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.

Bell was available in Nova Scotia when I lived there. It’s also in Ontario. I can’t speak for other provinces.

There are actually three major telecom companies making up 85%+ of the market share: Bell, Rogers, and Telus. Don’t be fooled by names like Virgin, Fido, and Koodo, as those are just the “lite” subsidiaries of the three major companies respectively.

For supermarkets there is Loblaws, as you said. But, it’s not like Sobeys and Metro are much better, they just keep their robber-baron executives better hidden.

It might have been 22 Minutes instead of Air Farce, and it might have been Stockwell Day instead of Preston Manning. I couldn’t find a video clip using any combination of show and politician.

As I said, it’s deep memory from long ago. I mostly remember it for personal reasons and not the actual joke. But, you’ve reassured me that it wasn’t just a hallucination on my part.

There’s the Christian Heritage Party. I’ve known several people who have voted for them at one time or another.

Somewhere deep in my memories there is a Royal Canadian Air Farce skit about Preston Manning (I think) and how he “didn’t campaign on Sundays.” The joke is that him highlighting his supposed piety of respecting the Sabbath was, in and of itself, an act of campaigning. I did a quick search for the skit and couldn’t find it, unfortunately.

Now, decades later, we have a party leader not just campaigning on Sunday, but making political speeches from the pulpit. I can’t help but think this is a step backwards.

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

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.