It really wants me to host a webinar. I get a pop-up every day telling me about how great this function supposedly is. You’d think there was a VC generative AI project attached to it with how hard it’s being pushed.

Nah, just the sad message of “Pretty please love me (because we sunk a bunch of money into this).”

Connections Puzzle #445
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One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would otherwise be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.

My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.

Here’s the story.

The actual monetary loss to Air Canada (known affectionately as Fuckstick Flights Inc.) was insignificant, but the PR was bad.

Then again, I can’t remember the last time AC had positive press. Before that they forced a guy with cerebral palsy to drag himself off the plane.

Wordle 1,162 3/6*

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I changed up my starter word and it paid off.

I phrase my dislike of dogs differently: I do not care for 99.9% of dogs. If a (human) friend has a dog, I will dutifully engage with it on a limited basis. I may even enjoy myself a bit, too.

But a random person walking their dog in the park? Please keep it away from me. I don’t care how much of a “good boy” you think your pup is, I don’t know or trust them.

I’ll fully admit to being completely ignorant about voting the first time I did it. I was politically disengaged for moody teenager reasons, but my parents forced me to go to the polling station anyway. I didn’t care to vote for any of the candidates, but was also worried that I would get in trouble if I spoiled my ballot because I hadn’t paid attention in civics (again, for moody teenager reasons).

Wasn’t the “sigma” personality just invented by incels when they realized that “being alpha” didn’t work the way they thought it did and therefore they needed a new paradigm to keep their worldview from collapsing? Or am I remembering that wrong?

Wordle 1,102 3/6*

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Wordle 1,099 4/6*

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The answer was fairly obvious after my third guess.

Wordle 1,098 2/6*

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I got lucky for the second day in a row.

Wordle 1,097 2/6*

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Got lucky today.

EDIT: I’m bad at formatting

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.

I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading their review of the thing, it sounds an absolute nightmare to use.

Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using the assistant in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.

The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.

I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.

My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we’ve learned, these milestones sneak up on you.

I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That’s around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend’s house within the neighbourhood on my own.

Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.

Don’t be afraid to mess around with the class system and try out things beyond the default mono-elemental classes. There’s no penalty for changing your class setup every so often, or even after every fight

My story is a bit different than others. I am not a Trekkie, and most of what I know about the franchise is from cultural osmosis and from catching the odd rerun of TNG in the 90s.

I have, however, been a junior officer in a ship, and much of Lower Deck’s content struck a chord because I’ve been there. I’ve been assigned the banal tasks, I’ve argued with other crew members on an opposite watch, and I’ve had to fight for the attention of the senior officers.

Disclaimer: I am not encouraging you to join the navy just to enjoy LD. That would be silly.