IMO, best practice is still to use the current name/pronouns. I think it's OK to say something like "Caitlyn, formerly known as Bruce" if clarity is needed and then proceed with current name going forward. In this instance, everyone knew who we were talking about so it was unnecessary.
As someone who's used both, I think men's and women's restrooms are equally gross overall. Humans is humans, bodies is bodies, grossness doesn't discriminate, etc.
I find regular oat milk and/or almond milk too watery, same as you. Oat milk or almond milk-based creamers are where it's at for me. Califia Farms also makes a "barista blend" oat milk specifically for coffee drinks if you can find it.
Website recommendation: Cookie and Kate. Generally pretty easy recipes and I haven't been disappointed yet. The Vegan Lasagna is a lot of work but 100% worth it.
Book recs: Moosewood Simple Suppers and Weeknight One-Pot Vegan Cooking. I checked the latter out from the library and liked so many of the recipes that I immediately bought a copy. And I actually made one of ny faves out of the Moosewood book last night: Lemony Couscous with Chickpeas. I like to cut the couscous down to one cup and throw an extra can of chickpeas in, but it's good as-written too.
I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I'd recommend SpiralLinux. It's basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don't think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you'd need to manually upgrade but that's not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.
So the NVIDIA graphics card is not as big of an issue as it would have been even five years ago. Just use the proprietary drivers. And for my money, Linux Mint is the best distro for beginners, hands-down. You never have to touch the command line and everything just works.
I second this, with the addition that you can also use DistroSea to test-drive distros in your browser. Also, DistroWatch has a search that you can filter by "Beginners" to find some that might be easier.
A friend of mine is working on an internal AI chatbot at their company, so that the Least-Productive Team will have something to answer the same 5 questions that they keep asking to Friend's (extremely productive) team, instead of wasting Friend et al's time.
So I guess that's the one use case of AI bots: to dangle keys in front of MBAs who are too stupid to do their own jobs. Which explains everything, really.
California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it's so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there's a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It's not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.
IMO, best practice is still to use the current name/pronouns. I think it's OK to say something like "Caitlyn, formerly known as Bruce" if clarity is needed and then proceed with current name going forward. In this instance, everyone knew who we were talking about so it was unnecessary.