I’m a sailor.
Ships sound a certain way, even when not sailing. If they ever sound differently, you know something has happened and you’ll have to respond to it. Even if it’s just a drill, the response is the same.
My sailing days are actually behind me, but I still get tense when I hear unusual sounds in my house or office.
I’m extremely sensitive to changes in noise levels. Whether it’s a very loud and short noise, like a door slamming, or some change in background noise, like a furnace turning on, I’m just acutely aware of it.
All my grandparents save one have passed on, and I have no actual relationship with the one that still lives. So I’m not terribly concerned about her, beyond how much I care for any other random senior citizen.
To answer the spirit of the question, though we can talk about my parents, who are grandparents now.
Both are educated and about as tech proficient as I am. However, my mom nearly got caught in a gift card scam a few years ago, where someone was posing as one of her friends. She had even bought the cards, but insisted on going to give them in-person, which exposed the scam.
Because of that, I think my parents are actually pretty safe, as they are now extra vigilant about the messages they receive, and know to follow up anything suspicious using an alternate communication method.
I know, “once bitten twice shy,” isn’t the best defence, but alternate communication methods are. Stress to your loved ones that if they ever recieve a message from someone asking for money, to follow up using a different medium.
I can think of a bunch of other things that Google should be embarrassed about, but Gemini is uniquely humiliating because of how proud they are of it and how hard they are pushing it.
Copilot is one of two LLMs I’ve briefly tried. It was noticeably better than Gemini was at the time, but still seemed entirely pointless. Nothing it (or Gemini) offered to do were things I wanted help with. I enjoy research and writing, so why would I outsource those things and burn down an acre of rainforest in the process?
And this is the saddest part. The primary victims will be young children, suffering through a potentially deadly disease because of their parents’ credulity.
The article says “Canadian leaders” but only mentions the Deputy PM by name. That troubles me.
Canada is on track to a Conservative government in our next election. The current Liberal regime is long in the tooth and Trudeau is unpopular. One of my biggest worries is that the new Conservative government will put appeasing Trump over the interests of Canadians.
I looked at a few Canadian news outlets, and it seems that this announcement by the Deputy PM is coming on the heels of a First Ministers’ meeting, which is the council of the PM and all ten provincial premiers. Nothing about this indicates that the federal opposition is on board, though the most conservative premier (Danielle Smith of Alberta) seemed to think it was a productive meeting.
That I will never enjoy the taste of wine.
I figured out I would never like coffee in my teens, and had the same realization about beer in my 20s.
But it wasn’t until this year, in my mid-thirties, that I finally accepted that I don’t like the taste of wine and probably never will. After years of trying the full spectrum of wines, I had to admit that it wasn’t the “notes” that were turning me off, nor was it a problem with the quality of the wine. It was the fundamental “wine-ness” that I disliked, the same as I don’t like the “beer-ness” of beer or the “coffee-ness” of coffee.
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).”
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
In the “Big Book,” the foundational document of these programs, “Chapter 4: We Agnostics” tells atheists and agnostics that they are “doomed to alcoholic death” unless they “seek Him.” The chapter characterizes non-believers as “handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.”
This really jumped out at me. What a horrible thing to say about someone, especially someone looking for help.
“The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives,” so goes the old hymn.