Shed hair? Go to jail. Have dandruff? Straight to jail. Cut yourself and bleed? Believe it or not, jail.

Honestly, in like 40-50 years, I imagine that “red hat” will be a term with a similar connotation. We’re on a very dark path.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear; I didn’t mean to make it sound like an attack or a lecture. Section 31 is just one of my pet peeves in Trek for a while. We are in agreement! 😊

It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what Section 31 is supposed to be. Sloan wasn’t a good guy. 31 actively tried to commit genocide.

The idea behind them is that arguments of ends justifying the means and “getting dirty” to preserve higher ideals is morally, philosophically, and practically bankrupt. The Federation didn’t need 31 to win the war, and in fact, their methods would have made it much worse. Section 31 as a plot device exists to show us that there will always be those looking to use higher ideals to support terrible actions, and we must be constantly vigilant against them.

It truly pains me how that message has been twisted, and people think Section 31 are not only good guys but also cool.

Let’s be honest. They’ll detain anyone who looks like they can’t prove citizenship on the spot in the vicinity. Absolutely despicable. What can we do to stop or at least impede this?

Same here. My desktop is in a controlled environment, so I don’t see a need. Plus, if I do have some sort of issue, I will still be able to access those files.

Since I actually take my laptop places, I have that encrypted for sure.

This is why I am dreading when my 2017 dumb TV dies. It’s really telling that dumb TVs, which should be cheaper to produce and sell, are either not available or very expensive (as in commercial displays). Really proves the point that the consumer is really the product.

These militias are absolutely unhinged. The reporters and especially the mole deserve medals for this kind of reporting. I hope this makes some modicum of difference.

Jaguar: “Copy Nothing”

Proceeds to copy one of the worst car designs ever created.

What a joke of a company and design.

EDIT: Welp…guess I didn’t read closely enough 🤷 It’s still a terrible design.

A third point is that, as someone else mentioned, the cars are now trained, not ‘programmed’ with instructions to follow.

As an addendum to that third point, the training data is us, quite literally.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was in SF a few months ago, and I was impressed with how the Waymos drove–not so much the driving quality (which seemed remarkably average) but how lifelike they drove. They still seemed generally safer than the human-driven cars.

Improving the ‘miles per collision’ is best at the big things.

Given the nature of reinforcement learning algorithms, this attitude actually works pretty well. Obviously, it’s not perfect, and the company should really program in some guardrails to override the decision algorithm if it makes an egregiously poor decision (like y’know, not stopping at crosswalks for pedestrians) but it’s actually not as bad or ghoulish as it sounds.

Living in a walkable city is nice.

This is so true! I was telling my family about that a few years ago when I was living in a semi-walkable place, and then they started grilling me about how long it takes me to do things. I had to concede that it does take longer to walk in some cases than drive, BUT the travel to and from is actually nice, and I look forward to the walk as time for looking around and enjoying my time. They didn’t understand, but they also will get in their car to drive a mile, so…

The thing I’m heartened by is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs among the MBA/“leadership” group. They actually think these models are intelligent. I’ve heard people say, “Well, just ask the AI,” meaning asking ChatGPT. Anyone who actually does that and thinks they have a leg up are insane and kidding themselves. If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly, but they will then fall behind just as quickly because the quality will be middling at best. They don’t understand how to best use the technology, and they will end up hanging themselves with it.

At the end of the day, all AI is just stupid number tricks. They’re very fancy, impressive number tricks, but it’s just a number trick that just happens to be useful. Solely relying on AI will lead to the downfall of an organization.

Congratulations! Enjoy the journey! You’ll look back in a few years and wonder how you ever managed with a Windows set up while you slip into the comfy-ness of your customized system.

Yep, that’s more or less it. To add insult to injury, he wanted someone higher in his chain to fight for him or at least tell him he was a good boy. No one did, and his superiors basically shrugged and said, “Guess you should have had a tie or whatever.” And he took that personally.

The sad thing is that it’s a super relatable story. Everyone has been in his place at one point or another where they’ve essentially been set up for failure. Normal people, though, would just get over it and turn it into a funny story down the line about the stupid indignities of their position. It really shouldn’t be a villain origin story.

And their web apps are nearly unusable (especially with Firefox and its variants)

Admittedly, I use LibreOffice, and it works for almost all of my needs. However, I’ve never encountered the above issue, and the web versions have worked for me on Firefox. What’s your particular issue? The solution could be pretty simple; I have my user-agent string reporting Windows, and I’ve never had an issue. Maybe worth a try?

Changing the user agent shouldn’t work, but there’s a stupid amount of times that it does, and so I’ve just kept it permanent.

Mabus was a Surface Warfare Officer for two years and attained the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade. Granted, to make JG, all you need to do is have a pulse, but he still was in the Navy.

A more reasonable explanation is that some people cared more about president than other down ballot elections.

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” There are a lot of stupid people in the United States who would vote for Trump. His campaign was directed at turning out low-propensity, low-information voters, and the type of voter who would cast a bullet ballot are low-propensity, low-information voters.

Why do you assume it’s not nefarious?

The past two elections are regarded as two of the most secure in history. Plus, if there were actual malfeasance, I very much doubt that Trump, knowing his famously insatiable ego, would not allow his popular vote to get below 50%.

In the end, investigate away, but nothing will be uncovered, just like in 2020.

The Trump campaign was heavily courting low-propensity, low-information voters. The bulk of spending was in swing states. People who are more likely to cast bullet ballots are low-propensity, low-information, and/or single-issue voters. All I’m getting from your argument is that the Trump campaign was effective in their strategy.

So, go ahead and investigate, but the result will almost certainly be that the election was secure.

The sad truth is that there are many disengaged, low-information voters who were swayed to vote for Trump.

Things can be anomalous and abnormal and not be nefarious. Abnormality isn’t evidence of criminality. So, why investigate? Because the number of bullet ballots is slightly higher? A more reasonable explanation is that some people cared more about president than other down ballot elections.

I can’t talk about Picard, but Discovery has a series of really interesting ideas that were completely destroyed by the overwhelmingly bad details.

This is it. Both series had season plots that would have made for generally decent two-parters back in the '90s.