EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

Reddit banned all the subreddits I actually enjoyed so I stopped participating altogether. It’s helpful to recognize that reddit’s structure leads to total stagnation in the content. I haven’t been active for years, but I still end up on a reddit thread from time to time to get answers to questions that Google should be answering (that’s another topic altogether) and I see the same stake jokes being made, the same arguments being had, the same mediocre insights from the same dull people, and it makes me so glad that I left. I don’t begrudge younger people going through the process of figuring out how to engage with the world, but I also don’t want to participate.

I’m not even sure it’s really parasocial. There’s nothing to have a relationship with. This seems like something else, although I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s more akin to getting addicted to a video game.

But simply not liking a privacy conscious experience or utilization of AI at all? I’m not getting it?

I have heard zero people object to this extremely narrow definition of AI. This is an extremely fragile straw man that has no relationship with reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely anti “AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap”

Well I’ve got bad news for you, that’s the only thing that the AI industry gives a shit about. That and pretending that they can replace human labor to justify wage depression and layoffs.

Also, you didn’t mention the excessive environmental impacts, or the fact that the industry is hemorrhaging money with no clear path to viability.

If you can’t think of at least a few reasons to be speculative about the current state of the AI industry then I’d go take a closer look at what’s actually going on.

Researchers suspect that this is because screen time displaces sleep by taking up time when people would otherwise be resting.

So if we went back to the old way of doing it where we stayed up late sitting upright at the computer until we couldn’t physically stay awake any longer, that wouldn’t be considered disruptive? I’m just trying to be cozy for my late couple hours of browsing. I’m not going to be going to sleep earlier. This has nothing to do with bed. Bed is a saint. You leave bed out of this.

Sadly, Hank is exactly the type of person to do that. The details he shares about his lawn care show that he’s all about artificially tweaking variables and removing uncontrolled factors. This should be Bobby lecturing Hank about his industrialized and unsustainable landscaping practices.

This is the best answer. Billups is torn between his loyalty and affection for his home, and his desire to be a Starfleet engineer. His internal conflict is manifesting as his own insistence that these customs and traditions are binding, despite the fact that this is all very silly and no one seems to be taking it that seriously.

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

Anthropologists discover evidence of ancient subspecies of humans with gigantic, goose-like penises.

Are there any flat-moon conspiracy theorists? I feel like there’s way more evidence that the moon is flat. We see the same side all the time. If it were round, wouldn’t we see different parts of it? We’re supposed to believe that it’s a spheroid orbiting us at the exact rotational speed required so that the same side is facing us all the time? Be serious.

lmao imagine how deeply unserious you’d have to be to suggest that decoupling from China is even possible, let alone feasible or desirable. You’d have to have the discussion in full clown makeup while riding a unicycle.

Flawless. No notes.

If things don’t turn around for him, he might have to lower himself to try to get votes from non-Republicans.

violent images

I hate to be the one to tell you this, Seattle Times, but this is fetish content.

The existence of time travel and the idea of a Temporal Cold War suggests that any given future is just one of many possible futures. The events in Discovery are canon, insofar as they did happen, but whether future Star Trek properties will take the Discovery future as a given is a more open question. Discovery was written very deliberately to avoid being constrained by canon, but that also means that the events are narratively very removed from the rest of the franchise.

My guess is that whoever ends up in charge of making the next chapter of Star Trek will want to establish their own timeline going forward for the same reason that the Discovery creators did, and they’ll largely ignore the easily-ignorable Discovery events, at least as relates to the far future. The alternative is either to set the next series in an even more distant future, which comes with its own issues, or setting it before the 31st century and having to write around a whole bunch of barely-established future canon that only applies to Discovery. I could be wrong, but it seems like the path of least resistance.

The actor of captain Picard

Do you honestly not recognize Sir Patrick Stewart? No shade, it’s just wild to think there would be people who don’t recognize him at all, given the length and breadth of his career.

In answer to your question, I can’t speak for Patric Stewart, but my guess is that he chose to play the scene that way because it’s likely that very few people in the Federation smoke, and that’s probably doubly true for people who spend most of their time on a spaceship. My guess would be that Stewart was trying to indicate to the audience that smoking would be somewhat of an anachronism in the 23rd century.