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.

I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.

Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.

Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I’m not sure if I completely understand.

Pointers also didn’t appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.

It also didn’t help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn’t seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn’t much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.

And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.

I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.

I’ve known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.

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.

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 don’t think I could say, honestly. My last (and first) dumb phone was a hand-me-down from my mother c2009, and I rarely used it. It spent most of its remaining life in a drawer with its battery removed, only coming out when I was going places where other forms of communication would be scarce. I think I made maybe a dozen calls (and one seriously garbled text message) before grudgingly getting a smart device in 2011.

And yes, my Boomer mother had gone through multiple cell phones before her Millennial son got his first.

I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.

This hour has 22 minutes indeed.

I hate this two sentence headline format (“John Doe did blankety-blank. Now he’s yadda yadda whatever”) almost as much as I hate seeing headlines with the words, “slam,” “rip,” and “sparks outrage.”

When I was growing up, my two sisters and I decided what to watch on TV pretty much by pure, brutal democracy. They formed a bloc against me and I always got outvoted, so it was Little House on the Prairie (and The Waltons) every day after school.

I feel this in my soul. My university house had mould on the bathroom ceiling, and one of my roommates was allergic - they went into violent sneezing fits every time they showered.

Our landlords tried everything to avoid addressing it, up to claiming that, “people couldn’t be allergic to mould like that.”

They only “fixed” it after one of my other roommates threatened to talk to his father who was a lawyer. Their “fix” was to paste over the ceiling with vinyl plates.

Don’t forget every magical staff , necklace, and ring that casts a spell.

Will I ever use Create Water from the Rain Dancer? Probably not, especially with Shadowheart lugging around more than a dozen bottles of water. But what if I really need it?

Bit of an obscure one, but Fire Emblem Gaiden.

There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.

I ordered a roller blind through a website. I measured the width down to the millimetre based on their instructions and triple-checked checked the measurement before submitting the order. I also selected the option to indicate that the blind was to be mounted outside my window frame (important for later).

My roller arrived two weeks later and was nearly 3cm shorter than what I had ordered. I only discovered this after I had mounted the brackets on my wall, again using their instructions (which explicitly said to use the measurements I provided in the order).

Customer service first said that this was a normal deduction made to all orders. When I asked them why they would make a deduction after asking for exact measurements in the order form, they said that they deduction was to make sure the blind fits inside the window frame.

I then pointed out that I was mounting the blind outside my window frame, as indicated in my order, and didn’t need the deduction. I also pointed out that while their product page did mention a deduction for rollers being mounted inside of a window frame, there was no indication this would apply to rollers being mounted outside of a frame like mine was. I finally pointed out that the installation instructions made no mention of the deduction and explicitly said to use them measurements from the order. They proverbially shrugged and repeated that the deduction was standard on all orders.

When I asked about a replacement, because I literally had them on record admitting to deliberately sending me a product that was different than what I had paid for, they said they wouldn’t send a replacement until I had donated the first roller to charity and sent them a receipt or thank-you letter.

I did some research just to humour them, and I could not find a charity that would take a roller blind in any condition, let alone one with no mounting hardware. And I don’t live in a small town, so it’s not like there just weren’t charities around - there were plenty, but none of them would take a roller blind. When I pointed this out to customer service, I was told to just drop the roller in a donation box and take a picture. I’m not 100% sure of the by-laws, but that sure sounds like they wanted me to record myself illegally dumping their product.

At this point I was fed up, so I left a nasty review on Google and on their product page. They were too craven to actually post my review to their website, but the Google review went up. Within a few hours they reached back and finally offered me an unconditional replacement. I still had to order a roller that was longer than what I actually needed because there was no result l way to stop them from making the deduction.

My replacement blind finally arrived six weeks after putting in the replacement order, nearly triple the wait time of the initial order.

Also, they didn’t do it to me, but other people who left bad reviews often got snidely told, “we have a 4.7 star rating on Google,” as part of the company’s public response, as if lots of people being satisfied with their products somehow negated the complaints of those who weren’t.

teenage_wasteland_the_who.mp3

Different problem, same vibe.

My work phone is specifically partitioned to separate personal and work activities. I can’t even copy and paste text between the two sides, they are so disconnected from each other. This is done specifically so people can use their work phone for personal business without cross-contamination.

I still refuse to use my work phone for anything but work. I only log into my personal accounts long enough to install/update a few apps from the Play Store that aren’t allowed on the work side but are still useful (MS Teams, WhatsApp).

Part of that is not wanting to enter a 12 character password every time I want to do anything simple . But the other part is that I just don’t want to mix my personal and work lives more than I have to.

I believe it’s 8000 in the manga.

You’d think so, but every couple of months there’s another post making the rounds on the internet because some oblivious person completely missed the message of their favourite band.

My last haircut + beard trim was about $40 CAD, and I tipped 20%.

Now I tend to go to nicer places, so the price is a bit higher than Magicuts or something. My hair is also a pain to deal with so I generally tip well.