Zero tolerance policies aren’t meant to protect students, and they aren’t even meant to protect bullies. They’re meant to protect teachers and principals, mostly from having to face scrutiny for how they handle bullying. They can just punish all parties equally and wash their hands of the matter, and any criticism can be deflected by saying, “zero tolerance; everyone was treated the same.”

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.

My own experience, as someone who is not necessarily tech illiterate, but also not an expert either:

I decided to check out some basic Linux stuff, and found a post directing newcomers to a website that was supposed to be a top-notch beginner’s guide. This guide started with a history of Linux, written in the style of an early 2000s GameFAQs guide. It then jumped immediately into selecting a distro, and started describing each option with terms like "lightweight"and “robust” without explaining what those terms meant in that context - or even defining what a distro was in the first place.

As someone who has used Windows for around 3 decades, I could make some inferences to fill in the gaps. But I imagine someone with less experience with PCs would get completely lost.

Now on the flip side, I’ve also shared in another thread the story of how I lost interest in programming partway through my introductory university course, and mostly received positive feedback. The folks in that thread seemed happy to hear the perspective of an outsider.

My angel is the centrefold?

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

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 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?

I fully appreciate that, and it’s the same in Canada for many people. I’ve witnessed it personally. I’m very fortunate to be in a position to handle that sort of thing.

The hospital just wrote it off instead, so the cost was passed to the Canadian taxpayer. Lucky for me, but frustrating all the same. I would have rather the insurance pay like the were supposed to.

Hell, I’m from Canada where we have (mostly) socialized medicine, and the one time I made a claim on private insurance it was denied. That was after I had called them to confirm that yes, my policy (should have) covered that expense.

And it was only a few hundred bucks too, so my frustration was more about the principle of the thing rather than the cost.

Any ____son is a last name. FYI the etymology is son of Jack, son of ____.

There’s something similar in Slavic languages with suffixes like -ovic, -ic, -icz, -ich, etc. So “Djokovic” means “little son of Djoko.”

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.

Different denominations have different traditions. Christianity is not a monolith and has split many, many, many times.

My experience is that the more separated the church is from the oldest denominations, the less likely the priest or pastor is to wear “traditional” garb. The church in the picture is some flavour of southern evangelical, and so is pretty far removed from Roman Catholicism.

I grew up in a reformed Calvinist tradition and the pastors always wore suits. In later years, younger pastors would even ditch the jacket in the summer.

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.