melmi

@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose I’m confused what your issue with the trans characters is then. I thought at first you wished there were more, but now you’re saying you don’t understand why it comes up so often?

  I understand the difficulty getting used to new pronouns. It’s great that you’re doing your best to understand despite not having much experience with it. I was just trying to point out that the portrayal in Trek is already showing a world that accepts trans and nonbinary people far more naturally than IRL, even if there could be more representation of actual queer folks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I just don’t understand this “Vulcan powers” criticism. She was a prodigy, sure, and pretty good at doing anything she wants, but that’s a broader issue. I don’t recall any point where she showed any Vulcan abilities that would be implausible for a human to learn from being raised in that culture. Even if you could argue it contributes to her being good at too many things, that has nothing to do with Vulcans specifically.

  And I find it very ironic that you’re complaining about the portrayal of trans characters not being progressive enough while misgendering Adira. Adira is non binary. They are not a girl, and they explicitly make it clear in the show they use they/them pronouns. Girl refers to gender, not sex, and furthermore sex isn’t relevant to 99% of conversations so you don’t need to disambiguate by finding a replacement word.

  Frankly, I think Adira and Gray’s transness was handled quite well. I’m not sure what makes them tokens to you. Adira has more lines than most of the bridge crew, and the little queer family unit of Stamets/Culber/Adira gets quite a bit of development and screen time. Gray gets his time in the spotlight too, and gets a bit of character development of his own.

  Both Gray and Adira are immediately accepted and never questioned by anyone on the crew. That’s a far cry from presenting it as if it were still our time. No one trips up on either of their pronouns once. You yourself refer to Adira with she/her in your comment.

  The main difference between Adira and Gray is that Gray already came out and transitioned off-screen, while Adira comes out on-screen. I think their transition is well done and realistic; even in the Trek future people will have to come out to some extent because people clearly default to binary pronouns. They aren’t mind readers, and they haven’t replaced all pronouns with they/them, so it’s only natural that one would have to explicitly tell people their pronouns.

  Stamets immediately accepts Adira, with zero questions about nonbinary identity or pronouns, and then seemingly informs the rest of the crew off-screen. I don’t know what you think coming out nowadays is like, but that’s not the reaction most of the time. Adira comes off as kind of nervous in the scene, but they’re talking to someone they barely know at this point who arrived from hundreds of years ago. Plus they’re just a nervous person in general. I think it works well.

  And Gray doesn’t have to come out at all, he’s accepted as male from day one. His transness only ever comes up as vague references to transitioning. Seems pretty accepted to me!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think Adira is a nonbinary girl, I think they’re just nonbinary. Their boyfriend was also trans for what it’s worth.

  Georgiou is also pansexual, though that’s not particularly progressive (classic depraved bisexual trope), and Jett Reno was married to a woman.

  So you’re right, most of the major cast is cishet. Even so, I think there’s more people who hate it for being “woke” than for being not progressive enough, as I haven’t heard the latter much but the former is annoyingly common from the usual suspects.

  Also, as for “Vulcan powers”: we’ve always known that Vulcan logic is learned and not innate. Vulcans are naturally wildly emotional, their logic is basically just advanced meditation techniques, so it makes sense that a human raised by Vulcans could learn them. We’ve also seen non-Vulcans use the iconic nerve pinch before, it’s essentially just a Vulcan martial art and nothing to do with Vulcan biology. Picard and Data could both do it.

  The only “Vulcan power” tied to their biology really is the mind meld, and that’s because Vulcans are mildly telepathic. Non-Vulcan telepaths could learn it too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think Picard was worse than Discovery. Discovery had major flaws but there were moments when it really shined. It had some interesting ideas too. It just wasn’t an ensemble show.

  Picard is just awful. Mediocre S1-2 that doesn’t know what it’s trying to achieve, and then S3 abandons every plot thread that they bothered to build up in favor of nostalgia baiting and bringing back the Borg, which was very tonally confusing after S2.

  The tone is also just bizarrely dire throughout. People complain about Discovery not feeling like Trek, but I had that problem way moreso with Picard. And now it’s this minefield in the canon of the early 25th century that every show that comes after will have to figure out what to do with. At least Discovery going immediately jumping to the far future means it wasn’t able to fuck up the timeline much, and what it did do was cheekily classified.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I reworded my comment a few times to try to hedge for that, without making any claims about fungi experiences because I couldn’t know anything about that.

  It’s certainly possible fungi experience some form of social life, but I think it’s unlikely they have an experience of gender at all analogous to ours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If we’re being pedantic fungi have neither gender nor sex, they have “mating types”. But yeah, mating types are more analogous to sexes than genders. Fungi would have to have some level of social experience to have gender.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, games for it are written in a high level language (Lua) which makes it significantly easier to get into than actual old hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Job Market Is Hell: Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You say /s but look at that account’s profile, it just straight up is AI lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework Laptop 16. Upgraded!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The heatpipes are a nonissue, I mean maybe they’re going to do a surprise heel turn with this new mainboard but the laptop 13 previously got the same heatpipe upgrade and it’s completely contained to the mainboard, it’s just as modular as before and you can switch between the parts. All the same parts work, it just makes that particular mainboard more efficient at cooling. Plus the parts they added in the 13 that they’re now bringing to the 16 are backwards compatible. The new graphics cards were announced to be backwards compatible too.

  Also, the laptop 16 launched with the adjustable keyboard, but it only came out a year ago so maybe you’re thinking of Youtubers comparing it to the 13.

  So far Framework has a great track record of not breaking backwards compatibility.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io Re-indexes free NSFW content, are in ongoing discussions with payment processors to re-introduce paid content⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t help but wonder if Itch is intentionally going for a malicious compliance route. As you say, it’s tougher to defend rape and incest content, so if they’d opened with that they likely wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much media attention. But by doing it this way, half the internet is talking about payment processors forcing itch to delist NSFW games, even giving juicy headlines like LGBTQ games being disproportionately affected. Then Collective Shout of all groups was forced onto the back foot and forced to say “wait no we just wanted the rape and incest games gone” but now that the story is out there it has a life of its own.

  Even if they didn’t do it on purpose, it seems like it’s created a much more effective movement than if they had done it “properly”, regardless of the reason for why it worked out this way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨get sum⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To the contrary, on a party level the democrats seem to be failing to capture any radical energy. They’re broadly playing to the center, and alienating progressives in the process, whereas the right is very effectively turning the radicalization pipeline straight into support for the Republicans. Unless you mean to imply the Democrats’ goal is to radicalize people away from their own platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RPGs that are optionally pacifist?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re mixing multiple endings. Far Cry 4-6 all have quick endings like that but none of them I know of fit your description? In Far Cry 5 you go in to arrest the BBEG, not the other way around, and the way you get out early is by not arresting him and leaving. If you do your job and arrest him, then you get attacked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨be gay, do computers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a myth; the term “bug” for mistake predates the famous moth incident.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf it’s a comedy show, it being informative is mostly a bonus. This one is rare for being factual and not about why we should nuke the moon or which cartoon characters are invited to the cookout or something like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Just got to this” doesn’t really seem like a lie to me. If they said “just read this”, that would be a lie, but “just got to this” implies they didn’t have time to reply/think about it, without commenting on whether they read it. Honestly to me “just got to this” implies it’s been on their to-do list but they didn’t get around to it until now. If they hadn’t read it at all saying “just got this” or “just read this” would make more sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a “Hot” sort.

  I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.

  I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have a link to people talking about running a relay on a raspberry pi? I find it hard to believe that’s possible. A PDS, sure, but a relay requires multiple terabytes of storage alone and plenty of bandwidth/CPU/RAM that I just don’t see a raspberry pi being able to support.

  I’d be curious to hear about any progress on setting up new relays though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT does not fuck around⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The free version of ChatGPT is 4o or 4.1-mini at this point. You can’t even access 3.5 without paying, ironically, since it’s legacy now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even from a viewer perspective, this sounds depressing to watch. I don’t really get what people get out of this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ever heard of Bitmoji? Or Apple’s Genmoji thing? People do create stickers of themselves doing gestures or facial expressions, it’s fairly popular… And most of Instagram is people posting thirst traps and selfies. Not sure why you’re singling out furries here…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enshittification of ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  LLMs are very good at giving what seems like the right answer for the context. Whatever “rationality” jailbreak you did on it is going to bias its answers just as much as any other prompt. If you put in a prompt that talks about the importance of rationality and not being personal, it’s only natural that it would then respond that a personal tone is harmful to the user—you basically told it to believe that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Classic

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  mom-and-pop style datacenters

  I find this wording very funny for some reason. I do wonder what a more-decentralized internet would look like though, rather than 90% of it being in the hands of a few megacorps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NJ teen wins fight to put nudify app users in prison, impose fines up to $30K⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a lawyer so this is just my layperson’s read, but looking at the actual law it seems like in order for it to actually count as “deceptive” it needs to be presented as real. If there’s a disclaimer saying it’s fake, it wouldn’t be illegal under this law, so it seems like satire isn’t the main target.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There are already AI-written books flooding the market, not to mention other forms of written misinformation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with you, ultimately. My point is just that “good for humanity vs bad for humanity” isn’t a debate, there’s no “We want to ruin humanity” party. Most people see their own viewpoint as being best for humanity, unless they’re a psychopath or a nihilist.

  There are fundamental differences in political views as well as ethical beliefs, and any attempt to boil them down to “good for humanity” vs “bad for humanity” is going to be inherently political. I think “what’s best for humanity” is a good guiding metric to determine what one finds ethical, but using it to categorize others’ political beliefs is going to be divisive at best.

  In other words, it’s not comparable to the left/right axis, which may be insufficient and one-dimensional, but at least it describes something that can be somewhat objective (if controversial and ill-defined). Someone can be happy with their position on the axis. Whereas if it were good/bad, everyone would place themselves at Maximum Good, therefore it’s not really useful or comparable to the left/right paradigm.

  But hey, instead of killing everyone, eugenics could lead us to a beautiful stratified future, like depicted in the aspirational sci-fi utopia of Brave New World!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that “everyone is inherently equal” is a conclusion you can reach through logic. I’d argue that it’s more like an axiom, something you have to accept as true in order to build a foundation of a moral system.

  This may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but I think it’s important to distinguish because some people don’t accept the axiom that “everyone is inherently equal”. Some people are simply stronger (or smarter/more “fit”) than others, they’ll argue, and it’s unjust to impose arbitrary systems of “fairness” onto them.

  In fact, they may believe that it is better for humanity as a whole for those who are stronger/smarter/more fit to have positions of power over those who are not, and believe that efforts for “equality” are actually upsetting the natural way of things and thus making humanity worse off.

  People who have this way of thinking largely cannot be convinced to change through pure logical argument (just as a leftist is unlikely to be swayed by the logic of a social darwinist) because their fundamental core beliefs are different, the axioms all of their logic is built on top of.

  And it’s worth noting that while this system of morality is repugnant, it doesn’t inherently result in everyone killing each other like you claim. Even if you’re completely amoral, you won’t kill your neighbor because then the police will arrest you and put you on trial. Fascist governments also tend to have more punitive justice systems, to further discourage such behavior. And on the governmental side, they want to discourage random killing because they want their populace to be productive, not killing their own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with a “beneficial to humanity” axis is that I think that most people think their political beliefs, if enacted, would be beneficial to humanity. Most people aren’t the villains of their own stories.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not what’s going on here. It’s just doing what it’s been told, which is repeating the system prompt. It has nothing to do with Gab, this trick or variations of it work on pretty much any GPT deployment.

  We need to be careful about anthropomorphizing AI.