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.

I mean, Traveller’s Gate is still good, if a bit unpolished in hindsight. It’s just plain fun, especially if you’re familiar with fantasy and anime tropes, though I recommend keeping a glossary nearby to make the comprehension of the the various terms easier.

The Last Horizon, the series he’s working on now, is also a lot of fun. It mixes sci-fi and fantasy, and all the main characters are already able to bench-press continents (literally or proverbially), so their development comes via different avenues than Cradle, where Lindon’s personal growth was tied directly to his power level. I wasn’t as enamoured with the second Last Horizon book as I was the first, but it was still good, and unless Will Wight starts writing Nazi propaganda or something I’ll continue to read everything he publishes.

I’ve been reading Will Wight’s stuff since the first Traveller’s Gate book. He’s my favourite living author.

Orthos, sacred beast of the Path of the Black Flame

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.

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.

A quick rundown of the Ten Commandments, for those who never went to Sunday School:

• Four are theocratic authoritarianism
• Three are obvious crimes that appear in law codes the world over, even without the influence of Judaism
• One is useful in some civil proceedings, but most modern criminal codes don’t label it a felony
• One is okay as general life advice, but isn’t universally applicable, and it has weird theocratic qualifier
• One is a thought crime

In summary, not the best basis for a society.

He sparked outrage by torching the GOP. You’ll never believe what happened next

I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.

I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.

My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was “impossible” because I had “just renewed.” It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service another year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn’t let me do.

My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.

Or so I thought.

I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I’m presuming they were going to ignore.

Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents’ behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse

Definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to cancel a subscription.

Having learned French as a second language, I can say that the gendered noun thing wasn’t the most difficult aspect, but it was the most consistently annoying. There are signifiers that makes the gender of some nouns very obvious, but then there are just as many others where it feels arbitrary or even contradictory to the established trends.

Don’t forget “rip”.

I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.

This hour has 22 minutes indeed.

I’ve seen S2E1 so far. It was a bit slow, but at least Egwene and Nynaeve are mostly in the right spot, and Perrin is almost exactly where he’s supposed to be (a bit strange considering of the five main characters he was the one with the biggest change to his backstory)

I’m probably on my own in being a big fan of the books and also liking the first season for the most part. Despite the changes, the world felt recognizably like Randland. I only really hated the last episode.

But that last episode was an absolute trash fire. It wasn’t just different, it was wrong. A bunch of characters and story elements are either killed off, not present to begin with, or in the wrong place at the start of the second season.

I’m willing to forgive a lot of that due to the troubles the production had with COVID and the loss of one of the main actors. All that was on top of regular old studio meddling that happens with these things.

My hope then is that the second season will go about trying to correct everything and put all the characters where they are supposed to be at the start of season three, which I’m assuming will align with the third book.

I ordered a roller blind through a website. I measured the width down to the millimetre based on their instructions and triple-checked checked the measurement before submitting the order. I also selected the option to indicate that the blind was to be mounted outside my window frame (important for later).

My roller arrived two weeks later and was nearly 3cm shorter than what I had ordered. I only discovered this after I had mounted the brackets on my wall, again using their instructions (which explicitly said to use the measurements I provided in the order).

Customer service first said that this was a normal deduction made to all orders. When I asked them why they would make a deduction after asking for exact measurements in the order form, they said that they deduction was to make sure the blind fits inside the window frame.

I then pointed out that I was mounting the blind outside my window frame, as indicated in my order, and didn’t need the deduction. I also pointed out that while their product page did mention a deduction for rollers being mounted inside of a window frame, there was no indication this would apply to rollers being mounted outside of a frame like mine was. I finally pointed out that the installation instructions made no mention of the deduction and explicitly said to use them measurements from the order. They proverbially shrugged and repeated that the deduction was standard on all orders.

When I asked about a replacement, because I literally had them on record admitting to deliberately sending me a product that was different than what I had paid for, they said they wouldn’t send a replacement until I had donated the first roller to charity and sent them a receipt or thank-you letter.

I did some research just to humour them, and I could not find a charity that would take a roller blind in any condition, let alone one with no mounting hardware. And I don’t live in a small town, so it’s not like there just weren’t charities around - there were plenty, but none of them would take a roller blind. When I pointed this out to customer service, I was told to just drop the roller in a donation box and take a picture. I’m not 100% sure of the by-laws, but that sure sounds like they wanted me to record myself illegally dumping their product.

At this point I was fed up, so I left a nasty review on Google and on their product page. They were too craven to actually post my review to their website, but the Google review went up. Within a few hours they reached back and finally offered me an unconditional replacement. I still had to order a roller that was longer than what I actually needed because there was no result l way to stop them from making the deduction.

My replacement blind finally arrived six weeks after putting in the replacement order, nearly triple the wait time of the initial order.

Also, they didn’t do it to me, but other people who left bad reviews often got snidely told, “we have a 4.7 star rating on Google,” as part of the company’s public response, as if lots of people being satisfied with their products somehow negated the complaints of those who weren’t.

My work phone is specifically partitioned to separate personal and work activities. I can’t even copy and paste text between the two sides, they are so disconnected from each other. This is done specifically so people can use their work phone for personal business without cross-contamination.

I still refuse to use my work phone for anything but work. I only log into my personal accounts long enough to install/update a few apps from the Play Store that aren’t allowed on the work side but are still useful (MS Teams, WhatsApp).

Part of that is not wanting to enter a 12 character password every time I want to do anything simple . But the other part is that I just don’t want to mix my personal and work lives more than I have to.

“Just be yourself and you’ll make lots of friends at your new school.”

Four years of constant bullying and loneliness later: I have one acquaintance that would eventually become my friend after a few more years. I also have basically no self-confidence, and my social development is set back half a decade as I’m still looking for friends to have sleepovers with when everyone else has moved on to normal teenager stuff.