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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It was fine. A total of maybe 8 minutes of interesting content. I enjoyed the segment with Tawny Newsome and Eugene Cordero watching silly clips. And the interviews on the street were cute.

    Jerry O’Connell did have a slight “blink twice if you need help” vibe going on, but I’m not sure how much of that is me projecting it onto him given that the strikes are going on (but I assume this content was prepared in advance?). And honestly, I couldn’t do half as well “hosting” a show with no guests in front of a green screen!

    The segment about Discovery was a bit…

    And I’m actually a discovery fan! But wow that Paramount Plus narrator was so proud of their achievements, lol



  • People aren’t misunderstanding the issue. Third party cookie support is being dropped by all browsers. Chrome is also dropping them, but replacing them with topics. Sure, topics is less invasive than third party cookies, but it is still more invasive than the obvious user friendly approach of not having an invasive tracker built into your browser. No other major browser vendor is considering supporting topics. So they’re doing an objectively user unfriendly thing here. This is the shit that happens when the world’s largest internet advertising company also controls the browser.


  • A classic use for them is spam filtering.

    Suppose you have a set of spam detection systems/rules which are somewhat expensive to execute, eg a ML model or keyword blocklist. Spam tends to come in waves, and frequently it can be as simple as reposting the same message dozens of times.

    Once your systems determine a piece of content is spam (or you manually flag content), it’s a good idea to insert the content into a bloom filter. This means that future posts of the identical content will be flagged without needing to execute the expensive checks, especially if there’s a surge of content stressing your systems.

    Since it’s probabilistic, you can’t use this unless you have some sort of manual reviewing queue or system, as it’s possible for false positives to be flagged. However, you can also run more intensive checks once you’ve flagged content, to detect false positives.

    The false positives can also be a feature, not a bug: with careful choice of hash functions, your bloom filter can actually detect slightly modified content, since most of the hashes may still be the same.

    I’ve worked at companies which use this strategy so it’s very real world.




  • I know reviews are pretty mixed, but I enjoyed listening on and off as I watched Voyager! But I will say that their episodes were pretty long winded for my tastes. In particular, while I understand why they had a section describing all the guest actors, writer, and director, they spent a bit too much time on it for my taste. Especially the actors, where they covered each actor’s first role and usually had a bit of a IMDB review. I personally only really care for the stories about the production of each episode, and also their general reception/opinion of each episode is fun since they’re deeply a part of the trek world.

    For me, a briefer version would have been a home run. As is, it’s worth a listen, but you should feel free to skip around.




  • Yeah…Star Trek has never been particularly good at one-off romance episodes, and this is certainly one of those.

    Yeah, I don’t think that I enjoyed any shoehorned romance with Picard especially…

    The episode also has Dax asking O’Brien to boost the top speed of Seyetik’s ship to warp 9.5 to avoid a potential supernova, a prominent example of Star Trek supernovae being apparently able to travel faster than light. So there’s that.

    Lol now that you mention it, yes that is quite silly.

    I also remember a moment where O’Brien reports that he increased the speed to warp 9.6, and Dax asks “wasn’t the theoretical maximum warp 9.5” and he’s just like “it was.” Top tier O’Brien right there.


  • For what it’s worth, ENT is set around 2150, SNW around 2259, TNG starts around 2364, and PIC around 2399. In my mind, ENT is pretty far removed from the SNW/TOS era that you’d say is well covered. There’s a lot of “untouched” canon to discuss, like the Earth Romulan war. So long as temporal wars are forgotten, I’d be excited to see more ENT stuff.

    But I also agree that just going forward into the 25th century would be nice too. Ideally for me I’d prefer to see a clean break from the TNG/PIC nostalgia characters: just the next, next generation, with a new captain and crew.

    I do like Jeri Ryan’s Seven a lot, and would love a Captain Seven, but there’s something to be said for just starting the new thing and building the next big dynasty of trek, rather than borrowing characters.


  • For your first part, that would make sense, except Nidell isn’t supposed to remember anything about Fenna. I don’t know how Sisko would expect her to think of Fenna as something she’d want to become, since she knew nothing about her. That was what made the line weird to me.

    For your second part - agree on both actually! I haven’t seen any particular DS9 specific community in here or elsewhere. Maybe we can be the change we want to see, lol. Maybe a new community or a weekly episode discussion or something.





  • It’s not as if I watch everything that way. Just when I want to enjoy some star trek and can’t look all the time. Besides, the audio description tracks are meant for the blind to enjoy the show, they’re quite well written and produced. They are also great at surfacing details about the settings or characters which the writers/directors wanted to be noticed, but I wouldn’t have focused on. So they really open up a new and great perspective. And it’s a lot cheaper than buying a new TV every few years so I can see all the newer shades of black lol.


  • I mean, I don’t care what the directors think. They can make things for mass appeal, or they can make things for enthusiasts who invest in top-quality TVs with the latest tech every few years, and who invest a lot of time calibrating their TV and putting up the right curtains to block out the sunlight. If they’re making it for enthusiasts, great. But these directors are supposed making things for mass appeal, so they should make TV and movies easily consumable in the ways that average people watch.

    I watch for the stories, characters, etc. I honestly don’t care that DS9 will never be remastered, it’s fine the way it is. But I do care when half the bridge is black because Discovery went to black alert, and I guess that means I can’t see anymore :P

    .(edit: I actually enjoyed “watching” new trek on my phone with the audio description track on while I was doing dishes. Mostly listening actually.)