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 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.

While jarring and ad hoc, I didn’t think BSG’s finale was catastrophic. I honestly disliked the transition from S2 to S3 more than I disliked the ending.

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.

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.

So say we all.

Somewhat related, I wonder how much of an effect birth month can have on a child’s school performance, social development, and athletic ability.

Where I live, a child is eligible for junior kindergarten starting in September of the year they turn four. A child born in January would therefore be around 56 months old on their first day of school. Meanwhile, a child born in December would be around 45 months instead. That is a substantial gap, and my experience with kids that age is that even a difference of a few months can see dramatic changes.

I’m personally thinking right now of my nephew, who starts JK in a few weeks. He will turn four right before Christmas, and when he returns from holidays, some of his classmates will start turning six because he’ll be in a combined JK/SK class. I can’t imagine how difficult it might be for him to keep up with those much older classmates, a situation caused by virtue of his birthday.

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).

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.

I’m just getting to the end of reading Orconomics, and it had a somewhat novel take on this. Basically, elves live so long that their entire personality can change century over century because they meet, and subsequently outlive, so many new people.

The really quick, really accessible version is the Extra Credits videos, though understand that they simplified a lot of things, and made some mistakes (which they admit to in a follow-up video).

The Great War YouTube channel also covers some of the same ground in an accessible but more rigorous manner, though I don’t remember them going over all the “clash of empires” background stuff.

On the far other end, I liked the book The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan. It’s a dense tome, but it’s chock full of details.

Same with me and WW1. There are so many more factors to the start of that conflict than the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

My wife is from an Eastern European country, and whenever we visit her folks I have a similar experience. Every single restaurant reeks of smoke, and there is apparently no political appetite to change that.

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.

They also had to cram sensationalist words like “scorching” in there, because apparently the Venn diagram of the WWE and American politics is nearly a circle.

I’m 188cm (6’2") and grew up in a fairly insular community of Dutch people and their descendants. I thought I was average height until I left that bubble went to university.