T156
@T156@lemmy.world
- Comment on How does the world view America now that the Dems are in control of congress? Or are they waiting for the DIC to be thrown out? 2 days ago:
It’s a bit early, isn’t it? Their election’s only just been.
- Comment on Things you feel Star Trek handle poorly? (In general, political, technical, etc, share your opinion) 4 days ago:
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
In their defence, they explicitly say they are not space military. Everyone else just treats them as such. Just because they’ve got exploration cruisers armed like warships.
Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?
It’s not any more or less explodable than the rest of the ship. But we do see a good reason. The main screens on the bridge are physical on most ships. So if the master computer fails, they don’t lose visibility completely.
Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
Only if you can power it, and if you can afford to power a replicator, chances are, you can power a phaser enough to be useful, and they’re far more versatile devices.
A regular gun using bullets is just a wasteful toy by comparison.
If anything, there’s the question if why they didn’t just run their phasers at wide beam, and deal with it that way.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
There’s no good point. From memory, Worf has to dismantle his badge for it, and it doesn’t last for very long.
Most people just don’t go down where there are bullets flying, and most civilisations use energy weapons like laser cannons.
If bullets were more common, they probably would have them. Similar to why the Borg don’t block bullets with their shields.
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
Why have pockets if you can have everyone look like they’re in wetsuits? It’s like why no-one has first aid kits, or emergency supplies on them. Who has time for sensibility if you can have the ✨Aesthetique✨?
- Comment on Things you feel Star Trek handle poorly? (In general, political, technical, etc, share your opinion) 4 days ago:
For example, maybe the Benzites require a gas that is poisonous to some other species?
They do, yes.
But I wonder if every species actually needs its own atmospheric mix? Maybe every species has its own ideal mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc.
I don’t think that they do, or if it does, it overlaps enough that it’s effectively a non-existent difference. They would be much more visibly impaired going planetside otherwise, since the ship wouldn’t be able to sustain it.
- Comment on Things you feel Star Trek handle poorly? (In general, political, technical, etc, share your opinion) 4 days ago:
Change.
Star Trek seems to be allergic to any deviation from the status quo. Everything forward must be recognisable to the past, whereas reality is not like that. Everything has to look recognisable, and be recognisable, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Everything has to have impulse, warp drive, for example, or engines that make it behave much the same. All the alien ships work like that, even centuries into the future, when that makes no sense at all. There has to be a Federation.
There’s very rarely any sort of major lasting change that we see on-screen, and I think what Star Trek needs is that growth.
Star Trek’s biology also tends to be infamously awful. It’s always played fast and loose with it, arguably more so than a lot of the other scientific disciplines it covers.
Barclay’s Cold Virus cure causing Worf to devolve into a precursor species, and several of the crew to evolve into hybrid creatures just because it altered the introns and exons. Doing that doesn’t automatically turn you into something else, or else radiation would be far worse than it is.
Same for the Klingon redundant organs. It’s still the same system, so the Klingon redundancies wouldn’t do much good, unless they had something on their planet that meant they needed it, that isn’t just being a fighter planet.
And it doesn’t really address the physiological differences very well. A human and a Klingon hit the same, and have much of the same vulnerabilities. Worf has slight super-strength, but that’s about it.
- Comment on Patrick Stewart, stage giant also of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘X-Men’ fame, dies at 86 6 days ago:
Not long after Walter Koenig (Chekov) too.
- Comment on What's one cliche "Moral of the story" in media that you hate more than anything else? 2 months ago:
Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.
Funnily enough, I think Tolkein might have also enjoyed that. He was long-conflicted about the nature of orcs, being that his religious beliefs maintained that evil could not create from nothing, but only twist, and even then, it could not corrupt someone past possibility of redemption.
So orcs were stuck between being elves corrupted past redemption, or something sauron created.
Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.
Or change it on the fly for the same character.
Cruella de Ville going from someone so single-mindedly obsessed with the idea of the perfect coat, that she didn’t care for how she got there, even if she had to skin a hundred puppies, to someone who developed a lifelong phobia and hatred of Dalmatians after they scared her mother off a cliff, weakened her character a bit, I feel.
If she had been one of the other from the get-go, that would have been fine, but it was switching between that wasn’t.
- Comment on What's one cliche "Moral of the story" in media that you hate more than anything else? 2 months ago:
Or conversely, racism will be eliminated once the head racist is defeated.
- Comment on What's one cliche "Moral of the story" in media that you hate more than anything else? 2 months ago:
Frozen (2013)
The original Frozen was a nice twist on that, where it wasn’t romantic love that saved the day.
- Comment on What's one cliche "Moral of the story" in media that you hate more than anything else? 2 months ago:
Almost as bad is if they get treated worse for saving the town, with the townspeople blaming them for any collateral damage.
- Comment on What's one cliche "Moral of the story" in media that you hate more than anything else? 2 months ago:
Anyone can achieve great things, even if they come from nothing… As long as they secretly have a great background and heritage out the wazoo. Or it is pre-ordained and has to be them; all other attempts doomed to failure.
The initial message might be fine, but it then undermines itself.
Star Trek’s treatment of the mirror universe (a parallel universe where everyone is evil) is like that. It’s introductory episode had a nice hopeful ending, where someone is convinced that the evil human empire would last longer and be more sustainable if it changed its ways to be less evil, since cooperating is a better strategy, and that they, too, could be something like the Federation.
In its next episode in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, said person’s reforms are explicitly attributed to being the cause of the empire’s destruction, because they had weakened it.
You have to be the “good” humans, in the right universe to form the Federation, anyone else would be making a fatal mistake.
- Comment on Is there a reason why toilets are made out of one of the most resonating materials possible while also being made in a shape that makes a small fart sound like a damn trombone? 2 months ago:
It also usually self-cleans quite nicely through the flushing mechanism. Hence the noise, since it pushes water down the sides to clean it.
- Comment on How do I make the most out of a mediocre laptop? 3 months ago:
At the very least, it may be worth saying what programs.
- Comment on Why are Pokemon Showdown Moderators SO against the discussion of "Eating Pokemon"? 3 months ago:
People also get incensed about it, and at that point, there’s rather an open question about whether an actual productive discussion to be had at all, or whether people would simply start shouting at each other whilst everything goes up on fire.
- Comment on How come in the trucking industry they are very against carrying a gun? Some area's my sister went into in new york I would have carried an AK-47. No offense NY. 3 months ago:
The trucking company probably also doesn’t want to have to deal with the extra mess of you trying to give chase and get shot for the trouble, or trying to shoot them, and accidentally hitting something, or someone unrelated.
Losing the cargo to robbery is bad, but is preferable to losing a driver. Insurance will cover theft, anyway.
- Comment on How come in the trucking industry they are very against carrying a gun? Some area's my sister went into in new york I would have carried an AK-47. No offense NY. 3 months ago:
Weigh bridge that’s actually a trapdoor. You go inside to check the weight, and your lorry’s gone, never to be seen again.
- Comment on Is starlink internet worth it or shit for gaming? 3 months ago:
Being a satellite link, it’s also susceptible to weather (though that said, my old DSL line wasn’t any different). You probably won’t want your network connection rendered unusable because of a storm, or large cloud/smoke cover.
- Comment on Patrick Stewart Reflects on 'Star Trek' at 60: Why He Wants More Spinoffs 3 months 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? 3 months 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. 3 months ago:
I’ve never had an avocado that smelt like bleach.
- Comment on Why Aren't there More Fem-Focused Werewolf Stories? 4 months 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"? 4 months 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"? 4 months 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"? 4 months 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 4 months 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? 4 months 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 4 months 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? 4 months 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 ? 4 months 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 months 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 months 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.