Good. The universe of Trek feels too old, too bound by franchise requirements and lore. The Federation is a galactic empire and all of the threats have either been folded in or rendered pathetic (like the Borg.) There's no mystery left, nothing to explore.
Everyone hates Picard and for good reason as it squandered so much potential, but at least it was trying something new. They even made the Borg scary again (until they all got shoved out of an airlock so Seven of Nine could crash the cube. Women drivers amirite?)
I think it's time that Trek and Star Wars get mothballed for a generation or two, then maybe reboot them like Doctor Who, when there aren't enough original fans around to complain about "getting it wrong."
I'd like to see a version of Trek that stays within the style of TOS. Maybe the Federation exists but it's a minor alliance insignificant to the rest of the galaxy and humans are an upstart power contending with vast and ancient alien empires. Technology is advanced but limited and comprehensible. No infinite free energy, no transporter clones, no time travel, no Moriarty. No Q! Humans are very much on the bottom of the galactic food chain. Do what Enterprise should have done but was never brave enough to do.
But more so (and I know people will disagree with me on this) I want something new, something other than yet another flagship and more planets of the week. They could have made an entire series set inside the Dyson sphere, for instance. How cool would that be? Or a series about settling a colony near the neutral zone, or archaeologists tracking down powerful alien artifacts. Or something about the Fenris Rangers, and society outside of the Federation.
These franchises need new ideas and new blood, and it's time we moved on to other things.
I'm a leftist, and a Democrat by necessity (not by choice) and I would be fine if the power of pardon was removed for Presidents who share my ideology. I would rather have working separation of powers and reform the justice system than give one person carte blanche power to nullify it based on their whim.
Not everyone making a political argument is engaging in cynical tribalism. Believe it or not, some people do actually believe in things.
when you have only two choices and you have to be quite insane to choose one of them, you are, for all intents and purposes, forced to choose the other side (same argument works for left and right if you hear someone say they are forced to be what they are politically)
I never claimed that anyone forced me to become a Democrat.
I support them at the national level because they're the least evil of the two and exactly two relevant options available, and the one which at least gives lip service to progressive values. But that is still like supporting Mussolini over Hitler. Locally I vote third party when I have a chance.
And I live in Texas so none of my votes matter anyway.
You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.
If I claimed that I had no choice but to become a Republican, I would be justifiably laughed at (even by fellow Republicans). Political views and affiliations are certainly choices.
Anyone can claim that their opinion is the only sane one.
>You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.
I explained my choice. Choosing the lesser evil is a choice. I don't think anyone in this thread besides you is getting hung up on this, and I don't know why you're being so aggressively pedantic. It's weird.
Not all violence by the state is legal. In a properly functioning democracy, the state cannot carry out arbitrary violence with impunity, only that which is consistent with the powers granted to it by the constitution and laws written and passed in accordance with that constitution. That was the case in the US for long stretches of its existence.
But under an authoritarian regime, it doesn’t matter whether what the state does runs contrary to statute or constitution because there is no one who has both the will and the ability to enforce any restrictions against the state.
that's violence by the state though. That's exactly the kind of violence GP said are legal (in my reading, no moral stance was taken about this state of matters)
Why is it my responsibility or anyone else's to do your thinking for you?
I've seen more than enough of your political comments to know you aren't arguing in good faith here. You aren't interested in a discussion, you're interested in an argument. You consider capitalism to be the only moral, just and valid system by definition, and you consider any possible faults with capitalism to be the result of not doing capitalism hard enough.
When you can view politics and economics in something other than religious terms then maybe we can talk honestly about capitalism and its alternatives. Otherwise, I mean, all you intend to bring to the table is "free market good, leftists bad" and I've already met a million of you here.
We're sticking to capitalism because capitalists are the ones making the investments and the laws and the decisions. If you want to change the system to something other than capitalism, pick up a gun and start a revolution.
And the end should be obvious, because capitalism has one and only one goal - making the capitalists richer.
I don't understand how "exploits" and "edge cases" can exist in a narrative-driven game where the DM can always just say "cut the shit" if they don't like what the players are doing. Or let it happen for rule of cool. At the end of the day the rules are whatever the DM says they are, and don't have to be rules as written.
Even combat can have a narrative element (and it should, to be fun.) There are rules yes but the game isn't supposed to be this rigid.
Maybe for resume cover letters and LinkedIn posts but I haven't met anyone with half decent taste who prefers AI writing, even well prompted, to skillful human writing. I'm not a stranger to using AI for writing tasks by any means but it's only ever a starting point that gets heavily rewritten by both myself and the model.
It's not hard to get them to copy a style, you just have to provide examples and they will happily produce similar text including grammatical and spelling mistakes. The trouble is with the composition and novelty. Most of the big models have had all of the interesting parts hidden behind a wall of RLHF. Local models are better since you can use ones that are not indoctrinated as a "helpful assistant" and also control the system prompt, temperature and see the top K alternate tokens which let you steer them in interesting ways.
>Maybe for resume cover letters and LinkedIn posts but I haven't met anyone with half decent taste who prefers AI writing, even well prompted, to skillful human writing.
That attitude is one, maybe two generations away from extinction. Taste is created by the market, which caters to the young. When enough people have been born into a world in which AI generated culture and communication is the norm, that is what will define what good taste is. People like you (and I) will just come off like old people yelling at clouds.
We can already see this happening at the fringes. People have relationships with AI, they prefer AIs to real people, they use AI as a primary source of truth, they consider AI generated art to be superior to human work, they trust AI more than people. People identify as AI. AI is filling an emotional, sociological and creative space that an increasingly alienating and hostile society denies to people, for better or worse. Generative AI has only been a thing in popular culture for four years or so and it has already completely transformed human society and human sociology.
Barring a complete collapse of the AI bubble, which seems existentially impossible at this point given how invested our economies and government are in it, that's just what normal is going to be in a decade or so.
Popular taste is guaranteed to be awful since it is driven by economics and fads. That's the type you point out as created by the market and catering to the young. It's a disposable product of consumption used to sell shoes and overpriced paintings.
I don't disagree that it will permeate everything, it already does. It'll just be written by an AI instead of people being paid to find the next style to cop. I don't think it will extinguish human writing, you'll just have AI writing that you feed to official or public channels and then real writing that goes in private or pseudonymous channels. Using AI writing among friends or an in group will still be a faux pas and cringe because it will have become the norm to be rebelled against.
browser plugins are an anti-pattern. and security risk. less depedencies are better. all modern social media platforms, including HN, should have out-of-box way to mute/block and delegate to service as well. There are often categories of folks/accounts I likely dont want to see/hear from or have my content exposed to them where I can help it. HN has demonstrated itself to have a toxic subset in their community, as elsewhere.
Consider that Paul's misogynist (albeit commonplace for the time) views on women have probably been responsible for the abuse, rape and killing of more women than men were killed in the Crusades, and his views on slavery were used to justify the practice for centuries, including in its most brutal manifestation in the US.
The Crusades and Inquisition, bad as they were, were also limited in space and time. Paul's words have arguably done damage across the entirety of Christendom to this day.
This is a rather unbalanced perspective that lacks a shred of evidence. I can't imagine that you've actually read his letters, because if you had you'd know his stance on the role of a husband is not remotely what you've described.
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. (1 Timothy 2:11–15)
It doesn't really matter what Paul says on the role of the husband, when he makes explicit his belief that women should be subservient because of some ontological inferiority on their part through Eve, and that the only value a woman has is in childbearing.
Saying a slave should obey their master doesn't ameliorate the moral evil that is slavery, and saying a husband should "love their wives as Christ loved the church" doesn't ameliorate misogyny. Paul doesn't believe men and women are equal, nor that they deserve equal rights, and thus neither has Christendom for most of its existence.
And the evidence is everywhere, in the two thousand years of law and culture based on the religion. Christian opposition to womens' rights and suffrage, divorce and non-heterosexual relationships. Laws forbidding women to work or own property, judges deciding that rape cannot exist within marriage because a woman's duty is to please her husband, husbands abusing their wives when they don't "know their place." And of course banning women from any position of power in the church. All of these are the consequences of Pauline principles.
Yes, I am aware of this passage. He is not speaking to equality of genders. You can read his other writings to see how he treated actual women who were in leadership roles in the early church. If you believe in Christianity then you believe that God ordained specific and symbolic roles for husbands and wives and the appropriate authority to go along with each.
Paul also wrote the men shouldn’t have long hair and women should keep their heads covered, so there is also an amount of “being at peace means also being at peace with the culture” to be interpreted from his writings.
Everyone hates Picard and for good reason as it squandered so much potential, but at least it was trying something new. They even made the Borg scary again (until they all got shoved out of an airlock so Seven of Nine could crash the cube. Women drivers amirite?)
I think it's time that Trek and Star Wars get mothballed for a generation or two, then maybe reboot them like Doctor Who, when there aren't enough original fans around to complain about "getting it wrong."
I'd like to see a version of Trek that stays within the style of TOS. Maybe the Federation exists but it's a minor alliance insignificant to the rest of the galaxy and humans are an upstart power contending with vast and ancient alien empires. Technology is advanced but limited and comprehensible. No infinite free energy, no transporter clones, no time travel, no Moriarty. No Q! Humans are very much on the bottom of the galactic food chain. Do what Enterprise should have done but was never brave enough to do.
But more so (and I know people will disagree with me on this) I want something new, something other than yet another flagship and more planets of the week. They could have made an entire series set inside the Dyson sphere, for instance. How cool would that be? Or a series about settling a colony near the neutral zone, or archaeologists tracking down powerful alien artifacts. Or something about the Fenris Rangers, and society outside of the Federation.
These franchises need new ideas and new blood, and it's time we moved on to other things.
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