Maybe there should be four buttons:
Which could be used for more filtering options.
Or maybe a separate agreement/disagree metric. I wouldn’t mind seeing the consensus on a topic separate from the measure of usefulness.
It’s just that it’s boring. I’d rather have an interesting debate. Downvoting everything you simply disagree with just leads to groupthink forums.
And then getting downvoted by people who just disagree with your opinion. I’m one of the Reddit refugees so I don’t know if we brought that with us or Lemmy was like that before but it’s sad to see.
Holy crap. I have Tidal on my phone and Plex at home. I didnt know I could connect them. Thank you!
Humans are good decision makers, we’re just not good at paying attention for long periods of time. Which is why I think self-driving cars will eventually be better, but they aren’t yet. And those are expert systems (I refuse to call them AI) trained on a well-curated and limited set of data for a limited and specific purpose. Which is an important difference over the generalized generative models. More data does not make systems, especially more unsorted data.
But here’s another important difference: I can grab the wheel at any time and take over. If we are going to give these systems decision making authority there needs to be an obvious and intuitive override.
The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.
We might have to agree to disagree on the overall look of the thing, but I want to comment on the job part.
It’s always been a bit of a disconnect that you supposedly had this post-scarcity, socialistic, utopia where we have overcome our baser instincts and work cooperatively. But for some reason the dominant organization has military ranks and some people agree to sign-up to take orders and get thrown in jail if they don’t. That never quite squared. But in the real world it’s a simple matter of writing what you know and Gene was ex-Navy so that’s what Starfleet was modeled on. Doesn’t really make sense. It’s also why admirals are so often bad. He had a beef with them.
But yeah I agree I like it better when they talk about their places in Starfleet being a matter of choosing to be a part of it and it being bound by honor and duty. I don’t know why they’re doing that, if it’s supposed to be earlier in the development of the Federation, or if they’re just copying the Orville jokes. I do really like is Una. A lot of that is I always felt robbed by the fact that the network made Gene cut out the idea of a woman first officer after the first pilot and I feel like we’re finally getting to see what could have been with Majel in that role.
When I wrote the above I had not seen the musical yet. It was well-produced and fun, but I think it really undercut the show and I didn’t like it. It made the characters seem silly. Contrast with the Lower Decks crossover which I thought I was going to hate and I thought actually worked fine if you could ignore the cartoon thing. I didn’t mind that it was played for outright comedy because it still took the characters seriously. Much like the DS9 Tribbles episode.
I do think DS9 was great by the way, with a few exceptions, mostly the mirror universe stuff. And Miles calmly encouraging the Ferengi to go on strike because of course that’s what you do, was maybe one of the most subversive things Trek has gotten away with on TV. American media loves to hate on unions so that was a bolder than you might realize and I loved it.
You’re not wrong, but that’s why I like it. Before I get in to that.
Discovery had some good moments and some good acting but was overall a mess.
Picard was like someone gave a big budget to a fanfic and said “I’m not taking any notes.” When a bunch of good actors turn in a lousy performances you know the whole thing is broken.
Lower Decks is just all around fun and I really like it.
Back to your statement. I (American) grew up on TOS reruns in the late 70s. I watched old movies and TV shows that had the American 50s optimism for the bright shiny future, but in the late 70s it felt like we’d failed not just economically but more importantly socially. Trek showed a better possible future where we’d solved our problems and learned to work together. It had the 50s optimism for tech and the 60s lessons in social justice. Gene’s vision (and he was by no means perfect himself) was that humanity had solved its problems and that serious conflict had to be external. We were still humans with loves, losses, and petty squabbles but we didn’t have hatred for our fellow man. But we were still working to be better at accepting everyone. Kind of a throwaway but a great example is Boimler the snotty ensign telling legendary Captain Pike it’s kind of offensive to assume all Orions are pirates.
SNW has been a combination of goofy fun, serious topics, and gut-punches like Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach.
I still loved DS9 but it strayed away from the vision a lot. I especially hated the parallel universe bullshit which really undermined the point of the original episode. And it gave my conservative friends license to say, look if we’re not tough we’ll get rolled over and be the underclass. Either be the Terran Empire or be slave. I reject that.
I’m tired of gritty dark Trek. Especially in these times where the future doesn’t look good I want to see a shiny happy future where we overcome the challenges by being smart and cooperative. The sets are bright and polished and everyone is fit but the characters actually feel more like real people to me than TNG. I love that we got to watch Uhura’s progression from scared cadet to confident at her job for example.
Michael Dorn has spent 30+ years delivering deadpan one-liners and I love him for it.
That one really wasn’t as obvious at the time. Netflix was in huge debt and hadn’t really built their streaming platform yet. In fact streaming was barely possible. Blockbuster should have been able to out-compete Netflix at both dvd by mail and streaming but they screwed it up. Netflix won, but may now end up getting killed by the big studios.
It seems like Teslas get way less range when it’s cold, especially the ones without heat pumps. This is no surprise whatsoever but it’s not well covered by EPA range estimates because combustion engines get free heat. So it’s not something people are used to thinking about.
Seems like where Tesla f’d up is by making a team to lie about it instead of just telling people, “yeah that’s what happens.” As usual it’s the cover-up that worse than the crime. Tesla will probably win the case but will look stupid. Should have just been honest about it.
What Twitter did well I think was handle the non-trvial problems of scale, and did a fairly credible job of content moderation. I can find fault with a lot of how they handled that but they did honestly try. Becoming the dominant platform is always largely luck, but had they not adequately handled scale and content they would not have lasted for so long. Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Twitter like it or not has been pivotal for connecting people around the world especially those with less developed infrastructure. The Arab Spring events would not have happened without it. Which is why I think the Saudis were happy to give Elon money. They knew he’d either make it more friendly for them, or kill it and they’d have a hold on him because of the money he owes.
Yes, most Democrats are right wing. They take money from medical, insurance, and banks who would very much like to prevent single payer. So instead we got ACA modeled on a Republican plan with a cop out mandate from a Republican think tank. (And the Republicans still lost their frickin minds). Yes, I vote Democratic but I have no illusions that they’re left of center 'cept maybe Bernie.
It’s basically true. The ACA drew a lot of support being compared to Massachusetts’ healthcare when Romney was governor. The individual mandate, which was the necessary compromise to get it passed, was first proposed by The Heritage Foundation.
I don’t and until the comments explained it I couldn’t see it either.
Ford really should have released the electric Mustang as the Model E. Not only because Mustang was a bad brand to use for that but because Elon losing his shit about it would have been hysterical and free PR.
In the mid 90s I set up a dedicated dial-up line to an ISP. I had arranged with the ISP to have a dedicated phone line of my own so they were cool. The phone company on the other hand was kind of pissed and tried to threaten me with penalties. I kind of understood why it was a problem for them in terms of provisioning, but… that’s what there was then.
If you call them PanoPods you can probably get venture capital funding and then just go buy a train and paint it with a cool design.