T156
@T156@lemmy.world
- Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. 1 day ago:
Although they’re falling out of use these days, both because they’re not very environmentally friendly on account of being instant bird death-rays, and also because regular solar panels are cheap enough that it’s not worth it to make a big thermosolar plant.
- Comment on The recent Star Trek series are often criticized for "not being woke enough", but I've come to feel the envelope they are pushing is much more radical, bolder, and important to our specific time... 6 days ago:
I think we can accept that the premise is we’ve made astounding strides and there are still areas of improvement; I don’t think that tarnishes the hopeful and utopian dream at the heart of Star Trek.
It doesn’t, but it also shows that even in the future, they’re not free from the foibles of being a person. Achieving and maintaining something like the Federation needs active, constant work. They can’t just go bang, Federation, and be done with it for good. Constant vigilance is the price we must pay for our freedoms.
It’s an angle that I’m honestly disappointed that hasn’t been tackled yet, since it seems perfect for a Star Trek story. Early Picard seemed to be going that way, with former Borg drones being mistreated, and the Federation outlawing reproduction for inorganic beings, but then it veered off for the Season 3 plot.
There’s a really juicy three-way conflict between people who think that the Federation is too soft to survive, those who think it’s fine as it is, and those who think it doesn’t go far enough, and should be expanded to cover more, that could easily come into play.
- Comment on The recent Star Trek series are often criticized for "not being woke enough", but I've come to feel the envelope they are pushing is much more radical, bolder, and important to our specific time... 1 week ago:
I’d also argue that part of it is also maintaining Starfleet values in extremis. Even if you don’t have the institutional support of the rest of the Federation and they are against it, it’s important to stand up for your moral beliefs.
- Comment on The recent Star Trek series are often criticized for "not being woke enough", but I've come to feel the envelope they are pushing is much more radical, bolder, and important to our specific time... 1 week ago:
It’s supposed to be a time after humanity has dealt with all of the stupid in-fighting and conservative BS. It’s supposed to be about a time when the drama doesn’t come from inside the house. When humanity is exploring the stars, not having a moment.
Though they clearly haven’t, even if they think so. For example, if you’re not an organic humanoid, it’s very much up in the air whether you’ll be treated as a person, or as an inconvenience.
The Measure of a Man was constrained to apply to that one instance, in Data’s case, and he had the Sutherland automatically assuming the worst of him and nearly comm itting mutiny. Both the ExoComps and the EMH suffer from people thinking they’re malfunctioning and factory resetting/lobotomising them.
If you’re in a war with the Federation, it’s very much up in the air whether they’ll stick to their own rules of conflict. The moment they feel threatened, they’ll do things like unleash a deadly bio-weapon/memetic-weapon against your species, start laying self-replicating mines, or just make plans to blow up your homeworld. At best, your fate is left to the whims of a handful of admirals and captains.
Even within the Federation, Admiral Satie was not a isolated instance. She only made two mistakes, in going up against an unusually accepting crew that would bat for one of their own, and losing her composure in front of another admiral. If she hadn’t, her crusade against Romulans in Starfleet would have continued unabated.
The fact that she could start it would suggest that those attitudes exist and are underlying within Starfleet. At least, on a significant enough level that she wasn’t treated as being unusually paranoid about a non-issue.
- Comment on What is a good present to get your dentist and dental assistant as a way of showing thanks? 1 week ago:
Would it not be better to ask them directly?
They know their own preferences, and could mention if they have policies in the clinic that prevent them from accepting gifts from patients and the like.
- Comment on Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road? 1 week ago:
Or “if only the city would open a new lane, it won’t be as congested”. Sometimes followed by “why dId the city shut the road, that’s just going to make traffic worse” when the council shuts the road for expansion works.
- Comment on Poor Jeremy 2 weeks ago:
Snail sex is weird and complicated
- Comment on Does anyone else feel like "analog" stuff is more "tangible"? 2 weeks ago:
You say that, but analogue computers are quite good at what they do. Issue tends to be that they’re specialised, so aren’t very good at general tasks.
Brains are a rare exception.
- Comment on If a Space Elevator became a reality, wouldn't the cable act as a kind of wick for all of the unfiltered radiation from outside our atmosphere? 2 weeks ago:
Would it not be self-correcting in the end? The various bits of debris that form the Kessler cloud would collide so much that they would eventually fragment into little more than dust, or lose enough energy that they are no longer in a stable orbit.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🤠 Tuesday 20 January 2026 2 weeks ago:
Got a workspace. Funnily enough, spent the while morning cleaning it because it was horrifically dusty, just after having spent the whole day on Sunday cleaning up my workspace at home for rather much the same reason.
At least there is air conditioning in the building.
- Comment on If I publish my memoir and wrote about every bad thing people did to hurt me while the people mentioned are still alive, how much trouble could I get in? 3 weeks ago:
It also stops them from getting attention, and dissuades people who might commit similar crimes for the notoriety.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🍜 Tuesday 13 January 2026 3 weeks ago:
I’m more surprised she didn’t end them first when she realised breakfast was to be late.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Or end up provoking someone who might not have the most reasonable reaction to it.
- Comment on Metal Exclusionary Radical Astronomy 4 weeks ago:
If we put aside humans for a moment, some species of animal have more than binary sexes. Some species of mushroom have thousands, for example.
- Comment on Still trying to figure it out... 5 weeks ago:
Or rabies. Australians might have to watch out for their own brand thereof, but they don’t have rabies to contend with.
- Comment on 🍺 🍻 1 month ago:
Not always. Flies, ants, and mosquitoes are all considered bugs, despite having no stinging capacity to speak of.
- Comment on Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms 1 month ago:
It is zero. You split atoms all the time, thanks to the radioactive carbon-14 in our bodies, from nuclear testing.
A nuclear bomb goes off because a lot of atoms split all at once, which causes a whole lot more atoms to then split. But that requires a critical mass. It doesn’t just happen on its own.
- Comment on Chasing the Elephant 2 months ago:
Although it really only happened recently. If you look at older generated images, they don’t have the yellow colouration.
- Comment on Why do all text LLMs, no matter how censored they are or what company made them, all have the same quirks and use the slop names and expressions? 2 months ago:
It’s something of the law of averages. At their core, an LLM is a sophisticated text prediction algorithm, that boils down the entire corpus of human language into numeric tokens, that it averages out, and creates entire sentences by determining the next most likely word to fill the space.
Given enough data, and you need a tremendous amount of it for an LLM, patterns start to come about, and many of those end up the ones that we see in LLMs.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🍎 Thursday 6 November 2025 2 months ago:
Where do you buy thick bacon?
A cafe at my uni sells muffins with a centimetre thick slice of bacon in.
I was curious if it’s possible to buy bacon that thick as a consumer, and where. The local butchers either don’t have any, or just have the same thing slices Coles and Woolworths have.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🍎 Thursday 6 November 2025 2 months ago:
Good luck!
- Comment on Velma can't math. 3 months ago:
Plus the first two seasons basically had the producers get fired, and a new person brought in.
That would be bad for any show.
- Comment on Fight me 3 months ago:
It would end up creating some, due to inefficiencies, which may contribute.
- Comment on Banana 3 months ago:
It’s still around. It just got replaced by the new banana for produce.
You can still buy Gros Michel bananas, they’re just harder to find compared to a Cavendish.
- Comment on Banana 3 months ago:
So are you. They’re not special.
- Comment on egg time 3 months ago:
You do see it sometimes, where people complain that dinosaurs are no longer fearsome giant lizards because we found out that they might have feathers, on social media and places.
It generally becomes obvious that they have never met a goose, chicken, or been at risk of swooping before.
- Comment on egg time 3 months ago:
Let’s compromise and call them both fish.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🏕️ Wednesday 22 October 2025 3 months ago:
To think we could have almost had the Octopus system Hong Kong uses.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🏕️ Wednesday 22 October 2025 3 months ago:
They’re nice when they work. Problem is when they don’t.
- Comment on Discussion Thread 🏕️ Wednesday 22 October 2025 3 months ago:
Why are the new Myki readers so awful? I’d argue them to be worse than even the first-generation readers with a bad read.
The entire device basically gets locked out on a bad read for about a minute. If your Myki doesn’t read properly, or your phone is acting up, a few retries could lock out a big chunk of the ststion gates.