MudMan

I moved to a snow city for the first time well into adulthood.

The big thing I have for you is that walking on snow is awesome for like two hours and then it's constantly threatening to kill you. Slippery sludge or ice is the worst feeling in the universe and all the locals will just strut right over it like it's nothing while you're fighting for your life.

Just buy good shoes and plant your feet vertically, no sliding motions.

In S3 Picard and Bev Crusher at one point sit down to ponder whether to torture or execute a prisoner and decide to go for it.

Yeah, no. It's not AS bad... but it's bad.

Hey, you want to hear a spicy take?

Discovery is the one piece of Trek that fixes their dumb AI nonsense.

By the time they are in the post-postapocalypse future they introduce at least one Soong android who is just... hanging out, being a guy. Not even a particularly nice guy. So at least there is that.

I mean... yeah, the episode isn't as focused on procedural detail, and I do live for legal process minutia, but I can fill in the blanks just fine and suspend disbelief.

I mean, the question being raised is whether Data has been operating as a person willingly joined Starfleet or as salvaged equipment. If Data had been roaming around on his own and then applied to join Starfleet I'd be more nitpicky, but he was found and turned on by Starfleet and he seems to have been in the system since, so I can see the question of how to categorize him coming up retroactively. Especially in retrospect, since we eventually get undeniable confirmation that AGI is very much possible within their normal gear.

I mean, for the record, by the time Voyager comes around we know that they have protocols to use holographic AIs to substitute in for key personnel, so if you can have a "EMH" slot in for an officer you can have a piece of salvaged machinery operate with a rank and then reassign it to a different role... unless that entity has personhood. It IS a sci-fi as hell concept, but a valid one in-universe.

Me, I would have very much enjoyed Noonyien Soong arguing whether he still owns Data and learn what is legal salvage in Starfleet territory but for the sake of 90s network TV I can see "Is this android truly a life form" being the approach to a Trek episode. And thematically... well, I can't get through the Goldberg and Stewart scene about slavery without tearing up. It isn't just how good they both are, it's the "oh, crap, they're saying the thing" element to it, too.

Of course that means Starfleet straight up condoned slavery later, as per Star Trek Picard season 1. I would gladly remove all of Picard from lore at this point, but nope, officially Starfleet had legal proceedings to determine that Soong androids are people and to remove their autonomy is akin to slavery and then went ahead and did it anyway.

Picard sucks and is the worst Star Trek thing ever, is what I'm trying to say. Yes, way worse than anything in Discovery. Including season three.

Not even partial in this case. I mean, the "turbulence sending you into the ceiling" event is fully resolved here.

Anyway, just here looking for the common sense pedantic clarification, found it, so now here just to say good job.

So the JerryRigEverything guy just did a Cybertruck video and he says his sponsor backed off because they didn't want to be in any Musk-adjacent content.

He's so dumb. You really can't fail after you break a certain money threshold, because damn, is this guy trying hard.

About damn time.

This thing is my favorite MMO by some margin and it's not even a MMO at all.

Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

I am screaming at this juxtaposition. This is such techbro thinking, where he's oversimplifying a single data point to pretend he's making a data-driven decision (people in a survey said media is biased) and then leaning on a confirmation biased, entirely non-data driven stance (people don't vote based on newspaper endorsements because I said so).

I mean, two seconds of thinking will tell you that people think the press is biased because the press is biased. There is no reason "the press" that is causing this impact is WaPo in a world of Newsmaxes, Foxes and yes, MSNBCs. You're going to need more than a survey you read once to make that determination.

And obviously, he has done nothing to determine that his choice doesn't benefit Trump. He doesn't even claim that, he just... says so.

Or that his choice moves the needle towards lack of bias, because man, it sure seems like he's diminishing independence here, not the opposite.

It's the same billionare brain rot. It's the same wonky self-assured, biased thinking where they can't pay enough brainpower to consider the facts independently and they're too convinced of their own infallibility to even address basic human biases or defer to actual experts on their random convictions.

It's an absurd way to run a business, let alone a country. And there are few enough of these super rich idiots with a direct enough spotlight that we have a full sample size here. We (now) know how Bezos thinks. We definitely know how Zuck and Musk think. They aren't to be trusted with the decisionmaking their money warrants them under the current system. Their squishy human brains are too weak and broken to handle it without the elaborate, dispassionate social engineering that keeps reasoably designed liberal democracies chugging along.

Yeah, that's the thing about it, right? It has all the pieces of the architecture of a modern console in a world where none of them make sense. Even with the 360 I was probably an outlier, and the reward you got by being able to access 720p video on a CRT PC monitor was much higher compared to a SDTV.

Specifically the VGA 480p output, which was a big deal for most use cases.

I imagine there is some regional differentiation here based on HDTV adoption and SCART vs component, but for reference VGA out was still the sole way I had to get any progressive signal for gaming all the way down to my day one Xbox 360 in 2005, which did not have an HDMI out (not that I had any displays with an HDMI in, for that matter).

Yeah, in some ways I think playable content vs cosmetics is a more functional distinction than DLC (or MTX) vs expansions. The big thing that changed is that games now will sell you visual items for bragging rights, rather than stuff for you to play.

I would suggest that not buying those is a good idea, but clearly a bunch of teens and rich people disagree with me on that one.

Or the weirdly anachronistic mess that is the Dreamcast in general. I mean, it's not easy to visualize today because a lot of the "just a tiny underpowered PC thing" approach ended up winning the day, but the Dreamcast made no sense whatsoever at the time and produced entirely absurd looking games.

Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.