Ernest

last year was my first time; looking forward to doing it every year now

because in the long medium term sooner than I imagine, those things are going to happen anyway. Presenting it as a choice between “saving (some) fed employees” vs “fucking them over” is disingenuous. The actual choice is between “ceding power and the news narrative” vs not. People are upset that the Dems keep doing this, despite the long history of “working across the aisle” not working.

To address your specific points: just because there are things the Republicans want, doesn’t mean they’re “good” for them (see: all? of their policies). In the case of federal employees, passing the “CR”* isn’t going to get them paid–the GOP doesn’t care what the laws say (obviously). The Dems should be obstructing other ridiculous funding bills as well, because the only thing they can do is be in the news cycle for obstruction (and then using that time to sell progressive policies that most people agree with). That’s the only leverage they have. This appeasement threw that away. The hive of scum and villainy is only going to continue their illegal cuts, and the correct response is to fight back, not to lend them more legitimacy. Dems have tried that for decades and this is what it’s gotten us.

*: it’s not really a “continuing” resolution, as it has a bunch of Trumpian garbage in it that wasn’t in the previous appropriations bill. They’re just… calling it that, and Senate Dems have tacitly endorsed it as such.

or even a center strip that “staples” the two halves together with pegs running through holes in the two halves (probably sturdier than glue but also uglier)

If you’re willing to change up the design aesthetic and have other materials lying around (e.g. dowels, rods, some kind of sheeting), you could also just print the “end caps” with slots for the main body.

This also has the advantage of being sturdier and maybe easier to print, but the design might be more involved.

if you use Caddy they even take care of that part for you

I know I’m just dumb but for some reason Caddy is just so much easier to set up than nginx or fiddling with .htaccess files; I’d always fuck something up

speculating here, but the “auto-generated ones” are probably just the ones in the opengraph tags, which is supposed to be what the website intended as the thumbnail. It’s more likely that these websites’ operators don’t have a clue that opengraph is being used, but since they’re the “proper” way to do embeds, lemmy can’t just ignore them, either.

yeah, but it’s really easy to justify anything being AI, since there’s always something slightly off or some mistake somewhere even with human art

For emoji kitchen specifically, I know Jennifer Daniel (formerly Google’s blobmoji, now more famous as Unicode’s emoji subcommittee chair) does a lot of them (if not all?), since she tweets about it a lot. (For what it’s worth, she also seems kinda anti-AI.)

Having gone in to modify some of the emoji kitchen combinations myself, you can tell that someone was editing the original files (SVGs/Illustrator/whatever vector graphics were originally used to make them), either with a template or just some kind of copy/paste job, and there are parts that were obviously just mirrored (something genAI is usually pretty bad at). I’m specifically thinking of all the little facets on the diamond + heart combos.

I’m like 95% sure you’ll be able to find tweets where she talks about actually drawing the emojis if you scroll back far enough, but Twitter is so completely unusable now I’m not going to be the one to look for them