FriendOfDeSoto

I hear you. You think crossing the line mattered in 80s+ Trek but it doesn’t now. I don’t think that’s true. Sisko poisoning a planet is one of the examples where it clearly didn’t. But should have. So nostalgia is the only thing I could come up with to explain why you like the older and dislike the new stuff.

I don’t want to be in a position where I have to defend Picard, the show. Half of S1 is okay and then it goes off the rails. There are moments in it that are good. Overall, it’s a mess. One aspect that they did well is that they show a hero aging. Kurt Corbain will always be an icon because he ended his life early. So we were spared his ideas on COVID, Q Anon, or pick another hot button issue later in life or albums continually deteriorating in quality. With Picard they wanted to show consequences and chisel away at the icon a bit. The trauma of being borgified. His being sidelined for his unwillingness to bend to his superiors’ will. Why they had to bring his parents into it will be the writers’ secret. But they show consequences of lines being crossed. One of them is him standing rightly on his professional principles. It sounds to me this is exactly the stuff you’re missing and they built the whole S1 premise on it.

Burnham getting to be captain is about as realistic as chubby Kirk being demoted back to Captain.

On a slightly unrelated note:

What’s up with double-spacing every sentence?

It’s really

annoying to read

if you ask me.

I think you are partially trapped in nostalgia. Star Trek has never been this philosophically pure. Picard broke the Prime Directive in S1 by having contact with the Edo. And then regrettably prevented them from executing Wesley for trespassing a flower bed. Either should’ve cost him his command.

When Data has an inappropriate chat with a girl on a dying planet, JLP jokes with Riker about the level the shit is up to for them. And there are no palpable consequences for any of this behaviour.

Picard doesn’t feel like he should plant the Borg bug in Hugh. Admiral Valarian Canapés wholeheartedly disagrees. And while I like Picard’s reasoning, from a ten thousand foot perspective I agree with her. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have prevented the best TNG movie from existing but perhaps we would have also been spared Picard S2-3.

Late TNG and early DS9 with the introduction of Starfleet Al Qaeda, i.e. the Marquis, is a turning point for me. We get more stories that are more grey. Star Trek went from Kirk coming to a planet, telling the inhabitants their culture was stupid, to more contemporarily thoughtful treatments of ethical and moral conundrums in a utopian world, to seeing where utopia rubs up against the rest of the galaxy that isn’t there yet. Starfleet and the Federation are no longer exclusively the good guys. Sisko poisons an atmosphere just to catch one traitor and gets away with it. WTF?

Janeway gets a pass from me for most of her bad decisions because she tried and had to figure stuff out by herself. Tuvix be damned!

Enterprise also exists.

Third wave Trek is more grey than Marquis era Trek. It’s more CGI and action oriented because they can. That saves a couple of pages of dialogue otherwise spent on ethics. It’s different just like TNG was different from TOS. But it isn’t a radical change if you ask me.

Early TNG isn’t great until they stabilised the writers room. And then there is a continuation of development through DS9 and even into ENT. (Unfortunately including grade A assholes.) “Chaos on the bridge” is the default for Disco and Picard. And that’s why they often tell weird stories that don’t match up with what came before. They try to do Trek in the now passé golden age of television. And failed a lot imo.

Of all the third wave Trek, I’m most fond of Lower Decks. Because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and is littered with easter eggs. Disco S2 is good. Most of SNW S1-3. Picard had moments in it but that’s it. My heart’s not in it any more. I watch it because I see we are entering another content drought. I even enjoy SNW S4, not because I think it’s good Star Trek but because it’s a middle finger to Paramount for no longer financing any new projects.

I think if I was caught like this, the last thing I’d want to do is talk to the media about it. Not even under a pseudonym. But this story is probably not here to make Google feel bad and return some of the money. This is a reminder for parents everywhere to review payment and parental settings on anything their kids use online. You can be smug enough to say my 8yo doesn’t stream on Twitch or whatever because why tf would you let them anyway. But you’re deleting the credit card off of Google Play because you forgot it was there because parenting makes you forgetful at times.

This sounds similar to Google search results getting worse so you need to make more searches or look at more results pages so they can sell more ads on every extra clicked page.

The difference is this though. Google was doing this shit as market leader by a country mile in a saturated market. These so-called AI fuckers are trying to operate on an open heart while the hospital is still being built. What you are doing as a user is helping them get better. Eventually. At the same time they have financial difficulties. So the aim to be the best Skynet runs into operational hurdles, like not having the money to do what needs doing or their models being caught doing questionable stuff. That includes all the cases where human ignorance or hubris is so blame, like the Hugging Face case. That’s not good PR and the surgeon in my metaphor above is forced to switch gear while the half built hospital is being moved to another location yet again.

To the outside, they need to present themselves as trustworthy companies that do good. Internally, we will learn in time they are a fucking mess of competing interests, of which greed will eventually win over any other concern. If a model is getting worse it’s because the conditions of the surgery have changed again. And they will change again. In the long term, the only way is up. In the much shorter term, development will be much more volatile.

I’m so glad I don’t need to use any of that. Especially for work.

They are a bit vague on this but I suspect all of these attack vectors start with LEOs having physical access to the unlocked phone. They then set up a trusted desktop without the phone owners knowing.

Which is clever, to be fair. Whether or not that’s legal is already a court case. The law is so frightfully grey.

The other ones I mentioned.

China’s biggest denomination is CNY 100 or about USD 15. India pulled its largest denomination bill from circulation maybe 5 years ago. The US stopped doing anything above USD 100 a while ago. Bigger denominations are a counterfeit and bribery risk.

Nobody cares about the Swiss Franc in cash outside of Switzerland. There are 10 million or thereabouts Swiss people. All the other currencies are used in much larger populations, three-figure millions at the lower end.

Delightful. Tardy is an excellent musician that just won’t die, will he.

but would an EU-style freedom of movement remove that by allowing citizens of both Canada and US cross freely…?

Captain Obvious says yes.

It should be noted that not all that glitters is gold. At various times, Schengen member countries have reinstated border checks. Not at every border crossing but randomly checking people. Often unfortunately in accordance with the Family Guy police stop meme Pantone skin color chart. Germany is doing it at great cost as an internal political maneuver. Italy is doing it to people coming from Spain post the run on Ceuta. At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis every EU country along the way did it. Free movement is the first victim of anti-immigration politics everywhere. There is an argument to be made that this lofty ideal inked on paper in the 90s was too lofty for its own good in a realpolitik kind of way.

Given the current US administration and the crap they’re pulling on their friendly neighbours to the north there is no way this will happen. This century, if I had to put a time frame on it. This is what happens when the toddlers run diplomacy. Earning respect takes ages, losing it takes no time at all.

If you listen very closely, you can hear the world’s smallest fiddle being played in the distance.

I may be white, sensitive, and full of bullshit. But I’m not American!

I don’t dispute the stats. I think you are trying to convince me of the usefulness of a rail network. That’s unnecessary. I already think that.

Keeping in mind how car focused the US is, I don’t think they would tunnel through the Appalachians or run track over the Rockies today if somebody hadn’t thought to build out a rail network more than a century ago. Because that’s a counterfactual statement, it’s only an opinion.

Sensitive? WTF do you mean sensitive? I’m not sensitive. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Let me say up front that I’m very much in favor of democratic socialism. When I now try to disabuse you of two points in your comment, it’s not for ideological reasons. It’s more of a gut feeling about how politics, and especially politics in the US works.

Mandani works in NYC. A politician like that wouldn’t work in Wisconsin or Louisiana. Probably not even in California. That is not to say people wouldn’t benefit from more left leaning politics in those places. But they wouldn’t get elected into high enough offices in sufficient numbers to drive change. There is the US hangover from the cold war that reflexively makes anything with socialism a turnoff for the poorly educated masses (the irony!). And the power of religious belief, especially monotheistic religions, favors right wing authoritarians. The Midwest is too religious for its own good. NYC is the outlier.

MAGAs don’t vote on track record. It’s vibe based and that vibe is obnoxiously trying to own their opponents. The fact that 47 is ruining the US"s standing in the world, the economy, and all unwritten political norms that had underpinned the republic are not as important as fucking with the libs. 47 may be at the end of his political career, somebody is going to take over and continue on this path. You can’t fight feelings with facts. And you can’t drive change without getting enough socialists into office everywhere.

yet many a European would take issue with your US centric viewpoint on rail :)

That’s because virtually nobody got rich off of trains in Europe. They would have all been reasonably regulated and their incomes reasonably taxed. And rail was used to connect places in Europe that already existed and often already had roads connecting them. There was no “wilderness to conquer.” That’s what sets the US railroad apart from their old world counterparts. And as far as cargo is concerned, a lot of it may run on rails. But that’s because it’s already there. They wouldn’t build a new network today. And the infrastructure that survived this far isn’t exactly in good shape.

I agree with you. I still think somebody is going to do something with the compute capacity that hasn’t burned up in cycles to train models to create Yoda with a six-fingered hand. And somebody will find something worth doing with these models. It probably won’t be search, or writing, or making graphics for your PowerPoint. But I think video creation, be it for Hollywood or video games, will be here to stay and be potentially profitable. There will be a use in coding although probably no profit. I’m still hoping for good uses in medicine and pharmacology as well. And as aids to people with disabilities there are probably very good use cases as well. And they are the richest people on this planet so there is a Ferengi level of profit there. /s, of course.

The digitization of books will be useful as well.

In the end, the ROI for so-called AI will be inked in red. And the US will enter a recession, which will give us MAGA 3.0. So invasion of Greenland ca. 2034?

A thing that gets overlooked often is that being the first in a field is often quite bad for business. Apple learned that lesson. They didn’t make the first smartphone, tablet, or mp3 player. They waited for other people to be first and then iterated well on that.

The people who financed laying the train tracks that became the economic arteries of North America (along with robbing more land and pushing out the people who already lived there) didn’t become rich. The second generation that ran logistics and passengers was way more likely to become rich. They didn’t have to pay for the infrastructure but they benefited from it being there.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, the son of the South African emerald miners, Google, etc. They’re just laying tracks right now. The conglomerates that don’t rely only on so-called AI have a chance to survive. All the other ones are going to run out of money and/or get bought and taken over. The real winner of the industry probably hasn’t even made it to the starting line.

Training models takes a big investment and then becomes difficult to protect against people who will just try to copy and steal it. In a way, I think world history will look at the US as the first generation track layers. You built the data centers at ridiculous cost, both in hardware and negative consequences for people and the environment, and then get out-iterated by all the people who didn’t want to jump on to the hype train three years ago or couldn’t foot the bill at the time. The cost decreases the longer you wait. US companies think they are investing into future long-tern licensing agreements to use their yet unknown products. I think that’s dumb and isn’t going to happen.

I think Apple will benefit from their lean back and wait approach. They will look at where this stuff consolidates into something useful and then just buy it.

Edit: Forgot this point: most of the train tracks have become redundant in the age of airplanes. The infrastructure is decaying. Data centers may become overgrown train tracks faster than we expect.

Seriously, I would stop doing that if I were you. Not for the esthetic or because there is inherently anything wrong with doing that. You’re going to become bycatch when people look to catch bots and sloppers in a wide net.

Any post formatted like that comes straight out of an LLM. No user, no matter how dedicated or how mad, would take the time to format headers and bullet points.

Reposting stuff from reddit and posting whatever the LLM spat out. As far as I’m concerned, you are a contributing factor to a stagnant user base here.

Asked and answered.