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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • the_sisko@startrek.websitetoRisa@startrek.websiteAdblock
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    1 year ago

    It's far more important to trek to criticize and reflect modern society, which is a lot harder to do if your characters are living in a utopia.

    I disagree... if anything, the opposite is true! Having "Federation utopia" makes it incredibly easy to critique modern society. Just introduce planets which have whatever element of modern society you want to comment on, and then draw a painfully obvious comparison to the perfection that is humanity in the 24th century, and boom, it's done! Heck, you could even make an entire alien race to critique an element of modern society like capitalism, not that anybody would do something that obvious :P

    I feel like TOS and TNG lived on this a little too much, especially in early TNG seasons. It was what made DS9 so interesting when the writers flipped the script. Instead of spoon feeding you the critique of modern society in the form of planet-of-the week, they throw in stuff that makes you question whether the federation utopia approach is actually right, or if it's too naive.





  • 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...

    Show

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






  • Honestly I was thinking more like 100mph

    I remember doing that for my first (and only) time on the empty highways outside Salt Lake City in the early morning. It was exciting to try but fully concerning. I couldn't imagine doing that around other vehicles.

    It's my belief that the people that jump on the highway and get 3 lanes over and just squat there not passing anyone that cause most traffic issues.

    I mean, I think it's clear that those are the people who cause the most issues for people who want to break the speed limit. And I fundamentally don't believe you have the right to speed on a highway, and shouldn't complain about missing out on opportunities to speed.

    Like, I'm not saying left lane squatters are driving correctly, they should be over in the rightmost lane. But also all the other drivers, including you, should be going the speed limit. Why does one arbitrary rule about lane positioning matter so much to people, while the arbitrary speed limit is fine to ignore? Real talk: they're both arbitrary rules. If you're breaking the speed limit: SHUT UP about the lane squatters.





  • Speaking as a person who does the limit (65 locally) in the right lane, sometimes the second to right lane in case there's a lot of entering/exiting traffic.... 120mph? What? The fuck?

    Humans aren't designed to react to things at that speed. You need insane following distances to drive that speed safely. With all that extra following distance you don't get much more throughput (vehicles per unit time). But what you do get is a ton more fatalities, because at that speed, when you meet stationary objects, all you can do is hope you had your affairs in order. No amount of crash safety tests help there.

    I gotta say, that if you're the person who's so frustrated about people driving the speed limit on a highway, you're the asshole. Like yeah, sure, they should be in the rightmost lane practicable. That's annoying, but it slows you down by a few mph for a minute or two and that's it.

    If you want to move at 120+mph safely to your destination, take high speed rail. If you don't have that in your region, start complaining.


  • 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 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 a cathartic, but not particularly productive vent.

    Yes, there are stupid lines of time.sleep(1) written in some tests and codebases. But also, there are test setUp() methods which do expensive work per-test, so that the runtime grew too fast with the number of tests. There are situations where there was a smarter algorithm and the original author said "fuck it" and did the N^2 one. There are container-oriented workflows that take a long time to spin up in order to run the same tests. There are stupid DNS resolution timeouts because you didn't realize that the third-party library you used would try to connect to an API which is not reachable in your test environment... And the list goes on...

    I feel like it's the "easy way out" to create some boogeyman, the stupid engineer who writes slow, shitty code. I think it's far more likely that these issues come about because a capable person wrote software under one set of assumptions, and then the assumptions changed, and now the code is slow because the assumptions were violated. There's no bad guy here, just people doing their best.