Old trek was super “woke” and optimistic, I see new trek as too focused on war and it paints the future as though they never achieved luxury space communism free of scarcity

At least on that front, it seemed to be rather conditional. If you were not an organic humanoid, you had a much more difficult time.

Just look at Measure of a Man, and what Starfleet later tried to pull with Lal, or what happened on the Sutherland. Or the ExoComps. Or what happened to the deprecated EMH Mk. I units, and the Voyager’s EMH and his holonovel. Or the UGLY BAGS OF MOSTLY WATER crystal aliens. Or the Horta. Or Hugh.

I cannot imagine that the Federation would have ordered the developing a form of memetic virus that would telepathically spread amongst the Klingon population and wipe them all out when they were at war with the Empire.

But they did order it against the Borg, intending to use Hugh as a vector.

Especially when the person taking them literally mentions that they are prescribed.

It’s completely different than the street drug “meth”. The only similarity is the methyl-5 ingredient, which is a molecule that our body naturally synthesizes continuously.

Slightly surprised it hasn’t spawned a factoid that claims the body makes meth/is full of it.

Because it’s not a small thing to change. You’re basically overhauling everything if you wish to transition from a monarchy to a republic, because it’s rooted in everything.

The names of the governmental positions, and possibly their responsibilities would need to change, as would official documentation, the money, the flag, the national anthem…

You could hardly call yourself a republic if your passports are still carry the authority of the monarch, and your national anthem prominently features the King.

It only gets more complicated if you’re a former colonial power, since they may also be affected, and have to change everything as well. If the UK decides to ditch the Monarchy and become a Republic, Australia and Canada would need to follow suit, since it would be silly for them to have references to a monarch that no longer exists, or a GG who’s meant to be representative for a position that no longer exists.

Either that, or there will be a political/legal headache deciding whether they become the new inheritors of the monarchy, since the parent is gone, or would they be also need to make the same changes (see above).

After 2029, the plane is to be transferred to the trump library, presumably refitted back to civilian spec, air force paying all costs.

There is no way in hell that the US would let Trump walk away with that gear.

10 years ago, we might have said much the same about the former President of the USA keeping most-secret classified documents unsecured in a bathroom of their resort.

Who knows what may actually happen.

Boo. Currently in the mood to cuddle the cats, except that they hate being picked up, and I’m virulently allergic.

Sometimes it’s both, where you mask to seem like the first, while being the second.

Only for some things, though. If you host your own e-mail these days, chances are, you’re going to have a very difficult time sending them anywhere without risking them being deleted, or automatically thrown into spam folders.

Especially since Epic doesn’t really have much to offer over Steam, other than its games and exclusives.

It wasn’t all that long that where Epic Games had the infamous issue with the store. Since their store didn’t have a shopping cart, if you wanted to buy multiple games at once, you had to buy them all in separate transactions, but the store flagged that as suspicious purchases/fraud, so more often than not, if you found a bunch of games you liked, and bought them all, your account would get locked.

Yes, but in this case, you can see what the model is doing, and it is running on your actual computer. Whereas a lot of LLM providers tend to run their models on their own server farms today, partly because it’s prohibitively expensive to run a big model on your machine (Deepseek’s famous R1 model needs at least a hundred GBs of VRAM, or about 20 GPUs) and partly so that they have more control over the thing.

AI isn’t a black box in the sense that it is a mystery machine that could do anything. It’s a black box in the sense that we don’t know exactly how it’s working, with which particular probability vector/tensor is responsible for what, though we have a fairly good general idea of what goes on.

It’s like a brain in that sense. We don’t know which exact nerve-circuits do what, but we have a fairly good general idea of how brains work. We don’t think that if we talk to someone, they’re transmitting everything you say to the hivemind, because brains can’t do that.

Remind me in 3 days.

Although poison pills are only so effective since it’s a cat and mouse game, and they only really work for a specific version of a model, with other models working around it.

A lot of ADHD Symptoms are things that regular people also do, but turned up to a level where it causes problems. It’s fine to be a bit distracted when you’re bored, it might be something more if you’re always distracted, even if it’s something that you find interesting.

People have just been doing dumb things for reputation since forever. We had the cinnamon challenge back in our day.

Can unfortunately confirm. Am useless in and our of a crisis. I can have all the steps for what to do laid out in my head, but be inexplicably incapable of doing anything with them.

I was envisioning “improvised heart surgery” as in a stabbing with a knife, as opposed to any surgical function.

But generally, if a someone is having a medical emergency and is brought into the ER, or is having a medical emergency in the ER, they will be triaged, and put ahead of a lot of people whose care isn’t as urgent, for good reason.

They’re also much smarter than our ones. One episode had a kid worried about doing exactly the thing shown in the meme, where he’d fallen, caught himself on the control panel, and thought everyone had died as a result of him fat-fingering buttons.

He was reassured by Riker telling him it’s impossible, because computer consoles can detect that, and have authorisation codes, so won’t trigger the buttons otherwise.

Plus, there’s aliens who have no eyes, and presumably cannot see in Starfleet. It would be unfair to them if they can’t use anything except by voice controls.

Ah, the technocratic solution. “We’re fine leaving things as-is, because someone will invent a thing to fix it soon”.

This is why there are so many stories about planes being grounded because someone tossed a coin in, according to superstition, or a nut or something fell into the compressor.

The whole turbine has to be taken apart to get the coin or it might dent something, and the whole engine then does something most exciting when the pilot tries to run it up to service speeds, as a result of the imbalance.

Basically. If someone’s been on the receiving end of improvised heart surgery, they’ll be rushed ahead in priorities. So if you’re not having anything serious, the wait may be irritating and long, but if it’s urgent, it will be shorter due to the whole actively dying bit.

Only slightly though. It hardly seems practical to try and infer gender from names, in a way where it can’t be obtained through historical records, or the user.