BenVimes

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.

The whole thing is tragic, but this part worried me:

"... [Lopez] suggested the presence of Robinson’s DNA didn’t mean DuBoise wasn’t also at the murder scene."

With no other evidence of the innocent man being at the scene, and hard evidence of the presence of another, unrelated man being there instead, she still wants to set the threshold of innocence at "prove DuBoise wasn't there!"

Maybe someone with legal training can clarify, but it seems to me that under that standard anyone without a rock-solid alibi is automatically a suspect, even if their is no grounds for suspicion otherwise.

They harassed the guy's family on the Facebook page they had set up to look for him because he had gone missing.

EDIT: Also, once the actual perpetrators were identified, some users tried to excuse their appalling behaviour by blaming the innocent man for "acting suspicious."

OoT is one of my favourite games ever and I've replayed it countless times. And yet, catching the loach remains the only (intended) thing I've never done. Maybe I'll boot up an old file later and finally do it.

It's the most accessible Paradox grand strategy game I've played.

That still means it's as dense as pea soup, but its nested tooltip system makes learning the game's key terms much easier.

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.

Well, there's the fact that outrage seems to drive more activity than other types of content. YouTube sees it as a more profitable option to advertise a Very Angry Gamer(tm) to you, even if you aren't interested. I guess they assume that you'll find something to watch anyhow, but if they will profit even more of they can hook you into the outrage machine.

Then there's my personal hypothesis that in order to enable this, YouTube's algorithm weights your demographics, subscriptions, and viewing history much more heavily than your manual inputs.