New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.

or lost to the changing tastes of a new generation of media consumers

This is the part that just baffles me.

I rarely see anything but vitriol for anything anymore and it usually seems almost wholly unwarranted at the levels it’s offered at.

I’m beginning to think it’s not that people actually dislike the stuff that comes out, they’re just so programmed to nitpick EVERYTHING that they don’t remember how to enjoy something without finding fault. Or they don’t want to risk saying they liked something only to have someone call their very right to an opinion in question. Or… I don’t know. It well and truly confuses me.

People have been trying to make it a thing for a while. I don’t know whether or not it started at a news outlet, but multiple news outlets have picked it up, so…

This is the first complaint I’ve seen about any of the new Star Trek shows that didn’t use the word “Woke” as a pejorative term. I’m impressed and appreciative of your well-thought-out take on it.

You actually do have some decent points, but I’m still an unabashed fan of the new stuff, especially Discovery/SNW.

It IS different, in all of the ways you describe, but every new trek has been a stylistic departure from the previous ones in some way, shape , or form, and I’ve been taking the plot armor Mary sue-ing as one piece of that. (Something DS9 also has to a degree, but they definitely held to the “difficult moral choices” aspect in spite of it).

Thanks for your opinion and insight.

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Not in the US.

On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.

The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here…

We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.

Edit – I should add that I’ve met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn’t allow that kind of nonsense here.

Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it’s another name for Tylenol.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

Basically, the rocking back and forth she’s doing as a coping behavior.

Yeah, it TOTALLY doesn’t have anything to do with him getting caught tripping balls on camera right next to his lady friend at the White House table who was so disassociated that the poor girl couldn’t stop stimming.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

Oh. Yeah.

There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

Well

You don’t know what

We can find

Why don’t you die for me little n00b

On a magic Corp Por ride

For gaming and everything else I couldn’t easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn’t know Linux well yet?

Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3’s just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

Production mac’s were still running os8 back then.

It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.

So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

All while still drinking and streaming video.

I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.

LOL

Ten years ago I would have just blocked the MAC address.

Failed Fact Checks

None in the Last 5 years

I want to marry this rag.

That probably shouldn’t seem as weird to me as it does but I swear, 50% of the more vocal population of star trek online are far right folks.

I mean, people miss the point of fight club too, but that’s only two hours long…

More like “sales teams are the reason middle managers think ALL employees slack off when not watched.”

I get that sales is a SUPER depressing culture, a ridiculously antiquated work environment, and full of some utterly soul-sucking mandates from above, but I have never seen, in any workplace, a team that needs someone constantly riding herd on them like the sales team.

Every place I’ve worked, every place that a place I’ve worked has had as a client, and every business I’ve ever visited had the same problem – sales people are largely unmotivated because their job has a much higher chance to SUCK OUT LOUD than most of the other jobs at a given company.

When five figure quarterly bonuses, daily friendly team competitions for gift cards, more paid-for-by-the-company outings than the c suites get and pickle ball on company time twice a week aren’t enough to hype people up to do their actual job, something is really fucking wrong with the job expectations.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?