My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea (“because it’s so cold up there!”) and will be amazing when they’re online. That’s the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.

100% agree. Of all of the Kelvin cast, he felt like Bones. Karl Urban was a fantastic casting decision.

I came here to say this. I first saw Walter Koenig as Chekov, but I really loved him as Bester. I’ve heard that he lights up when people bring up Bester at conventions and such.

EULAs are part of the reason I almost exclusively use FOSS or just spin my own software (if time permitting).

The first time I encountered one was as a small child (like 5 or 6) when I was trying to install some game. The EULA came up, and I started reading it. Of course, I only understood a fraction of the legalese, but seeing some clauses that seemed to a child supremely unfair, caused me to hit “Do Not Agree.” Who would agree to such non-sense without having a full understanding or seeing crazy stipulations? The window closed, and I couldn’t understand why, so I asked my parents. They said that although you should read and understand any agreement, EULAs were different because if you don’t agree, then you can’t use the software.

It’s crazy to me that even as a kid, I could see how one-sided EULAs were. These companies aren’t even hiding their malicious intent, and we as a society have just decided to go along with it. I’m part of the problem, too (much as I try not to be). There have certainly been times that I hit accept even knowing that the EULA was taking advantage of me in some way, but I needed to use the software.

Anyway, there’s not much of a point of writing all this. Companies’ EULAs screw us over, and there is little we can really do about it, especially if the software is necessary in some way.

The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been accused by historians and rights campaigners of “grotesque stupidity”

I see they were being kind to him.

I literally don’t know a single veteran or service member who either respects him or even just likes him. Literally 100% across the board disdain. There’s got to be at least a couple who have positive views of him in the DoD, but no one I’ve met or worked with…

One of my friends once told me that when you go far enough left, you get your guns back.

Please read the citations. I’ve found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it’s worth checking.

Also, to be clear, I’m not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). “Thinking” is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It’s just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to “check” it and “think.” It works surprisingly well, but it’s not actual thinking.

THANK YOU! I studied AI in school, and it always bothers me when people think that LLMs are the only facet of AI. Between 2022-2024, I had a knee jerk reaction of explaining that AI is more than LLMs and that LLMs are really a small subset of the entire universe of AI, yadda yadda yadda. Now I’ve given up and roll my eyes as someone tries to tell me about the cool new Claude skill they built.

What’s funnier is people think I hate LLMs. That couldn’t be further from the truth; they are a fantastically interesting and innovative technology! “Attention is All You Need” is a great paper, and super impactful. I just hate that people are outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and neglect the rest of my field of study.

Jennifer Griffin phrased this really poorly. (Fox News isn’t really known for intelligence…) Three ships were fired on, and they returned fire with retaliatory strikes, per USCENTCOM. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4480437/centcom-protects-us-warships-transiting-strait-of-hormuz/

So, the war isn’t back on, but it’s not off either. For a cease fire, there’s been a lot of firing going on. The US never should have kicked this hornet’s nest.

The only one that I can think of is research or clinical settings. It could be really useful for various social or psychological research or monitoring patient status. That’s not how it will be used for the most part but that is a place it could be useful. Like any tool, it can be used for good things and bad (how revelatory…)

The problem with the AI industry (and modern, unregulated capitalism in general) is that as soon as someone has a potentially useful tool, they look everywhere for every possible use with no regard for societal consequences. Thinking about the ramifications of using a tool doesn’t increase shareholder value. In fact, trying to only have your tool be used in a positive way actively harms shareholder value. Greed perverts all that is good.

It depends. I’d say it’s a scale of fairly easy to very easy depending on how you have everything set up and documented. Essentially, back everything up and install the new distro then put it all back. It will take some time, though. The first time I distro-hopped, I forgot to take a list of my installed packages, which made for some unwelcome surprises when I couldn’t find certain programs. That’s not hard to overcome, just keep a list of your installed packages. Even if you don’t, it’s easy to just reinstall them.

The job market in tech is not good right now, so they may not. I have a friend who is a dev and was getting heavily recruited by Palantir because he had a clearance already. The money was really good, and he was at the cusp of taking the job because he had been ghosted by other companies for months and only had a handful of interviews after being laid off six-ish months ago. Luckily, another place gave him an offer for a bit lower compensation, which he took. If that other place didn’t come through, though, I think he would have gone with Palantir so that he could get some income.

ETA: That said, Palantir is evil, and my friend was in that position because of the BS that is the US economic system, which is perpetuated by the people at Palantir.

That’s so cool.

I can’t think of anything more profound. Just…that’s so cool.

The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

Absolutely! I say this as a Comp Sci major who loves the humanities (and almost studied History). General education should encompass introductions to both the STEM and humanities areas. It is equally frustrating when I can’t walk through a 7th grade level algebraic function with someone with a Master’s degree in International Relations and when I can’t reference a fairly common part of mythology with a software engineer.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.

I agree. I think a lot of degrees are still real degrees, but the entire ecosystem has been degraded to the point that quality across the board has diminished. So, the most “rigorous” degrees now are equivalent to a run-of-the-mill degree a generation ago and so forth. Ultimately, the run-of-the-mill degrees of yesteryear are now just diploma mill degrees.

I hate to say it, but a lot of it is e-learning and online degrees. It’s a lot harder to engage with material, with a class, or with the professor themselves behind a screen hundreds of miles away. Even when you put everything into the work, it still just is not as engaging because you don’t have the same dynamic because you can’t just drop by your professor’s office for office hours or get the same level of help or group learning. In undergrad, I used to help others in my classes, and vice-versa, while also going to office hours to clear up details. Online, if it’s not impossible, it’s at least orders of magnitude more difficult. So, the quality of learning drops a ton.

If I go back for another Master’s or a Doctorate, I will only do in person classes.

Oh man this is really sad. I liked SFA way more than I thought I would. The cast was top notch, and they had some good stories. Genuinely sad to see this one go.

I found myself nodding along to a lot that was said in this article. I also would trace a lot of recent issues to JJ Abrams’ take. What I said then is still (I think) true today: “They are good movies, but they aren’t good Star Trek movies.” Discovery and Picard suffered for it, but I think that the ills are being corrected. My hope is that Paramount greenlights “Legacy” as the TNG-spiritually-successor as SNW is the TOS-spiritual-successor.

Where I will disagree, though, is that Star Trek isn’t broken. Five-ish years ago, I would have said that, but after SNW, Lower Decks, and Picard season 3, I think the powers that be have a better understanding of what is needed. We were in a bit of a “dark-ages” from 2006-2020, but I think we’re back on the upswing. We may not be quite at 1990s golden age Trek, but we can get close.