frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik,

Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.

If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.

frezik,

I’ve had a fan fic on the back of my head where the Borg start out as a small group exploring networked community like that, but some of the members are more radical than others. One believes that people need to be brought under collective influence in order to solve their social problems and sees individuality as a problem. However, when the more virulent form of the collective gets going, she becomes a hypocrite who refuses to subsume her own individuality to the collective while inflicting the same on everyone else.

That’s why the Borg Queen seems so contradictory. She actually is.

frezik,

That commenter already is the surgeon general of Florida.

frezik, (edited )

It’s only a big deal because of what Disney didn’t do, which is lobby to extend copyright yet again. That’s it.

Oh, and Steamboat Willy itself can be distributed as much as you want, at least in the US. It’s a good year to be a connoisseur of 1920s animation.

frezik,

Those are rookie numbers. Professionals came up with the nested logic monstrosity that is the JSON-LD specification:

www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11-api/#context-processing-a

Looks through the algorithm bits in the various sections. How would you implement that? The answer is invariably by copying the highly nested statements of the spec directly into your language. Maybe there’s a better way, but you’d have to understand all that nested logic first, and you’d be exhausted at that point and just want to move on.

frezik,

Works made for hire are 95 years from publication. LotR is not a work for hire, so it goes by life of the author plus 75 years. It goes public domain in 2044.

frezik,

“He’s grounded, so it’s OK” - Someone on YouTube

frezik,

For many countries, it’d be as easy as cutting a few undersea cables. Two to three cut cables in 2008 brought down most of the Arab peninsula.

www.wired.com/2008/12/mediterranean-c/

As for the US and Europe, things are too interconnected for that to work. That said, the Internet as a whole is more centralized than you might expect from its history as a network that was supposed to be nuclear war proof.

frezik,

Economics is simply a study in how to allocate scarce goods. It does not need to result in hoarding scarce goods in the hope of getting more for them later.

frezik, (edited )

Hmm? I wasn’t talking about OSI.

If you’re thinking BIOS, that was originally IBM proprietary stuff.

OSI started from a lot of telecom companies, who inflicted their silly ideas of Presentation and Session layers on us all.

frezik,

A big door shut, but they also knew how to open it again.

frezik,

Those first two seasons really aren’t that bad. There are some episodes that are downright excellent in there. Duet is a masterpiece.

frezik,

I agree on Pulaski. She could have been a great character if she had more than one season.

I don’t think there’s a truly great episode in TNG’s first two seasons, though. They range from “utter garbage” to “fine” . Season three is massive improvement. Watching it back to back, it’s almost jarring how much better it gets. Barely seems like the same show.

DS9 ranges from “I’ll watch it, I guess” to “holy shit this is amazing”. Kai Winn is a fantastic villain straight away, and would be the most talked about villain in any other show. The only reason she isn’t is because there are so many great villains in DS9 that she gets lost.

frezik,

There’s a lot of fighting between DS9 and B5. The story goes that B5 series creator J. Michael Straczynski had shopped the series bible around, including to Paramount. They weren’t interested, but when they heard it got picked up by WB, they rushed their own space station based Star Trek series forward. With people coming over from TNG, they get a pilot ready faster than JMS can create a series from scratch.

Since they had the B5 series bible, there’s long been allegations that DS9 is a ripoff of B5. Indeed, there do seem to be some elements stolen out of it. For example, the pilot of B5 has a “changeling net” technology that lets people impersonate each other, which had apparently evolved out of an early draft of a changeling species, which DS9 copies outright.

What Paramount studio execs did was definitely underhanded. They were deliberately pushing out a show to make sure B5 wouldn’t get to the same level of popularity as Star Trek. They probably did steal elements from the B5 bible and pushed Berman and Piller to use them.

However, fans make more of the similarities than are really there. Berman and Piller were almost certainly unaware of why the studio was pushing certain ideas and where they got them from (and JMS said as much at the time). Most of the stolen elements are ultimately superficial. The way the central conflict unfolds is very different, the characters are very different, and the technology is all different. B5 doesn’t center around a planet coming out of a long term colonial authoritarian government, and DS9 doesn’t have humanity crawling out of a war that nearly destroyed it and which ended for mysterious reasons. B5 doesn’t have an excellent father-son relationship, and DS9 doesn’t have a wisecracking ambassador who’s very likeable despite doing some incredibly fucked up things.

They are both excellent shows, and well worth your time.

frezik, (edited )

Could you imagine a Voyager where the ship is no longer constantly running towards home? One where they have to stay and gather materials to get their warp 10 drive working. The species they meet will be the same species around a few seasons later, and the relationships they build with them matter. Maybe stasis isn’t good enough, and they have to hold everyone in a transporter buffer, which means rebuilding huge sections of the ship to support having all the crew inside transporters at once. They expect this to take years, but it’s still by far the shortest way home. A few shuttles get modified and they send couriers back to the alpha quadrant. So they have some contact with Star Fleet, but it’s not as simple as opening a channel.

If there’s only enough story material here to support a few seasons, then maybe something comes up that means they have to go back and fix it. Maybe some Borg shit. Make up a reason to keep the Maquis crew around (not like Star Fleet gives a shit once the Dominion War is underway).

Good thing they never gave us that nightmare of a show.

frezik,

It has more points of failure, and that failure can be more catastrophic. If your air cooler falls off somehow or the fan dies, CPUs these days are pretty good about shutting themselves off before they melt. If your fittings leak, it can destroy everything.

frezik,

With CPUs with very low TDPs, yes.

frezik,

I’m a shareholder in a non-profit. Specifically, the Green Bay Packers. It basically means having a unique piece of team memorabilia.

frezik, (edited )

SNW is probably what you want. There are some longer arcs, but for the most part, you can take things episode by episode.

The streaming era is favoring shows with long arcs, though. Just the opposite of where we were in the 90s, where missing one episode of Babylon 5 meant you might not understand what’s going on, and VCRs were clunky and hard to setup right.

frezik,

Link talks. The fan theory that he’s mute is unsupportable. Too many instances of him conveying complex information to people he just met (and who wouldn’t know his gesture language). You can try to explain it away, but it will quickly get more complicated than assuming he talks.

frezik,

Lots of states issue IDs from the DMV with equivalent protection features as a driver’s license, but isn’t a license. Those are good enough.

frezik,

I’ve actually been working on a similar thing for the SNW uniforms by printing direct to fabric. First tried TPU, but it’s hard to get a consistent pattern of some of the fine details. Some of them come out better than others. Then tried a transparent PLA–the emblems are small enough that the flexibleness of TPU shouldn’t be necessary–but it didn’t stick very well.

So they’re either using a very carefully calibrated 3d printer (and this is the first time I’ve worked with TPU), or it’s a different technique entirely, like a mask.

Full details of SNW uniforms for cosplay, for those who are interested: makingitsew.com/starfleet-duty-uniform-skant-vari…

frezik,

My wife and I hatewatch house hunting shows when we’re stuck up in a hotel sometimes.

What sometimes happen is something you can’t hatewatch. One episode of “Love it or List It” had a black family where mom had to do clear the kitchen table to do the office work she brought home, the older teenage boy had a bed too short and his legs hung over the edge, and grandma moved in and had to sleep in the same bed as the younger daughter. I can’t hatewatch that. This family is legit struggling with their current housing arrangements and needs a fix.

Then the next thing comes on, and it’s a white family where their biggest problems are that the house is too far from the golf course and the kids don’t all have their own bathrooms. Thank you, hatewatching gods, I can work with this!

frezik,

In fact, weird outliers are a sign that the numbers weren’t cooked. In polling, you’ll always find a Christian who thinks Jesus isn’t real, an Atheist who thinks the ten commandments should be posted in classrooms, people who think Sonic tastes good, and other equally strange and nonsensical results.

frezik,

There’s lots of sources from the losing side. Josephus was a Jewish writer who told of the Roman destruction of the temple. The history of the Eastern Front of WWII, as it was known to the West, was dominated by the writings of German soldiers for a long time.

History is written by writers. For much of it, that means it comes to us from an educated upper class. That’s where the historical blind spots are.

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