I think that was Kent Hovind, not Ken Ham.

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

One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would 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.

Furthermore, there is an option to destroy the special “gift” if you can resist accepting it. However, all you get for doing so is a few brief lines from the Emperor. Your companions don’t seem to notice, and there isn’t even an quest log update.

Anxious Times by The Luka State or Hardship to Sail by Excuses Excuses.

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).

It was pure coincidence that I saw it when I did.

*meddle

For clarity:

• Metal (noun): an elementary substance with high opacity, ductility, and conductivity
• Medal (noun): a badge made of metal, earned through merit
• Mettle (noun): courage
• Meddle (verb): to interfere in matters where one is not welcome

As I said in another topic, this is the only way to play FF3 in its original form (or at least close to it) and in a language other than Japanese, outside of emulation. The DS remake is fine, but it is definitely a different experience.

The Stone Angel.

It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.

And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.

Canada’s military is small enough that there is typically only one officer with the rank of General (or Admiral if they are from the navy), and their position is the Chief of Defence Staff. I think a second General is appointed if Canada gets a seat on the UN Security Council, to act as the senior military advisor for the delegation.

There are more Lieutenant Generals (and Vice Admirals), and the CDS is appointed from their ranks when a new one is needed.

EDIT: To clarify further, there are multiple ranks with the word “general” in them. In order of increasing seniority, they are (with equivalent navy ranks in parentheses):

1. Brigadier General (Commodore)
2. Major General (Rear Admiral)
3. Lieutenant General (Vice Admiral)
4. General (Admiral)

I’ve been a Star Wars fan for almost three decades and I think almost all Disney Star Wars is “fine” at worst. Even most of the things I didn’t like had some sort of redeeming qualities, or I could recognize that I wasn’t the target audience. The only thing I truly hated was Rise of the Skywalker, which is quite possibly my least favourite Star Wars thing ever.

I realize this puts me in the very small minority among Star Wars fans, and it’s the reason I tend to avoid fan discussions these days - the relentless negativity is exhausting and leaves little room for discussing the things about Disney Star Wars I find good and/or interesting.

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 Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like 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 it 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 the 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.

Briefly: I didn’t.

More substantively: I never owned a cell phone growing up, even though I was at the right age when they became a common thing for teenagers to have. It wasn’t a money thing, nor household rule, as my sisters got phones when they were in high school. The biggest reason was probably just how I communicate. I wasn’t big into IM services either, and I preferred email or face-to-face, or a (landline) phone call if it was an urgent matter.

Then there was also my adolescent brain thinking I was making a bold counter-culture statement by steadfastly resisting the march of technology. In reality, I was probably just being a pain in the neck for my friends and family, and I probably unnecessarily endangered myself at least once.

I did finally, begrudgingly, get an old hand-me-down flip-phone in my final year of university, but that was out of necessity, and I used it to make maybe only a dozen calls the 2.5 years I had it before getting a smart device.

To bring it full circle: I did try sending a text message with that flip-phone exactly once, at the insistence of my family. That message was predictably a garbled mess, and to this day my sisters still wonder how I managed to get a number to appear in the middle of the “word”.

I have a number of other somewhat amusing stories about people’s reactions to my lack of a cellphone, but this post is long enough already.

Am I the only person in my generation who never learned to type on a number pad? It wasn’t the only thing I didn’t recognize from the “test”, but it stuck out to me.

Well, there’s the fact that outrage seems to drive more activity than other types of content. YouTube sees it as a more profitable option to advertise a Very Angry Gamer™ to you, even if you aren’t interested. I guess they assume that you’ll find something to watch anyhow, but if they will profit even more of they can hook you into the outrage machine.

Then there’s my personal hypothesis that in order to enable this, YouTube’s algorithm weights your demographics, subscriptions, and viewing history much more heavily than your manual inputs.

I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.

Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.

Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I’m not sure if I completely understand.

Pointers also didn’t appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.

It also didn’t help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn’t seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn’t much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.

And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.

I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.

I’ve known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.