FriendOfDeSoto

I don’t hate so-called AI per se. I see great use cases for people with disabilities. There are promising signs of it improving medical diagnoses (under properly tested conditions). I think even in my life I will learn to use some of the tools. Eventually. I try to avoid it right now as much as I can.

I hate the people peddling so-called AI as the solution to all problems, including already solved problems. I hate the mad rush on it because it risks negating all the positive greenhouse emission savings we have managed to get done. It will probably incur a greater water debt, i.e. more drinking water future generations will be forced to desalinate if they want to live. And it will make the next computing device you want to buy mad expensive because of the RAM shortage. I hate that this rush is a bubble that may not burst but drives prices up.

Why? What’s stopping you from finding news sources you trust on your own and bookmarking them? I understand the defeatist stance for some local stuff where most of the news has hidden behind paywalls - although paywalls can often be creatively avoided. But when it comes to coverage of the continued American embarrassment that is 47 on the world stage, the world is your oyster. You have news from other English speaking countries, of which there are loads. And a lot of public broadcasters and news organizations that normally speak or write in something else will offer English language articles. If you stop at consuming what is presented to yourself by our friend Al Gorithn, that is a choice.

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.

While the Kant certainly wasn’t referring to consuming news in the digital age, his abridged quote can be wiggled to apply as a motto in this context as well.

I heard the clip haha

Best boss I ever had.

I don’t necessarily understand why they chose that director but I kind of get why they wanted to try someone else. IX hadn’t been a great success. They wanted to find new momentum like a sports ball team swapping coaches when the season is going south. Team still got relegated. Life is like that sometimes. It’s easy for me to say Frakes would’ve been better because I have the benefit of hindsight.

Get your head out of this “the media does this or that” gutter where they are maybe part of a big conspiracy by the man to keep us docile. Media has never been perfect, reporting on all stories fairly and balanced and all that. That’s an unattainable ideal. You have to pick and choose what you read. They always jump on the big stories and neglect the smaller ones, especially if they operate under a need to generate profits.

47 came up through reality television. He will stay on topic as long as it generates headlines. Whether he is heel or hero doesn’t matter. There is also the behavioral pattern of TACO, he looks to play chicken with the world but backs out of it again quite quickly. And BTS he works to make himself and other rich people richer. Anything he does can pretty much be explained through this prism, after the fact.

Greenland, like wanting Canadian anschluss, generated headlines. He looked like he had a grand plan, the real estate developer in him came through. There was opposition and with it attention, which he likes. And then even members of his cult were sceptical to critical about this neo-imperialist bullshit. If the world had rolled over and let him have it, he would have took it. But European leaders managed to group up on him and gave him the most face saving out out of this bullshit. And it took away attention from other things, like the famous pedophile case.

He is not a details guy. They say anything that cannot be put on a single page with lots of pictures he will not take in. The agreement the US has with NATO ally Denmark already allows for 99% of his grand plan. They packaged the info he never absorbed into something that looks like a win for the great deal maker. And they probably awarded him the clubman of the year trophy to please his ego. Good enough, for now at least. Now, let’s escalate tensions in Iran or kidnap a south American dictator.

If you dig for European sources, you can read about developments that are the long tail of this failed Greenland grab. Officially, no European leader but maybe Spain’s Sanchez will be on record saying the US are no longer a reliable partner for anything. But off the record, that’s their tune. Efforts are underway to de-Americanize the defense industry and spending. Another slow building wave is the European desire to break free of dependence on US tech firms. These stories maybe would made the news in North America, if there wasn’t the bigger so-called AI bubble inflating at the same time.

I didn’t hate it when I saw it in theaters. Thought it was better than IX and VII but not VIII. It was a hit heavy on wanting to be star wars. The buggy ride, fighter ships, fights on gangways above huge chasms on the ship, the humorous banter while pew pew. Didn’t like the death of Data. Didn’t we learn anything from Spock? I liked the world building for the Roms and the Rems. I liked Hardy in it.

I don’t mind rewatching this movie. I feel it benefits from aging a bit like III doesn’t (but V does for me). And I’d argue it’s definitely better than PIC S2, if not the whole show.

The general vibe around this movie is bad because the box office take wasn’t great and then we learned all these little tidbits from BTS: Wesley (the boy?!) being cut out of the wedding scene or the director thinking Geordie was an alien. I think Frakes in the chair would have done a better job with it.

This is sign that Google is worried that a market of 500 million people could decide to move away from the US tech giants. Very worried, judging by this flimsy fear-driven argument. Good.

Would you agree though that there is a qualitative difference here? Platonically befriending a person and having an intimate, probably sexual relationship with a person are two different scenarios. And the question was about dating in particular. I’ll have a much easier time trying to humor a person I don’t share a bed with. People tend to not take one for the team to get them over their misogyny.

I suspect the lack of experiences of being with or even having a significant other is what drove the majority of these bastards to this proto-SA. Where they can be powerful grunt grunt and dress up in GI cosplay. There is this lordofthefliesification that takes place when all these frustrated men get together. Anyways, that’s why I suspect this is almost a trick question. How can you detect if you’re dating an ICE prick? You won’t have to. Chances are they are socially very awkward, behaviorally weird and therefore undatable. It’s this quality that set them on an authority loving, very likely misogynic, for various reasons chronically underfucked path in life where they thought hunting and terrorizing innocent people and shooting them if they can get away with it is a great career choice. It shows.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It’s annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It’s only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn’t happen a lot.

Don’t engage with anybody you don’t know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

I can kind of understand why people who aren’t used to bikers on their roads are lacking practice. And that becomes a problem when there are more people on bicycles. Another thing that makes this worse is that a significant fraction of bicyclists often disregard traffic code as well.

That being said, this article reads like a subtle way to shift responsibility away from drivers. It’s not their fault per se! It could be the laws. That is some bullshit. If you are unable to read the bicyclists next move unambiguously, keep a safe distance. Done.

Two factors play into this. 1) This hype has been around long enough to have planned, built, and put online new data centers. So the bottlenecks some providers had in the early days have widened already. And 2) they need capacity for training more than using the models.

a few years ago

Like 15+ years ago.

They performed horribly

I mean, this is all a matter of opinion. They promised stuff they couldn’t do - like everybody else. They gave us a revolving door of PMs - like the LDP, the party that won all the other elections, does as well. I think what broke their back was having to deal with a big earthquake, massive tsunami, and exploding nuclear reactors. The LDP can consider itself lucky they weren’t in charge then so the stink of failure to deal with an impossible crisis didn’t attach to them. They really aren’t the more capable politicians.

I think you can change the Klingon makeup as much as you want. Have one guy day Qapla and we’re golden. Recognizable enough. This Cardassian getup was too far from the one we’re used to - definitely what I was used to. Even the Fed president lady in Disco looked more Cardassian and she was only a quarter Cardassian. They went too far with the redesign. Which is sad because the choice of species wasn’t random.

I learned about her Cardassianess on this podcast. There is also a deeper meaning behind it because the Cardassians are great record keepers and that’s why she would be entrusted with keeping Jake’s unpublished book! A lovely touch that completely escaped me because I didn’t recognize her as a Cardassian until I heard Tawny talk about it with the Greatest Trek boys, subscribe today on the Maximum Fun network.

I was, initially, because I’m a fan, mad when it was revealed that Tawny Newsome’s character was supposed to be Dax. I later learned she was also supposed to be Cardassisn, which I totally missed as well. But I was mad in a “here we go again, new writers pulverize the canon of old, Trill synbionts can live a gazillion years now” way. But when I put the phone down before firing off a number of senseless hot take posts, I came to the conclusion that the Burn would have probably necessitated a system of hibernation or cryo storage for symbionts in need of a new host but unable to get back to Trill. In my head canon, the Dax symbiont was on ice for a couple of centuries.

I like the idea of the symbionts having an influence over their life span. And that Dax would cling to life no matter what for the off chance to meet The Sisko again makes sense to me too.

We’ll see which theory holds because I’m sure we’ll see Tawny in makeup again somehow.

Trouble with Tribbles! Worf just says they don’t discuss it with outsiders. ENT does more of the heavy lifting if you ask me.

Spoilers galore for PIC

We are all confused. I feel they wrote themselves into a corner in PIC S2 and airlifted out of it without addressing the little unpainted corner they left behind. From a writers’ room perspective, it keeps their options open. From a fan POV it’s maddening. I don’t think it’s all that clear that the OG Borgs are dead after S3; they could return as well because they caused a subharmonic regression in the 500 Cochrane range that traveled back a transwarp corridor in time. Or something like that.

This is a Klingon makeup problem. For the longest time, it wasn’t addressed why the movie Klingons looked different from the TOS ones. Then ENT tried to fix this. And then DISCO came in and completely obliterated that fix. It doesn’t make sense. It cannot make sense. We mustn’t be so Vulcan about it.

I think it depends. I’m my experience, towels last longer if they get thrown in the dryer. Wouldn’t throw my cashmere sweater in there though, if I owned one. The quality of the clothes you own plays a part. And most of us tend to go for the bargain over quality.

I feel like this depends on your climate as well. If you have sufficient sunlight outside, why do you even have a dryer? If it’s humid and stuff takes forever to dry on its own, a dryer might prevent certain bacteria to build up in the fabric and thus expand longevity. Although any act of aggressively drenching the fabric in water and chemicals and then blow drying it ought to age it by default.