T156
@T156@lemmy.world
- Comment on How much money do you think Superman could make if he offered his services to NASA as a launch vehicle? 3 days ago:
None. NASA can probably afford to contract one of the many super-geniuses for their engineering services to get a launch vehicle out in no time flat. Wayne Enterprises and LexCorp are engineering powerhouses, it wouldn’t be surprising if they already had some prototypes done up already.
- Comment on How is an SSH key useful ? 5 days ago:
It’s also a lot easier to use. You don’t need a password, since it basically exists as a file.
- Comment on What was the internet like before Y2K happened ? 1 week ago:
I feel like this comment could at least benefit from a rough explanation of what Eternal September was. Someone unfamiliar with Y2K isn’t likely to be familiar with the term.
Back in the day, it used to be that every September, there would be an influx of new users on the internet, BBS, what have you, every September, because of the school/uni holidays. Because they were unfamiliar with internet etiquette, they’d be confused by the existing terminology, or be a little annoying to the existing users, by not being familiar with the culture there.
Eternal September was a point where every day on the internet was September. There would always be people new to the internet on it, enough for there to be a major impact.
- Comment on The Definition of Non-Judgemental 2 weeks ago:
It might also be their version of the uncanny valley applies for different things.
A dog’s uncanny valley might be something that smells slightly off, but humans wouldn’t think much about a human that smells funny, for example.
A pigeon’s might focus on other features instead of the face.
- Comment on The Definition of Non-Judgemental 2 weeks ago:
That diagram literally says that they don’t look the same to the pigeons, and seems to suggest that pigeons may play more value on the beak than they do on the eyes.
- Comment on Is this machine good enough to install QEMU considering that it runs on windows 10 ? 2 weeks ago:
RAM is probably the biggest killer for it right now. The other specs are still viable enough for most basic usage.
The info says desktop? But that’s a low end mobile cpu in there, 15W TDP, optimized to be cheap and have a good battery life. The downside is the performance sucks.
Might be one of those all-in-one-systems where they put laptop hardware into a screen.
- Comment on Would you want to be Michael Jackson-level famous? Why or why not? 4 weeks ago:
No. Or at least, I’d have it done the way Daft Punk/Yoko Taro do. You’re only known as the character in costume, and not elsewise.
Otherwise, every single aspect of your life gets pried into, and you can’t trust anything to be what it seems to be. Anything you say, or opinion you hold would be a headline, and anyone who claims to want to be your friend could easily be angling for your wealth/connections more than anything else.
- Comment on What do you think realistically would happen the moment we meet extraterrestrials? 5 weeks ago:
A fantastic amount of talking. The militaries would want to be in readiness, for example, just in case the extraterrestrials are not friendly, and the diplomatic corps would be doing their best to figure out how to communicate with them.
A lot of religions might also be thrown a bit into the air by the arrival of aliens, so there would be some chatter there, too.
Are aliens subject to human rights? Are they beings also made in God’s image, etc.
- Comment on How do I drink more water? 1 month ago:
Tap water? If so, try filtered water, get a good, credible filter and filter the water. Depending on where you live there’s a fair amount of materials in the water that make it unpleasant.
In a pinch, boiling it, and letting it cool back down also helps some, if they can’t afford a filter.
- Comment on And toxic in large amounts! 1 month ago:
foamed lactase.
Isn’t that the thing that digests milk, but not milk? You can buy little lactase pills at the pharmacy.
- Comment on "Science isn't political!" 2 months ago:
Did he read/hear about gut flora somewhere, and get his eggs scrambled.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
The oil crisis isn’t quite that bad yet.
- Comment on With regards to cutlery, do you prefer a spoon or a fork for eating cake? 2 months ago:
An ice-cream cake is better eaten with a spoon, for example.
- Comment on Is there any reason not to charge my laptop with a USB C phone charger? 3 months ago:
Not really. It depends more on what wattage that the power supply can give, and what the laptop is willing to take. USB-PD is pretty smart, and will only give as much power as the laptop wants to take, up to the limit of the cable/power supply.
But if it’s capable of supplying the same wattage, it makes no difference if you’re giving it 65W by phone charger, or 65W by manufacturer power brick.
- Comment on Diphalia 3 months ago:
Probably to make mating easier, since they can protrude out on either side, rather than the snake having to reposition, or end up poking straight down.
But genital shapes can be pretty weird in general.
- Comment on big facts 3 months ago:
It could power stuff. Tesla was working on it, and there have been a few small companies over the years that have done it.
Just turns out that it’s not very practical compared to a wall socket.
- Comment on Karim Diané Gets Support From George Takei For Playing Star Trek’s First Gay Klingon 3 months ago:
At the same time, it was also good enough that it made Paramount want to pop out more shows.
SNW couldn’t exist without DSC giving us a taste of Anson Mount as Captain Pike, for example.
If people had left it, chances are, they’d have left it buried for a few more years.
DIS was shit but the worst thing about it was really that it was the first thing after the pause.
Honestly, I don’t think it was that, as much as its production was just a mess. Showrunners and writers were consistently fired partway into the season for at least the first two, and it shows, because the plot would just suddenly fly off in another direction mid-season, which doesn’t exactly work well for a serialised show.
Past that, it basically turned into an experimental testbed for show ideas, and never really seemed to find its own identity before it ended (though it came close in its last season).
- Comment on Liminal Space 3 months ago:
It’s pretty difficult for it to go wrong in a way that isn’t just nothing happening.
The eyes don’t just grow randomly, you need to give the brain blob a chemical signal that grows eyes in-utero to make the eyes grow.
- Comment on Liminal Space 3 months ago:
There’s also the question of why would it experience horror? It’s not exactly in pain, and they way they make the eyes grow is just to add the hormone signal that makes eyes grow when developing.
So from its perspective, it just got told to make eyes, so it has rudimentary eyes now. Hardly the most horrifying existence.
- Comment on Liminal Space 3 months ago:
perhaps some people have eyes in their brains and just don’t know it.
Your eyes technically are part of your brain.
But it’s certainly not unheard of. Parietal eyes have existed for a good while now.
- Comment on Lemmings, please give us your info dump. 3 months ago:
I wonder if they do. That seems like a lot of effort to go to for the average person for a scammer.
It seems easier to have a generic voice, rely on the fact that phone audio quality isn’t great to bridge the gap, and use a shotgun approach.
Some places do, since there were a few high profile attacks, but they were nearly all targeting organisations by pretending to be the CEO or something.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🦜 Wednesday 18 February 2026 3 months ago:
4’33" by John Cage. (Here’s a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra)
It will leave quite the impression upon him.
- Comment on Kate Mulgrew Defends ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ And Captain Ake From “Disrespectful” Online Attacks 3 months ago:
I don’t know, TNG could be up there, but it was also generally influential as a whole, so both its good and bad ended up getting carried over.
The entire exploding bridge trope came from it, as did evil admirals. It also set up the Enterprise as the flagship, with the best and brightest of Starfleet. Which also meant that people generally assumed it to be the norm, and that the hero ship was some special ship, when it was a normal ship of the line in TOS.
VOY Borg are really bad compared to TNG Borg.
They are, but more due to issues with overuse more so than anything. In TNG, we saw the Borg for all of 4 times. In Voyager, they were shown much more frequently.
But as far as the timeline goes, it also wouldn’t make sense to show an earlier iteration of the Borg, not when they were severely affected by the actions of the Borg.
I heard PIC stinks because it makes VOY Borg the main villains
I’d honestly argue that which version of the Borg to be a minor issue in Picard. Picard’s bigger problem was that it didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, and kept leaping between multiple different plots and story lines, which confuses it a bit.
It arguably have been better if it has taken one of those plots, and run with it for the entire show. Like the matter with Synths and former Borg drones being treated as subhuman, vindicating the concerns Guinan and Picard had in the Measure of a Man, or visiting the TNG crew and seeing where they are now. As it actually was, it seems like the writers/producers felt that now they had Patrick Stewart, they wanted to do everything before it was too late, and the result was a bit of a mishmash.
The issue with the Borg tends to be more that they really aren’t very much of a threat by the end of Voyager, and were dealt such a blow that it would be almost impossible to ignore.
Their greatest threat, assimilation, is trivially curable, and it’s now known that their assimilation abilities are one of their greater weaknesses. The Federation might have issues with infecting someone with a pathogen to make the Borg assimilate them and self-destruct, but others have no such qualms, and we know of at least one species that did use such methods (Icheb’s parents).
Their adaptation is a greater issue, but even older Federation ships, like the galaxy-class saw good effect just cycling their weapons frequencies. The Voyager’s ablative armour would be well-studied after they returned to Starfleet, and dedicated anti-Borg weapons would have both been in active development, and also use.
As of the events of First Contact, it’s also known that not only are there Borg ruins on Earth that may still be intact and active, but that Borg ships are not as truly uniform as they seem, with Picard pointing out a weakness in a Borg cube that dealt catastrophic damage to it. Local signals, what he felt, scans of what remains of the area, and everything would have been thoroughly studied to determine how to both find and exploit those weaknesses on other Borg cubes, without a former privileged Borg unit at the helm.
- Comment on Kate Mulgrew Defends ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ And Captain Ake From “Disrespectful” Online Attacks 3 months ago:
It’s also been 800 years since then. It’s the third millennium, the seat probably is the belt itself at that point.
- Comment on Kate Mulgrew Defends ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ And Captain Ake From “Disrespectful” Online Attacks 3 months ago:
Discovery definitely feels like it, especially since you have people still arguing quite animatedly about how it’s not Star Trek, and might have Ruined Star Trek Forever, though I would rather imagine much of it to be recency and accessibility more so than much else.
The other shows are a bit less accessible, even if they are newer, since CBS moved it onto their streaming service, and off of Netflix, whereas Discovery aired on Netflix around a time when Netflix was one of the bigger streaming platforms out there, and more people who aren’t as into Star Trek or other CBS properties might encounter it incidentally.
But for the most part, every single successor to Star Trek has always been controversial, and deemed to have ruined it forever, though most of it abates when the next show comes around, and is then deemed to have ruined Star Trek forever.
Though TNG was by far the least deserving of it.
I actually wonder about that. Most of the complaints, like the ones about Stewart being a shakespearean actor who wouldn’t be able to handle the rigours of serious television, or being bald were nonsense, but there was a lot of good reasons to complain about early TNG. A fair chunk of the early episodes weren’t very consistently good.
We know it to be better in hindsight, but if The Next Generation had started today, and not only is the second episode a rehash of a Star Trek (1966) episode, but the fourth was Code of Honour? I would also be inclined to criticise it for being quite bad. There’s a good reason why a lot of the advice for people watching TNG is to stick around until Season 3, or start from Season 3, since that’s when it gets better.
- Comment on Kate Mulgrew Defends ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ And Captain Ake From “Disrespectful” Online Attacks 3 months ago:
And if you don’t, that’s what subtitles are for. Hardly much to complain about
- Comment on What should I NOT do in front of rich people? 4 months ago:
The trick is to not care, and to confidently do it like it was the most natural thing in the world, and it clearly was.
The world of the wealthy runs on appearances. The worst thing you can do there is to be ashamed. Arguably better is to look at them with confident disdain for using a knife and fork to eat a pizza, in much the same way that they might for someone using a soup spoon for dessert.
For the pizza, it’s arguably more regional than wealth related. In a few countries, like parts of Italy and Sweden, it’s more common to eat pizza using cutlery rather than using your hands.
Whereas for other places, like other parts of Italy, it may be more common to use your hands for it instead. It very much depends on where, and the local culture more than anything else. But using your hands is as valid as using a knife and fork.
- Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 4 months ago:
However, it seemed to be one guy that wanted to do that, and the trial was held to examine if that would be right or not, and to establish the legal precedent.
At the same time, Starfleet also enabled it. The entire case would have never happened if it had just been Maddox asking for Data’s voluntary participation, but part of it was also that Starfleet was trying to compel Data to submit to the procedure, and also prevent him from leaving Starfleet to avoid it (hence the property angle).
We also know that the ruling was constrained to that one case both from Voyager, where it was outright stated to not apply to the Doctor, and because Data also had to fight Starfleet to prevent them from taking away Lal. While the fight was ended early as Lal died (possibly as a result of the emotional stress), it would not be too surprising if another legal battle resulted. Maddox might have started the events of Measure of a Man, but he was not singularly responsible for that whole business.
Wheras with the Pegasus, the investigation disappears into a hole and not touched since. Instead of punishing Pressman, he gets made Admiral.
We don’t actually know what happened from after the Pegasus’ cloaking device was revealed, other than that Pressman and the rest of his crew were likely to face court martial (and Pressman had “high-up friends” in Starfleet). He was promoted to Admiral before it was exposed, and it’s unclear what he was promoted for, since he was already Admiral when he tried to get it back.
- Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 4 months ago:
Plus, you get the prestige of having actually made and perfected it yourself.
That means a bit, especially since the Federation places value on authenticity.
It’s the difference between going to ICA and getting a bottle of wine, compared to fermenting some yourself in a wardrobe.
- Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 4 months ago:
Food too. A lot of problems with malnutrition and food deserts would be solved very quickly if you had a machine that could churn out perfectly nutritionally balanced meals.
Not worrying about potentially starving to death would free up a lot for people to go and do what they want to do, and to decline bad work environments.
If you didn’t have to worry about food, or bills, why would you stick to your rubbish job, instead of doing something you actually wanted to do?