Marketing weirdly effective, for one. They pump a large portion of their budgets into hype and they make just enough back to keep going. It’s like the same people who watch an ad for a fast food place and go even though it’s never as advertised.

And most isn’t direct marketing. They very much pay influencers to buy this slop and worse. You pay a half million to a guy to make something look popular and it becomes popular. It’s very annoying.

So funny I read this post right after my 3yo dishes l ate all her broccoli, her brothers broccoli, and seconds on… broccoli. Didn’t finish her rice, though.

I think she might actually like fruits and veggies?

That said, I think a good trick is to style the performative foods as Japanese bento style because kids are kinda easily swayed by look and feel of food, so if it’s cute or cool they are more likely to eat it. We’re planning on doing that anyway, mostly cause my wife was raised in Japan where that was common.

Another thing to keep in mind is parents are often the role models, so liking or disliking things will matter. If you hate fruits and veggies, they’ll notice.

I thought that too until today, it’s never clear until a quarter of the Internet is down randomly.

Same, Canvas is perhaps the most used Learning Management System in the US and they apparently are entirely hosted on AWS East. The real kicker is I had my students midterm due date literally today for two classes. I’ve been swamped with panic emails (and I made clear my due dates aren’t even that important when there isn’t a national outage lol).

My head canon is someone wished for a miracle due date extension somewhere in the country and they monkey’s pawed AWS into non existence.

Oh that makes sense, the codes probably open source. Those goons probably have minimal experience actually developing an app from scratch.

Oh no this one I know is real, I just mean, imagine how incredibly unlikely a story it’d be if they joined Lemmy or a Piefed instance.

They don’t really fit bluesky either but it’s popular enough I can see them try, lol

Edit: or wait, did you mean Truth Social being federated? Cause that’d be Not the Onion material lol

Now we need a parody article telling us the Whitehouse started hosting a fediverse instance. For once I don’t think people would eat that onion, lol

Literally right now, my daughter and I split an ice cream cookie sandwich after a long day of cleaning. It’s the simple things.

I’m playing through an old PS2 title Radiata Stories. I don’t get why this title is so overlooked! It’s really fucking funny to play in 2025 cause its weirdly apt with nepotism, classism and going to war over wage theft (kinda, anyway).

I don’t wanna spoil it though.

Good examples from others but I also want to bring up microaggressions. Basically, small things that add up, like a white woman gripping her bag tightly when a black man enters an elevator, or a white man crossing the street because a Latino guy is approaching who looks a little “gangy.” Usually they aren’t that progressive (e.g. they support diversity but critical race theory is a bridge too far).

That said, prejudice is something we all have and is part of human nature. It protects us historically from things like snakes and spiders who may not be venomous but on the off chance they are, better safe than sorry. Prejudice leads to stereotypes, stereotypes lead to discrimination. Conscious effort is needed to overcome that, and progressives do that better than not but no one is fully immune to your natural instincts.

Set it to humanity’s highest point: 1999. Things will get very confusing when they try and break me from the Matrix only to find it we’re in the holodeck.

I mean, they could include VPN for premium subscriptions I guess. Although at that point you already have a person’s credit card information, lol.

No, we ARE contrarians. Take that!

I went from full lurker to participant since I felt like I’m not completely drowned out by others. That made it more fun, since Lemmy all feed is pretty small relatively speaking and lurking gets boring if you’re expecting an endless feed of random junk. Plus, since it’s small, you can also feel like you’re contributing to the Lemmy community, since without your comments and posts, it won’t exist.

Although get to the bottom of the all feed and things get wild.

Yeah, that tracks with what I see, at least. Either it’s used as an excuse for layoffs that likely would happen anyway given the market, or they’re just included in a workflow without firing (the US was already in bad shape after COVID, with tech companies already laying off people they over-hired during lockdown)

I’ve got a friend who pays under the table to a guy to write and edit instructional videos, and still does that since there’s never enough videos to produce for her project. Just, now, the guy uses AI in his workflow and… I’d say maybe produces at about the same pace (fact checking the AI takes time, lol).

But basically, AI didn’t replace her copy writer / editor, they just scaled up (or at least, attempted to, lol).

It’s kind of a who’s who of questionable comedians. Curious from a moral perspective: if one takes the gig and donates their proceeds to a charitable cause, are they off the hook?

Another thing I’m reminded of is, I’ve heard many big comedians have had a gig at a corporate event at one point or another (I’ve heard some refer to them as terrible audiences lol). In that world, you’re kinda trained early on to never turn down a gig… but if they were to headline a company event for say, Nestle or United Healthcare or something, are we ok with that too?

Was gonna say, those exact names would be the people I expect to not go. Atsuko and Marc in particular would really surprise me.

Too bad PS4 emulation isn’t quite there yet. You can, however, pirate the fuck out of the earlier games, DLC and all. Truly a better way to play, cause that DLC was hella expensive.

I used to walk an hour and a half to get home from university, but I bussed to get there so I could sleep later and not be too sweaty when I arrived. I believe this would hold true for a library, as I tend to use that time to reflect on what I learned and plan out things.

That said, I’m an outlier; most people won’t walk more than an hour, or even 30 minutes, unless I promise them a fun stop on the way or something.

I was thinking about this deal and… I guess it makes sense the Saudis want in on the gaming industry. I recall a long while ago an old article about the industry (probably second hand via Polygon) that noted just how much Saudis whale on mobile and loot box games. It was so disproportionate, their nobility was like 2% of a mobile title’s revenue… literally just a few big families.

So my thinking is, EA, being the kind of shitty company it is, is actually probably pretty popular among Saudi nobility. That and FIFA, of course — imagine pay to win when you have infinite money.