Yeah, I’m in the same boat.

There’s also PeerTube, the Fediverse counterpart to YouTube. Unfortunately, while there’s some good stuff you can find (and some re-uploads of YouTube), there’s just not as much content. I’d imagine the userbase is pretty small, too.

I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It’s a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there’s a lot of annoying work to “verify” yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn’t be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I’m secure still needs to happen, but I don’t mind that work and find it fun.

I see your point, but I still don’t think the scene works, but thinking about it like that makes it much more watchable. My point is that the scene is simultaneously poignant and a throw-away. It’s a “big deal” but also just one scene.

By the 32nd century, something like that should be such a non-issue for humans, that it would be like stating just another fact about yourself (amnesia and trust-issues aside), which lends itself to being a throw-away…but that defeats the purpose of the scene. Again, I am all about the message and Stamets’ reaction, but it felt very 21st century and on-the-nose.

I’d have preferred if Adira were just non-binary from the beginning and maybe have a quick correction of someone when they were misgendered. Or, let that scene be the reveal of something else, like the symbiont. With that change (I’d have to rewatch the season to see where this scene was in relation to the symbiont reveal), I think the scene would still work while tightening up the writing. I also think it’d get the message across, too.

Now, if the writers really wanted that scene to stay as-is, there are options. Make them an alien from a culture not as enlightened (which would cause other issues) or have this scene play into a bigger theme of Earth backsliding post-Burn (like a Dark Ages) to have mores closer to the 21st century and show the 23rd century crew as horrified by it and work to bring Earth and humanity back toward enlightenment.

This kinda sums up my main problem with Disco. There were great options on the table to realize a concept, but they just wrote it in an awkward way that is unsatisfying (at least to me). Sometimes, that awkwardness reads as performative/lazily progressive.

It’s not that Disco isn’t progressive; it’s just lazily progressive. Case in point: the scene that bothers me to this day is Adira coming out as non-binary, just beyond cringe-worthy and very 21st century. As a viewer, the scene read like Adira was waiting to be judged harshly for their identity, and it just totally took me out of the era. By the 32nd century, I’d expect that being judged harshly for one’s gender identity would be at least a millennium behind us, and the conversation should either have not happened or been so matter-of-fact that it was treated as nothing. I get what the writers were trying to do, and it fell so flat and felt so bluntly obvious. I’m all for the message, but the delivery was not great.

The saddest thing about Disco to me is that there were great ideas and great intentions, but the execution of those ideas was so poor. Really, it just shows that you can have great actors, great directors, and great concepts, but if the writers can’t make it work, it just all comes apart.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.

My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.

This is awesome!

It’s not just convenient for them to do it; it’s how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It’s not impossible, and I wouldn’t even say it’s even hard. It’s just time consuming to set up (if it’s the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it’s virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won’t because it’s not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.

I agree with this in general, but you still may want to consider using Windows or Mac if there’s university only software that is Windows/Mac-based and doesn’t play nicely with VMs, which is really common in test-taking software (since it’s essentially spyware). An alternative would be dual-booting if you want to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that when I went back to school and started course work, there was an online class that mandated the use of certain test-taking software. I tried to get it to work in a VM (by masking the clues of being in a VM), and it kept shutting me down. I ultimately had to borrow a friend’s laptop to take all of my quizzes and tests, which was a real pain. Thankfully, I only had that one class like that, but any others would have driven me to get a cheap throw-away Windows-only box.

In the end, I’d stay away from bleeding-edge for school work, so Fedora is probably your better bet, but there may come a time that you will need to use Windows (much to your chagrin).

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seem to be the best approach.

That’s actually not a bad idea. I’m not on board with mining contacts, but I think there’s a simple, transparent way to do this that can actually be fun: a personality quiz. Sure, if someone knows what instance to join already, they can override this. But if they don’t, they get like five questions, and then they are matched to an instance.

I found myself nodding along to a lot that was said in this article. I also would trace a lot of recent issues to JJ Abrams’ take. What I said then is still (I think) true today: “They are good movies, but they aren’t good Star Trek movies.” Discovery and Picard suffered for it, but I think that the ills are being corrected. My hope is that Paramount greenlights “Legacy” as the TNG-spiritually-successor as SNW is the TOS-spiritual-successor.

Where I will disagree, though, is that Star Trek isn’t broken. Five-ish years ago, I would have said that, but after SNW, Lower Decks, and Picard season 3, I think the powers that be have a better understanding of what is needed. We were in a bit of a “dark-ages” from 2006-2020, but I think we’re back on the upswing. We may not be quite at 1990s golden age Trek, but we can get close.

Congratulations on making the switch! I remember when I switched full time almost 10 years ago. It always feels like there’s something new to explore or to try with your computer. One of the most freeing things I learned was that most things are within my grasp if I put in the effort to learn about it. There’s nothing quite as fun as whittling the day away going down a configuration rabbit-hole to make something just right.

This is a much better article. OP’s article just shows the author’s surface understanding of how coding works and how well an LLM can actually code. There’s way more that goes into a programming task than just coding.

I see LLMs as having the potential of being almost like a super library. I can prompt GPT, Claude, etc. to write me a custom function that I copy, paste, test, scrutinize, and almost certainly change. It’s a tool that will make someone a more productive programmer. It won’t completely subsume a human’s ability to be creative and put the pieces together.

At the absolute worst over the next decade, I could see programming changing from writing and debugging code to prompting, stitching together, and debugging.

This is so true. Although not popular with people in my field (Computer Science), I highly value my liberal arts and humanities education. Far from being “worthless mandatory classes” (like many in my major believed), I found thee classes to be the most enlightening. I learned to wield algorithms and build software in my major, but I learned why I should and how to think critically about how to do it to best serve people (not to mention just simple communication). If anything, there should be more liberal arts in the curriculum, not less.

No lie, he seems like such a cool dude. If I were in the area, I’d totally go to see him. And while I first knew him as Chekov, I grew to love him as Al Bester on Babylon 5, truly some of his best work!

Which is really sad. What “conservatives” are representing isn’t even conservative at all; it’s just regressive, authoritarian non-sense. Conservatives (real ones) have an important part to play in a properly working political system (which we don’t have in the United States). Ideally, we’d have a a progressive party and a conservative party; the former looking for reforms anywhere they can, even to the point of burning down the system, and the latter urging caution and ensuring the stability and safety of the system. Instead, the U.S. has a conservative party (Democrats) and a fascist/regressive party (Republicans). So, instead of moving forward with caution, we’re moving backward.

Yeah, you’re right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that’s all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don’t want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don’t really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn’t an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.