen Z, for some given interpretation of what “Gen Z” means. But in practice, there’s no such thing. In some ways it’s like a mathematical limit. There’s no smallest number greater than 0, because you can always devise a smaller fraction. But, if you artificially and arbitrarily limit your resolution (let’s say to 1/10th), only then can you declare some number the smallest (ex: .1).
I’m thankful that in all my years of working in retail, I never had a gun pointed at me. Having said that, random people get so bent out of shape about the most ridiculous, inconsequential things and it can be close to impossible to predict who it’s going to be or what is going to set them off.
Based on my experiences, if a customer is being indignant even after explaining that I was helping them out, I would apologize and remove the discount or ring the order up differently (if it was in my power to do so). More often than not, they calm down after they get what they want, even if it’s to their own detriment. Granted, after calming down, a not insignificant number of these folks will realize their mistake and then they have to figure out a way to save face so they can ask for the discount to be reapplied.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’ve investigated the situation and it turns out that you weren’t on the agenda. Rest assured, we’ve updated our records and you should expect to receive your first official solicitation in 5 - 10 business days! Please accept my personal apology for this oversight and have a gay day.
Anecdotally speaking, I’ve been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I’ve been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.
Some of these tools, like GitHub’s AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there’s enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it’s going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren’t really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.
More and more often I’m getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it’s going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.
Seeing the up votes and down votes in this thread, I realize this is an unpopular “opinion” but the flowers didn’t necessarily evolve to look like hummingbirds specifically. That many people see it as looking hummingbird-like is more a reflection of the human mind’s ability to find patterns and connections even when they don’t exist. It’s interesting and pretty for sure, and definitely a curiosity.
Same thing for the “monkey orchid”. You see a monkey because the flowers are photographed at an unnatural angle and forced perspective, the photos online where the effect is most visible are the ones with lots of compression artifacts and generally poor quality, and because of the power of suggestion. If you saw these in person (without prior context of the photos), there’s a good chance you wouldn’t even notice the face-like visage unless pointed out.
On the other hand, the “bee orchids” actually are an example where it seems that the flowers have evolved in a way that specifically mimics the appearance of bees (and wasps). These flowers mostly attract male bees and wasps who confuse them for lovely lady bees and wasps and try to mate with the flowers. In the process, they pick up a pollen sac / pollinia, and if all goes well they end up pollinating the flower (or move on to pollinate another one).
Fruits, and by extension peppers, evolved to be eaten. Peppers are the fruit of the pepper plant, and generally speaking, fruits act as an enticement for animals to eat them and thus distribute their seeds.
It’s just that hot peppers specifically appear to have evolved a strategy to dissuade mammals from eating them, since the chemical that causes them to be hot primarily affects mammals, but not birds. It’s actually not an uncommon strategy, many fruits are distasteful or even poisonous to certain animals, but are perfectly edible to other animals in a way that suggests it is specifically beneficial to be eaten by some but not by others.
“Wipe” is a bit of a stretch and a bit specific when it comes to animal behavior, but many animals do clean their food or clean their living quarters in a variety of ways.
In addition to the other examples already given, I’ll toss Eusocial Insects into the ring. This includes groups like bees and ants that live collectively in colonies. For example, honeybees will clean their colony’s comb to keep it free of debris. Leaf cutter ants depend on a specific type of fungus that they cultivate for food, and they spend a lot of effort keeping their farmed good nice and sanitary.
I think I have Disney PTSD from a former friend/acquaintance who had an almost supernatural ability to make any conversation into a conversation about Disney. So, now I’m super sensitive about it. Would almost rather a conversation start with “Have you heard about our Lord and savior Jesus Christ” than anything that includes the word “Disney”.
It's mentioned in this really good Verge article about SEO. I don't think it's a good sign for Reddit to just allow such blatant spam and makes me think how much subtler spam is out there too....
I’m not clicking a link to that site to get any additional context, but “Bots talking to bots” for the sake of stealth/viral advertising has been happening on Reddit for at least a decade (and almost certainly longer). Sorry this will be a novel of a comment.
My awakening happened when I noticed a specific trend of posts and comments in subs related to things like nutritional supplements, personal grooming, and things of that nature and it would be most easily detected in small subs with low user activity.
I’d see a post like “I need to find a new body wash, has anybody tried BoShiWah?” It would usually be the most highly upvoted thread in the sub with far more comments and replies than anything else in the sub. Comments were all posted within minutes of each other and shortly after the post was submitted, which would be highly unusual for a sub that only gets a few posts a week. These submissions would all be highly upvoted. The “conversations” would all be positive regarding the product and/or ask questions about it that would sound suspiciously like the script from a tv or radio commercial. And there would always be at least one comment like “where are you planning to buy it from” with a reply that contained a link to a vendor or someone saying something like “XYZ company has it on sale right now, here’s the link”.
I got curious and started looking at the specific user accounts involved in these posts and the comments/replies. It was a never ending supply of different accounts, some new, some old. The part that surprised me is that these accounts were also active and doing the exact same thing in larger and more active subs that were otherwise actively moderated. The activity that made them so obvious in the tiny subs was almost invisible in a post with hundreds of comments.
Reporting them rarely ever resulted in any kind of removal. The smaller subs aren’t actively moderated. The admins don’t (or didn’t) really ever respond to direct reports. I would sometimes comment on my observations in hopes that it would persuade less savvy folks from falling for it. Sometimes, though, I’d end up with dozens of down votes for doing that (again, very odd thing to happen in a small and inactive sub).
At one point I got “noticed” and I was invited to a private sub run by users who report and track that specific kind of spam. Also very eye opening to see how pervasive it was.
It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway....
Eons ago when I was working in retail, pretty much all the training on “shrink” (aka losses, including theft) emphasized that the overwhelming majority of it comes from employees (and not necessarily from employee theft). Things have certainly changed in the post-covid era, but the fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. So, I have been skeptical about some of the retailers’ shoplifting claims.
For me: I had a moment today where all I could think about was that meme which went around a few years ago that was along the lines of …
You wake up. You’re still a lizard sunning on a red rock. It was all a dream. The concept of selling feet pics to pay back student loans is already losing its meaning as you open and lick your own eyeballs to moisten them. Time to eat a bug.
It’s really hit or miss. The communities generally have most of the same downsides as those on the corporate competition, but with added issues due to the small size of Lemmy/fediverse and inherent features of a decentralized platform.
I mostly stick to bigger communities and instances on Lemmy, which was not a thing I did much on the r-word site, and I admit that makes it trickier to make a one-to-one comparison.
My hobbies and interests aren’t actually all that obscure, but the communities for them on Lemmy are functionally dead, fractured across multiple instances, or just plain non-existent as far as I can tell. Really little or no engagement. So, that sucks.
Another issue that seems especially apparent here is that it seems much easier for smaller groups with “loud” voices / strong opinions to overwhelm any kind of discussion or debate and give the appearance that their opinion is majority opinion, even if it is not. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen elsewhere, just that it seems especially pronounced here. People would complain about group think on the r-word site, but it’s often amplified here.
One thing I like about some of the bigger communities here is that it seems like it’s more visible when unprovoked rudeness and incivility are called out. Not that it never happened on the corporate r-word site, but I do run across that a bit more here.
Based on the size and proportions of this, I’m guessing this is a drumette and not a drumstick. But, I’m also I’m not sure a photo of a single piece of chicken from a single order is really evidence of much of anything.
And then go to prison for being in possession of “narcotics” with “intent to distribute” because the police tested a bag of kitty litter and determined there was a trace of illegal drugs in it so the whole thing is cataloged as $10,000,000,000 USD worth of hardcord drugs.
To me, sans any context, the asshole aspect of the design is that there’s no explicit button and comparable button to decline the offer / close the window/pop-up/whatever. Though it’s also very possible that this was specifically cropped so as to exclude context such as the existence of a close button or other clues that might offer some rationale for this design.
I don’t see the Buy now button as being disguised as anything, personally. This just looks like there’s standard theming in place where one button is classed as a primary button and the other as a secondary or perhaps default button. Pretty vanilla stuff and a common approach when there are choices like this.
Hades II is now available in Steam Early Access! (store.steampowered.com)
Lightning bugs (mander.xyz)
Trump slurs words, struggles to gain crowd enthusiasm as he takes to campaign trail (www.salon.com)
me_irl (lemmy.world)
Cursed Rule (pawb.social)
White Dudes in Winter (lemmy.world)
There is someone who's the first and oldest member of gen Z, and they have absolutely no clue that's the case.
‘I’m trying to give you a better deal’: Customer pulls gun on Burger King employee for giving him a discount (www.firstalert4.com)
You're welcome (lemmy.world)
dems the fact jack (fedia.io)
Paying your rent: it's that easy (lemmy.zip)
The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content (venturebeat.com)
Hummingbird plant (lemmy.world)
Try me bitch (lemmy.world)
Are humans the only animal that wipes things off?
I know the title is poorly worded but I can’t really think of how exactly to word the question....
New server policy. Lemmites who misbehave get sent to Disney land with a bus full of Disney adults. (lemmy.world)
"Bots talking to bots." Came across this subreddit that appears to exist only to take advantage of how appending "reddit" to search terms is being favored in SEO. (www.reddit.com)
It's mentioned in this really good Verge article about SEO. I don't think it's a good sign for Reddit to just allow such blatant spam and makes me think how much subtler spam is out there too....
Anon is completely sane (lemmy.world)
The shoplifting scare might not have been real — but its effects are (www.vox.com)
It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway....
Back from the holidays (startrek.website)
A true dilemma (startrek.website)
How have you personally found the Lemmy community compared to its competition and other social media?
KFC chicken be shrinkin' (lemmy.world)
I see the chicken size post, and match you this pathetic excuse of ‘food’. US penny for scale.
like the old days (slrpnk.net)
OneDrive disguising the "Buy now" button using the Cancel color scheme (programming.dev)