I got a free three month trial for Google’s AI Pro plan, and Google wouldn’t shut up about the fact that I had the offer waiting, so I gave it a shot. It’s been more annoying than anything else. Gemini made me feel icky when I tried it, and now I get irritating popups asking me to use an AI tool every single time I go to type something in a Doc or Sheet

My brother in Christ, I am misusing Google Sheets to plan my character builds in Final Fantasy Tactics. I have entered all the information in the sheet by hand, and it is mostly text. This information cannot be put into a graph of any kind. I do not need your help with anything.

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 have been the passenger in a vehicle where the driver didn’t wear their seatbelt, and they drove 30 minutes down the highway with the chime going. I think he may have been partway deaf due to using power tools without ear protection, but now we have two data points in a trend.

Considering he was a smoker too, I wonder what his life is like now 15 years later.

I’m in my mid-late thirties, and my recovery time is about the same as it was in my mid twenties. This is because when I was 26 I had major abdominal surgery. That experience ended up delineating my life, having boundless vigour before and but needing to carefully measure my energy and actions after.

It’s a personal thing, but the smell of cumin kills my appetite. I had a bad experience with it once and I can’t shake the association between the smell and the experience.

I don’t know how to feel about it being an RTS, as I’m pretty bad at those.

I guess a straight slow-time game might end up too similar to the board game, though.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

Here’s my original post again. I bolded the key part: it’s Trump telling the lie, and the news organizations are credulously repeating it.

This same article doesn’t provide any pushback to this claim until much later in the article, and then it only says that, “Carney said Canada accounts for only about 1% of fentanyl imports into the US,” instead of calling it what it is: a lie.

This is what has my onions cheesed: that major news outlets are uncritically repeating all the fetid slop that spews from Trump’s mouth. Another example was the ‘Governor Trudeau’ bit from a few months ago, where I saw one clip of a gormless CNN anchor nod their empty head and chuckle as Trump’s lapdog displayed the most wanton disregard for civility and the truth.

Canada had “failed to cooperate” in curbing the flow of fentanyl and other drugs across the US border. The Canadian government says it is cracking down on drug gangs.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

My angel is the centrefold?

Assuming you were aiming for the French phrase for ‘seafood’, I think you meant ‘fruit de mer.’

‘Fruit de la mère’ would translate to, ‘fruit of the mother.’

If you were talking about neckties, maybe. Loosening social ties doesn’t sound natural, at least to me.

This recently happened in my campaign.

We were fighting a dragon, and it kept flying around its lair, making it very hard for my Barbarian to hit it. We ultimately won, but 3 of the party of 5 died.

Later, while dividing loot, I saw that I had been carrying a Potion of Flying the whole time, and the fight probably would have gone better if I had used it.

You’re right, they don’t.

The ones beginning with “d” generally translate as “of the,” while the “à” ones generally translate as “to the” or “at the.”

French has three words that mean “the”: “le” (masculine), “la” (feminine), and “les” (plural).

I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn’t want them learning about naughty bits.

So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear “private religious school.”

I was thinking Flagpole Sitta, but that works too

Or a 90s indie song.

If I can’t find a Canadian version of a product, I look for Mexico next.

Help your neighbours, everyone.

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?

“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.