T156
@T156@lemmy.world
- Comment on Patrick Stewart Reflects on 'Star Trek' at 60: Why He Wants More Spinoffs 10 hours ago:
Odd headline, since the quoted interview bits don’t actually say anything to do with wanting more spin-offs. But it shouldn’t be that surprising. Who doesn’t want to earn more money?
If there are spin-offs, it should be something new, rather than being tied to the past. Trek suffers a bit from nostalgia, and being over-reliant on it is one of the franchise’s biggest weaknesses.
There’s really good show material just looking at and dealing with the Federation’s bias towards organic humanoids, for example. We see it pop up repeatedly across multiple shows, where Starfleet/the Federation are perfectly happy allowing/doing things for non-humanoid/non-organic species that they would never have allowed if they weren’t.
Repurposing the EMH MK. I units for dilithium mining, compelling Maddox to use the information he learned about Data to create an explicitly lobotomised version to use as a workforce, or ordering Picard to deploy a memetic virus designed to kill all the Borg, for example. The Federation would never have done that to its humans, and the closest match would be more like something the Dominion would do. But since none of them are organic humanoids, all is okay.
- Comment on If someone was shrunk down to the size of an ant would they be able to make a little ant sized campfire with the same principles? Does it scale like that? 11 hours ago:
You’d also get hypothermia, since your body wouldn’t be able to retain enough heat to stay warm.
There’s a reason why small animals tend to be round and furry.
- Comment on GinkNo. 2 days ago:
I’ve never had an avocado that smelt like bleach.
- Comment on Why Aren't there More Fem-Focused Werewolf Stories? 6 days ago:
A female werewolf would be a wifwolf.
- Comment on How has Apple tricked so many people into believing that they "just need to get another Apple product"? 1 week ago:
You could probably do something similar with Termux and Ffmpeg, but that requires terminal knowledge, and would be quite a steep learning curve for someone not familiar with it already. FFMPEG and terminals are not the most intuitive pieces of software.
- Comment on How has Apple tricked so many people into believing that they "just need to get another Apple product"? 1 week ago:
But Apple’s real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you’re swinging around in your post, OP, you’re not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.
I’d argue that their hardware is middling, but they make up for the shortcomings with decent software. Sort of the opposite of Windows, where you might have some nice hardware that gets held back by bad software (especially with the disastrous windows updates lately). Hence there being a really nice period of time where you could squeeze Mac OSX onto better hardware and ideally get the best of both worlds.
Apple has historically not been the value pick in pure hardware specs alone, and I don’t doubt that you could absolutely shop around and get a computer that, on paper, would be more powerful. Before the RAM price hike, they were the subject of mockery because they charge exorbitant prices for increasing the amount of memory in a machine you wanted to be (it was in the region of +$300 for another 16GB to get it to 32GB).
- Comment on How has Apple tricked so many people into believing that they "just need to get another Apple product"? 1 week ago:
They work quite hard to make it all work together well, and push to make their devices status symbols. Apple is the premium product everyone wants, and all that.
So the hardware may be lacking, but Apple tries to make up for it in making the OS work nicely, and tie in relatively nicely with any other Apple devices you have.
By comparison, the other options aren’t nearly as seamless. I’d need a lot more fiddling to send my keyboard and mouse inputs to an android tablet, or share the clipboard, for example, compared to a Mac being able to just push the mouse and keyboard to an iPad with no extra work.
The file management remains atrocious over USB (it’s basically the iTunes file transfer interface), on both Mac and Windows, but they’ve basically tried to paper over it with airdrop and an iDevice file manager.
Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
At least from my personal perspective, I’ve never heard nor seen people recommending someone buy a different device to supplement something they’re currently using.
With the exception of things like debugging (for some bewildering reason, if your Mac’s software breaks, you need another Mac to repair the software), it tends to be fairly self-contained.
The closest thing seems to be more that if you’re on a device that Apple hasn’t released the full set of features on, some stuff just doesn’t work properly, because it expects the full feature set, and seemingly ends up trying to annoy you into replacing it that way.
On my old iPad Mini 2, for example, you couldn’t actually close the slide-out panel, or expand an app there, since Apple didn’t let them use the split view, and you needed that to expand the window. The closest you could get is making the app crash when in the slide-out, and then it would open normally, or a lot of finagling by swapping it out with a different app, and then running the original app you wanted to.
My current one has a different issue where some apps have Apple Intelligence specific features that I cannot turn off, because the setting I need to change is put away under Apple Intelligence’s settings, and that’s not available on my device, so the settings are also inaccessible.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🦕 Wednesday 1 July 2026 1 week ago:
Ah yes, the tHong everyone needs to buy a screwdriver: A Chatbot.
If I wanted to speak with a tool, I could just hop on Twitter.
- Comment on How do I get the damn cat to understand I can feed myself? 2 weeks ago:
It’s also their way of contributing. You keep getting them food, and contributing to the colony, so they’re also getting food and contributing to the colony, to make sure you don’t go hungry, and the colony is fed.
- Comment on Saturn's Bestagon 2 weeks ago:
Saturn can have a little chicken cutlet, as a treat.
- Comment on How much money do you think Superman could make if he offered his services to NASA as a launch vehicle? 3 weeks 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 ? 3 weeks 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 ? 4 weeks 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 5 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 5 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 ? 5 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 2 months 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! 2 months 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!" 3 months ago:
Did he read/hear about gut flora somewhere, and get his eggs scrambled.
- Comment on 3 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? 3 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? 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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 4 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.