Makeitstop
@Makeitstop@lemmy.world
- Comment on Stay Mad 1 day ago:
I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.
It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.
- Comment on Also, you have been turned into a worm. 3 days ago:
- Comment on Galaxy S10 til the wheels come off 5 days ago:
I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.
I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.
But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 1 week ago:
He’s firing from both ends.
- Comment on Don’t expect Fallout 1 and 2 remakes from Bethesda any time soon - Todd wouldn’t want to “paste over” their charm 1 week ago:
Because they could sell them as new games.
Fallout is hot right now thanks to the show, and from a business perspective its kind of crazy that they didn’t plan to have something available to capitalize on that interest. A Fallout 1 & 2 remake or remaster would have been an easier option than a whole new game. And it’s the kind of thing you can outsource to another studio, so it doesn’t have to disrupt their current plans.
If I were some soulless executive at Microsoft, I’d have been getting this put together the second I saw that the show was a huge hit. I’d be trying greenlight remasters of basically all the games, plus a new non-numbered game in the series that could have limited scope but keep the same basic flavor, and maybe a new game in a different genre altogether. Things that could be handled by other developers and pushed out over a reasonable time frame so we could at least have something to announce before season 2, while letting Bethesda keep Fallout 5 for whenever they finally get around to it.
- Comment on Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown is coming to Steam in August 2 weeks ago:
Unless Ubisoft has stopped requiring that I log into an ubisoft account for every game, I will have to pass.
- Comment on "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care 5 weeks ago:
The ten years of exclusive control is such a shitty idea. I was on a medication that actually had that period extended beyond 10 years, and I struggled to get the medication I needed pretty much from the day it hit the market until a generic was finally made available. And even that was only after the company resisted hard enough to get a class action suit filed against them.
It would be so simple to change the patent laws so that getting the patent requires them to allow other manufacturers to produce the drug as well, and instead of exclusivity, they can get a 10% cut. Still plenty of incentive to patent a new drug, but now that incentive is only raising prices by 10% instead of 10,000%.
- Comment on 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later 5 weeks ago:
Don’t worry, it might still bubble up to the surface in the hallucinations of an AI.
- Comment on Futures 1 month ago:
In the long term, it’s also possible to alter the atmosphere on Venus until it’s approximately the same as Earth. It would be a massive undertaking, but a hell of a lot easier than getting Mars to a comfortably habitable state. And you could potentially get an entire habitable planet out of the deal, which would be nice.
Kurzgesagt had an interesting video on the topic.
Obviously it would take a significant investment of resources that would benefit some future generation, but not our own. So, back to being impossible, at least for now.
- Comment on The Force should be plural 1 month ago:
Could be worse. Wheel of Time has “the one power” which is actually two. And then there’s another one…
- Comment on Has pay kept up with inflation? 1 month ago:
I find that Betteridge’s law of headlines usually holds up pretty well.
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
- Comment on House Moves Toward Bundling TikTok Bill With Aid to Ukraine and Israel 2 months ago:
Ukraine is a major global food supplier. The war has directly impacted food prices. And if Russia succeeds, it will only encourage more conflict of this kind. And that’s ignoring the possibility that this will escalate into an even larger conflict because Putin decides that NATO’s resolve is weak enough that article 5 is no longer a plausible threat.
Also, that stupid argument applies just as much to funding schools, cancer research, fighting climate change and basically all other functions of government that serve the public good. We should do more to address economic issues, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing everything else.
- Comment on Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance” 2 months ago:
My dad used to tell me “It’s a lot harder to carpet the world than it is to wear shoes.”
Ambitious redesigns of existing infrastructure are neat, but they are rarely more efficient or practical. Especially when you are overengineering to solve an issue that’s already been dealt with. A self cleaning room requires a lot of additional hardware, all of which has to be designed, built and installed, and has to be powered and run by software that needs to be programmed. It also needs to be maintained, and depending on how it’s cleaning things, it may also be dangerous, or at least capable of damaging property (ever have a motion activated light turnoff while in a bathroom stall? now imagine it triggers steam jets). Not to mention the potential hazards of water damage on a room if anything goes wrong.
Or, you can buy a mop for 0.1% of the price.
Humanoid robots can escape this problem because versatility adds value. The upfront cost may be tens of thousands of dollars, but for that price you’re getting something that solves many, many problems. They can potentially go from task to task, filling a multitude of roles, and ideally with minimal down time.
It also helps that we can use existing processes to train them. They can observe human workers performing a task, attempt to replicate that task, and use feedback to improve. And that’s critical because the hardware is the easier part, it’s software that’s the real challenge.
- Comment on Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance” 2 months ago:
It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.
The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 2 months ago:
If companies terms of service said “we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t have to promise any service, and you have no rights” nobody would sign those terms.
Nobody who took the time to read the terms of service, and who felt that there was a real risk of those terrible terms being invoked, and who felt they had a viable alternative. But for the other 99.9% of people, they will just hit agree and move on.
- Comment on What's your favourite colour? [Non-political version] 3 months ago:
Ultraviolet. It makes other colors look cool. And it kills stuff.
- Comment on How Google is killing independent sites like ours 4 months ago:
Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video won't offer Dolby Vision and Atmos on its ad-supported plan | The company is now facing a lawsuit over its decision to charge $3 more for ad-free viewing. 4 months ago:
Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.
So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.
- Comment on Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles 5 months ago:
I use it to skim through headlines and pick through various sources on each topic. There’s probably a better free news aggregator out there, but I don’t know what it is.
- Comment on Is It Worth The Time? XKCD 1205 updated for open source and shared tools. 5 months ago:
Not since I was a teenager.
- Comment on Cable firms to FTC: We shouldn’t have to let users cancel service with a click — Customers may “misunderstand the consequences of canceling,” say lobbyists 5 months ago:
Sending a notification that a renewal is coming up? Impossible, will cost a fortune.
Sending mountains of junk mail offering bundles and limited time offers? Clearly much cheaper and easier.
Also, think of the labor costs, retracing the call center staff to not spend hours trying to talk people out of canceling and instead just having them hit a button. Why, that’s got to force a price hike.
- Comment on Your Car Is Tracking You. Abusive Partners May Be, Too. 5 months ago:
This is just going to keep getting worse until we have laws to protect our privacy. Laws that are strong enough to force transparency and accountability on companies that gather data, and to prevent them from holding features hostage if we opt out.
Unfortunately, the current congress can’t even pass legislation that they mostly agree on. And I doubt more than a handful of them give a shit about our privacy. Maybe some future election will bring in some strong privacy advocates, but I’m not holding my breath. I just don’t see things getting better any time soon.
- Comment on How Bread and Circuses should have ended. 6 months ago:
It’s already one of several planets that are identical to earth and have a history that parallels our own. The idea that planets in different solar systems would form as perfect copies of each other, and that they would both independently evolve humans, and those humans would form identical cultures that diverge only enough to create a 20th century Rome, that’s a level of ridiculous implausibility that seems more like something you’d find in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
By comparison, the fact that they also developed modern English seems like a far more logical possibility, given that they are starting with copies of the same cultures and presumably the same linguistic roots more or less. And the word play itself might actually have been intentional, making it the least implausible part of the whole thing.
- Comment on The name of the place is Deep Space 5 6 months ago:
It does depend on how you count it.
For Combs, I was only counting Weyoun as one character, even if he’s playing multiple copies of him.* And I’m only counting TV and movies, not video games. This also means that Tallman doesn’t get to have her Romulan appearance counted twice because the trading card game turned it into a different character.
For Tallman, I’m not counting any work as a double,** but I am counting her unnamed Starfleet officers that each had the misfortune of being played by a stuntwoman, and therefore tended to die. She gets one redshirt role each in TNG, Generations, DS9 and Voyager. She also plays one of the trilithium thieves from die hard in space, one of the aliens that knocked up a warbird’s engines, an immortalish prisoner in the gamma quadrant, a Bajoran nurse, and one of the space succubi that tried to beat Harry Kim with a large phallic object and drain him of his genetic material.
So, by that count, Tallman has 9 roles while Combs has 8.
* Obviously this is a matter of preference and interpretation, and the more you think about it the more you start to open Pandora’s box. Are clones with the same look and personality all the same character? What about clones that are wildly different? What about parallel universe versions? Is a doppelganger added to the count? Or a time travel duplicate? What about body swaps or possessions, do they count as being a different character? What about a character who is playing another character in an in universe fiction? What about versions that appear in dreams or simulations?
** If we’re going to nitpick, I’d argue that stunt doubles are intended to be seen as the character by the audience, so it’s not unreasonable to count them that way, even if I’m not.
- Comment on It's been a stressful week in Engineering 6 months ago:
Didn’t know Geordi was from the Zathras clan.
- Comment on Please don't let this be Gene's legacy. 6 months ago:
No one’s fault but your own for being 5 centuries early.
- Comment on The name of the place is Deep Space 5 6 months ago:
Fun fact: Patricia Tallman has played more characters on Star Trek than Jeffrey Combs.
- Comment on Discuss 6 months ago:
Going down to the planet, introducing yourself to the pre-warp civilization, making no effort to hide the fact that you are aliens from another world, planning your shore leave and preparing to fuck as many of them as you can? Not a prime directive violation.
Rescuing one of your kids who accidently breaks one of their rules and is immediately condemned to death, and asserting that as a member of your crew he is subject to your punishments and not theirs? Prime directive violation.
Taking one of the locals up to space to see the thing they consider to be a god, and openly defying the very foundations of their civilization’s system of law and order? Not a prime directive violation.
- Comment on Unlimited Suffering! 6 months ago:
Just realized I forgot the time that his wife got turned into a 10 year old. A 10 year old who got mad at him for being uncomfortable with physical affection at a time when she is going through something crazy and wants to feel comforted. Forget the Kobayashi Maru, that right there is the real no-win scenario.
Now if only I could go back to forgetting that episode.
- Comment on Unlimited Suffering! 6 months ago:
The more mundane, day to day stuff is where there’s a big difference.
(Young) Obi-Wan gets super powers and a highly respected position in society that allows him to operate independently on a day to day basis.
O’Brian gets dragged out of bed in the middle of the night because a hypochondriac feels a tingle, and after extensive diagnostics show nothing is wrong, he’s ordered to take the transporter apart piece by piece and put it back together again.
During a disaster where he is the most experienced person left on the bridge, he has to take orders from Troi (who needs him to explain everything to her)
Has arachnaphobia, gets stationed somewhere that’s overrun by giant spiders, just has to deal with it.
Let’s not forget that Miles fought in a war against the Cardassians, which caused some serious psychological scars that don’t seem to be getting addressed. Those same events broke his commanding officer, and Miles is the only one who really understands why.
Then he goes on to take a quiet post at a space station in the middle of nowhere, only for it to become the frontline of an even bigger war.