EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • I’ve been slogging through the latest season of Discovery, mostly just so I get the references. I’m just finished 5x05 and I’m not really enjoying it.

    It suffers from a lot of the problems with the prestige-ification of TV. Everything feels too serialized and too cinematic. The episodes don’t seem to have a unique identity, and the serialization means that you have to enjoy the commitment to that one serialized plotline (which I admit is not grabbing me). I prefer Star Trek when it’s episodic or has shorter story arcs within a larger season. The story itself is also very fast-paced, in that it’s a race against time/the enemy, which sucks because everything then has to happen inside of this very tight window of time. That’s fine for a movie, but I don’t know why it’s a good idea for a full season of a TV show (unless it’s something like 24 where that’s the whole gimmick). Star Trek is famous for using ticking clocks to keep the action moving, but they resolve at the end of the episode, and the next episode might not have a ticking clock, or the clock is caused by a fundamentally different thing with different stakes. In this season it’s like they’re doing laps around a racetrack. “Okay, we’re ahead now, let’s keep up our lead while we do basically the same thing next episode.” And we have to keep up the idea that it is a race despite having a ship that travels anywhere instantly. Incredibly boring.

    Mostly I just hate Alex Kurtzman. I hope his next Trek show flops hard enough that they decide not to renew his deal and they go find someone who doesn’t have obvious contempt for the audience.

    Apologies for the ranting. Short answer: DSC season 5, not great






  • The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

    One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

    The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

    Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

    If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.



  • Whatever, put cameras in and have them bluetooth to my Apple toothbrush and save it to the iCloud, fine, but “replace” the mirrors? As in rely entirely on cameras? Why? Leave the mirrors there. There’s no reason not to have mirrors on the car. Extremely cheap and reliable feedback system that never malfunctions. Putting new tech in cars is all well and good right up to the point where they start creating unnecessary failure points by getting rid of solutions that already work.

    It’s like when they started getting rid of aux inputs in favor of USB and/or bluetooth. Why? An aux input is such a trivial thing that would cost nothing to implement, takes up almost no space on the dashboard, and always works. Granted, most current devices don’t use aux cables (which I also think is a mistake for the same reasons), but that’s only been the case very recently, and car companies started getting rid of them years ago when plenty of devices still had them. Plus, they’re still useful if you just want to plug an audio source into a car quickly and easily with zero chance of failure, even if you’d have to use an adapter. It’s nice to have the option to use USB or bluetooth, but getting rid of the aux altogether is nonsense. Getting rid of mirrors? Nonsense and potentially dangerous.



  • Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

    There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

    As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.





  • Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.




  • Good. No shade on Pocket Pair, they’ve obviously done something that resonates, but imo while Palworld suffers a bit from borrowing too heavily from Pokemon, the real issue is that it borrows too much from Ark. I’d like to see a similar concept executed with an updated interface, crafting system, and progression system. Ark is fine for what it is, but it’s ten years old and Palworld didn’t really make any improvements over the basic structure. It makes sense that they built it the way they did, given that their MO is taking existing component parts and putting them together, rather than designing from the ground up, but I’d like to see a dev team take the same concept and be more intentional about it. There’s a lot that could be done to improve quality of life and create an overall smoother experience, even just by implementing current best-in-class features.