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?
“Swearing”
5th grade, first day at a new school. I’m trying to meet new kids, but I’m terribly awkward. I try to lead one conversation with some humour “Did you know the Bible says you shouldn’t covet your neighbour’s ass?”
Cue some other kid running off to find a teacher, which resulted in me having to skip recess and write an essay about how I shouldn’t swear because it is a bad influence on younger kids.
Over the following four years I was on the receiving end of invective many times more aggressive and offensive, sometimes right in front of teachers, but I never saw another kid punished for foul language.
And this is the saddest part. The primary victims will be young children, suffering through a potentially deadly disease because of their parents’ credulity.
I think so too. The doctors didn’t even mention the possibility when my son was born, and if we had wanted it we would have had to specifically ask.
It was very common in Canada too. My parents decided to break the cycle with me, but I was the only uncircumcised guy in the locker room growing up in the 90s.
It’s stereotypical, but I want to continue getting fit.
After decades is putting it off, I finally felt inspired to start exercising regularly back in September. I’m going to try to keep that up, and I know it’s going to be hard because we’ll be welcoming a child into the world early in the new year.
I guess another resolution would be, “try not to lose my sanity dealing with a newborn and toddler at the same time.”
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.
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.
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.
At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate “do not use” by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn’t want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.
My version of this story happened in the gymnasium. My class, along with the students from three other classes, were all formed up as a choir and had just wrapped up practicing a song for the school’s Christmas play. One kid let loose, and the whole assembly made a very hasty (and disorderly) retreat, leaving the poor guy standing in a puddle of his own vomit.
When I was learning French I was told penser and croire were interchangeable in this context.
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.
Between my wife and me, we have Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Curiosity, DropOut, and Nebula for videos. I also have one paid Twitch subscription. We could probably stand to cancel one or two.
For music, I have Spotify and my wife has YouTube Music. We have different preferences in sorting and recommendations, and at this point either of us migrating to the other’s preferred service would be more work than it’s probably worth.
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.
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.