For the record, I rationally hate AI*, and this title already raises suspicion for me.

“AI” is a buzzword, and seeing it in the title or slogan for project or product reeks of some business major jumping on a bandwagon that they don’t truly understand, and where there’s business majors, there’s probably encrapification.

*: Of course, one of the big problems is “AI” is a misnomer - there’s no “Intelligence” to it. “ML” is closer to capturing the nature of the technology without ascribing to it some magic power that it doesn’t have.

I think I have a bit more nuanced feelings on the MIT license. If I actually write something useful, GPL all the way, baby!

However, I don’t necessarily think the MIT license is the embodiment of evil; I find GPL a bit overkill for hobby projects. I’m not talking things that have the potential to become critical pieces of infrastructure like a kernel or something; I’m more talking about emoji pickers or hacky little Python scripts that would be pretty useless to a Fortune 500. In the minute chance someone actually cares about my silly little toy to fork it, I see very little point in encumbering it with the full heft of a copyleft license and stopping them from doing whatever the heck they want.

“Move Along Home” is a masterpiece; it’s the kind of bad episode that’s really fun to watch.

But yeh, I think it’s really stupid to dismiss a show based on its first season.

I just dont like any of the characters

Not even Saru? 😢

To be fair, SNW only gets a 10 episode season, so based on ratio, 1 silly episode of SNW is equal to ~2.5 episodes of TNG; it doesn’t take a lot of silly episodes to make it seem like a huge amount of silly in SNW.

I know we probably can’t go back to 25 episode seasons because those were always very taxing to work on, but I think 15 episodes is a good compromise. I think SNW would have really benefited from a season of about that length; even 12 episodes would be nice.

Heck, as convoluted as Discovery could get, from what I watched of the show (up to a few episodes into S4), it somewhat benefited from a longer season in the sense we had plenty of time for multi-episode plots, which are harder to develop in a 10 episode season balancing episodic and linear storytelling. However, I don’t think they used that time the most effectively, as season 3 often felt like death by subplots - the episode would take on so many subplots that, although each of them individually may have been good ideas, none of them ended up being particularly well-executed. It’s especially weird because they didn’t really need to do that; there was more than enough episodes to, say, have one subplot as an A plot and another as a B plot, then continue the B plot next episode as an A plot and have another B plot.

Honestly, I think what we have yet to truly see in Star Trek is someone in Starfleet who saves the day but ultimately cannot be absolved of their wrongdoing and cannot avoid the consequences if they’re not going to take the necessary steps for redemption - doing one important thing does not give you the moral license to do whatever you want.

They got close in TNG:”Ethics”, but ultimately the only “discipline” Russell gets is getting yelled at by Dr. Crusher - no investigations or anything.

I’d almost want to have an allegory for how we should deal with sexual harassment in the sciences, basically showing the senior staff handling the situation correctly and doing what should have been done with creeps like Richard Feynman, and maybe examining the negative tropes of past Trek. Then again, TNG has so many clumsy sexual harassment episodes that I’m worried it’d be hard to do the issue justice.

Although I’ve never watched Black Mirror, from what I’ve heard of the episode, maybe USS Callister did better than Star Trek ever could on this matter.

To be fair, Burnham’s supposed to be a bit immature and make questionable choices, which in itself is really annoying to a lot of people, but a product of the plot, and another episode or two and it might might sense.

Also, like @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website, I am a little confused by the “xenophobic military propaganda” bit. Maybe it’s that you haven’t watched the 2nd episode yet, but without spoiling much, Burnham’s somewhat xenophobic actions go pretty horrifically wrong the next episode and basically cause much of the season’s plot. Also, the Klingons aren’t entirely villains throughout the season and show.

“MOOOOOOOOVE ALOOOOONG HOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEMMMM!”

I mean, Strange New World’s eponymous first episode was pretty good. Otherwise a true observation, though.

No VHS tape with not-quite-Gowron telling you to experience bIj?! That’s a deal-breaker.

PDF forms are often horrible when done wrong; however, PDF files are really good for when you really need a document to look the same everywhere and don’t want to worry about what fonts the recipient has.

The accessibility issues are legit, though.

I otherwise agree, but what’s particularly wrong with PDFs? Almost anything can generate a PDF these days.

I wish there was a Lower Decks and VOY/DS9 version of this. However, I would cry a little having to design any PCB for that space, even if it’s as simple as registering a button or blinking an LED with a microcontroller.

Honestly, I’d be tempted to just do analog FM instead of Bluetooth and basically just make walkie-talkies. You could enable greater functionality, perhaps including Bluetooth support and being able to make voice commands, by having a “ship’s computer” that would just be a Raspberry Pi server or something with an FM receiver that could process the voice commands and route signals. You might have to hide it in a probe like a tricorder or a phaser while at cons, but if you’re just handing out Halloween candy or something like that, you shouldn’t have to worry.

Part of me wonders if you could cheat a bit and put the speaker in say, a tricorder prop.

Looking at the size of the iPhone 15’s speakers, I think it might actually be possible to fit it in. You might have to fudge the dimensions a little bit, but I think that could fit in a roughly combadge-sized space. The big question is getting the rest of the electronics to fit.

Sounds like a fun project for self-torture in KiCad.

EDIT: Another option to free up space would be to wear and conceal a throat mic. Heck, combined with the tricorder method, you could basically just make your combadge a glorified button.

I need to play with HomeAssistant more. My last bit of hesitation was I was struggling to find a replacement for the announcement and intercom functionality, which is half of what my family uses Alexa for.

It looks like it got announcements with the “broadcast” intent in February; for the intercom, there may be a plugin. This seems like it might have me covered on the intercom front: https://github.com/JoeHogan/ha-intercom

Perhaps I’ll mess around with it again once the semester’s over; a lot of my family would really like to jump the Amazon ship and certainly be willing to try it if I give them the option.

Yes. In fact, almost every XFCE component can ran on Wayland now. At this point, they’re just a few bugs to hash out and figuring out what they’ll actually use for the compositor.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

From what it sounds like, there will be a somewhat usable Wayland release in late 2026 alongside X11, and I imagine we’ll get a more polished release in late 2028.

I haven’t used Nautilus in ages, so I can’t say for certain, but Thunar is a more traditional-feeling file manager. It feels more like an older version of the Windows file manager but with tabs, while Nautilus seems more Mac-like.

Reminds me of when a client walked in to the help desk I work at the other day with a 2015 Macbook Pro still running El Capitan. I upgraded her to Monterrey - it’s been EOL for a year, but it’s better than sending her away with El Capitan. Monterrey is the best I can do since OCLP would be outside our policy.

I enjoyed the D & D movie, so maybe they can pull off something good. Maybe they could just do something set in, say, 2467.

However, I’m extremely sad that it probably won’t be Crisis Point 3.