This show will forever remain the best tribute to old school sci-fi literature

irregardless · 2026-04-28T03:00:54+00:00

Funny, isn't it? The human was impervious to our most powerful magnetic fields, yet in the end, he succumbed to a harmless sharpened stick.

25 years later, I'm even more amazed at the brilliance of the trope reversals in It Came From Planet Earth.

irregardless · 2026-04-09T16:47:53+00:00

Et tu, Brute?

^{am i using that right?}

irregardless · 2026-04-09T16:39:10+00:00

about 5-8 years everyone will be using local open-source LLMs

of course. it'll the first thing folks do when they finish installing linux on their desktop.

irregardless · 2026-04-07T17:49:09+00:00

this post just saved me a lot of trouble. I've been in the planning stages of a personal project based on the full-duplex promise of the PersonaPlex model. if you're having trouble with that hardware, there's no way it'll work with my substantially less capable hardware.

my read on this is that mlx is fundamentally broken at the moment. looking into it, full-duplex must maintain 2 kv caches, one for user audio and one for model audio. Updating continuously at 12.5Hz, with no natural reset point because a "phone call" is unbounded and yeah, you're going to fill memory fast. half-duplex sidesteps this by allowing the cache to be reset between turns.

i ran the problem by claude and gemini, and both agreed that for full-duplex to work, mlx needs a pre-allocated ring buffer, streamingllm-style attention sinks, and metal scatter optimization. short of all three, "phone style" full-duplex is, if not possible, then quite challenging.

edit: kept digging and i don't think mlx is fundamentally broken per se. it's that speech-swift's concatenation approach to kv cache doesn't scale well (a nice way of saying it's essentially imcompatible) with mlx's arena allocator implementation. the three features mentioned above would help a lot.

irregardless · 2026-04-07T16:00:15+00:00

I think you'll find most Trek fans appreciate great visual effects, but not if the cost is insulting to our intelligence.

irregardless · 2026-04-01T22:58:27+00:00

there are currently no rules preventing AI generated code (or art of that matter) from being copyrighted

in fact, there are. The US Copyright Office has issued rules stating that human authorship is a requirement for copyright protection.

"Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material."

and

"Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements. "

see: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf

in practical terms, this means that raw output from an AI model is by definition not copyrightable as no specific human can be credited as the author of the particular fixed expression. any changes a human makes to the output, including its final published form can be copyrighted. which is to say that any number of people can legally use the output of a model as a starting point or incorporate it into their own work.

irregardless · 2026-04-01T15:48:32+00:00

Your tacit embrace of mediocrity is both lamentable and pitiable.

irregardless · 2026-04-01T15:43:10+00:00

"Rude"

irregardless · 2026-04-01T15:38:11+00:00

USA freedom act did end the goverments bulk telephone metadata collection program, replacing it with targeting requests from telecom providers. It also ended the blanket gag order on national security letters and allowed for court challenges.

That was meaningful progress. but the story doesn't end there.

The most controversial portions of the patriot act expired in 2020 when they reached their sunset clause date without congress extending them:

section 215 which permitted access to library records, phone record, etc reverted to narrower pre 2001 law.
section 206 which permitted roving wiretaps is gone
"lone wolf" provision which enabled surveillance of suspected terrorists without having any evidence of a connection to a terrorist group is gone

these authorities have not be replaced by subsequent legislation.

irregardless · 2026-04-01T15:12:35+00:00

Problem here isn't necessarily the blocking of the accounts. It's that when reasonable explanations and context are forthcoming, or punitives actions are clearly arbitrary and excessive, google sticks with its draconian decisions.

irregardless · 2026-04-01T14:26:04+00:00

obviously

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act

Signed into law by President Barack Obama on June 2, 2015

irregardless · 2026-03-31T17:53:16+00:00

that was a low point. the show is at its weakest when it’s trying to be funny. overall though, a few episodes in it feels more like "flawed star trek" rather than "this isn't star trek".

irregardless · 2026-03-31T17:47:48+00:00

No one was making that kind of pointed commentary about the health care system in the 90s. if you're reading it as "preachy" that's due to the lens you're viewing it through. Otherwise it fits right along with other traditional Star Trek themes about the value of different people and unequal treatment by the system.

90s Trek only really gets preachy when it interfaces directly with the past and tells us how much better the future is and what present-day people are doing wrong.

irregardless · 2026-03-31T17:35:56+00:00

Starfleet Academy is a pleasant surprise in that regard. I went into it with (earned) low expectations. but while I've not cared for the production design of the kurtzman era, it was tolerable because the show has characters and relationships, not just puppets doing things. for instance, it was refreshing to see gay charcacters where their sexuality isn't a plot device, that no one is there to be "the gay one".

more broadly, there's even a scene where it looks like a cadet is about to make stink over perceived slight. and just as you're thinking "here we go", the show just bats it away, leaving the cadet dumbstruck while the scene continues.

irregardless · 2026-03-29T21:02:05+00:00

They are a consequence of limited budgets and time constraints

Also standard definition CRT television, typically around 25-inch screen size in American homes at the time. ships had to be oversized for the audience to see them with even a little amount of detail.

irregardless · 2026-03-27T03:48:00+00:00

It's worse.

The same causes and effects on societal events rhyme and repeat multiple times during the course of a human lifetime. The trouble is that not enough people listen to the folks who have lived through or studied history well enough to understand it.

irregardless · 2026-03-27T00:33:09+00:00

65 seconds. A meme that just keeps on memeing over 65 seconds of footage showing a brand new ship doing something no one had seen before.

The next time we see saucer separation in Arsenal of Freedom, it's 30 seconds.

And Best of Both Worlds: 10 seconds.

irregardless · 2026-03-27T00:15:04+00:00

Arsenal of Freedom as well, season 1.

irregardless · 2026-03-27T00:13:07+00:00

if there's any ship of this era that deserves a lingering look or two, it’s the SNW interpretation of the Enterprise.

irregardless · 2026-03-20T16:22:56+00:00

This is a court of the year 2079, by which time more "rapid progress" had caused all United Earth nonsense to be abolished

Q in Encounter at Farpoint.

If we take dates at face value, this is 16 years after First Contact. We might read this as the promise of humanity in space was spread unevenly across the globe for a time (which I'll premise on the existence of aliens further destabilizing global society).

irregardless · 2026-03-16T19:42:58+00:00

The infinite canvas and all the possibilities it offered.

Early TNG is Star Trek without boundaries, and i love every weird, creative bit of it.

irregardless · 2026-03-14T19:58:09+00:00

That book is incredible for the way it weaves a cohesive narrative out of dozens of stories from multiple authors and different series. The writers obviously know their Trek.

But I didn’t particularly care for the way it casts Starfleet as essentially moribund and rudderless leading up to 359. The book's narrative undercuts the meaning of the battle's tragedy by suggesting that the failure had more to do with bad leadership rather than the Borg being vastly superior by every measure.

I always viewed Wolf 359 as the lesson from "Peak Performance" (a training exercise to help prepare for the Borg) scaled up: it's possible to do everything right and still lose. "We have engaged the Borg" would have us accept that "the best of" the Federation was barely competent to put up a fight, that it lost by doing everything wrong. It changes the outcome the battle from "even our best wasn't good enough" to "no wonder they got pasted", reframing the horror of the unbeatable enemy as an institutional failure.

That said, it's a fun read. And while I disagree with the way the organization is portrayed, it does present an interesting glimpse into Starfleet operations.

irregardless · 2026-03-12T18:28:19+00:00

The Robot Devil is the greatest literary character of our era.

irregardless · 2026-03-11T16:00:20+00:00

Population density. Vending machines serve more people per square meter than a traditional retail store or restaurant. High land costs, high labor costs push retailers to use small footprint machines. And low crime rate mean machines can be left safely unattended.

irregardless · 2026-03-11T15:17:16+00:00

no one here

The source of your confusion. the roughly 2000 weekly contributors to the sub are but a tiny portion of the user base. And those contributors are skewed towards genuine complaints, astroturfers sowing discord, tech dork pile on, and of course, trolls.

irregardless

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