The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it’s short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.
Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.
I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.
I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.
The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.
I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)
Thumbs up for the World Tree.
That’s a really well-written article, the complete opposite of a fluff piece.
I encourage folks to go read it.
I’ve never been a huge fan of “adult animation”, or really animation in general. So I had to get over that hill of bias. But once I did, I found I enjoyed this show. Those Old Scientists on Strange New Worlds is actually what made me go back and give Lower Decks a second try.
Anyway, I’m excited to see where season 5 goes. I also kinda want another live-action crossover.
Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can’t see that.
I’m an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It’s like that in real life, and it’s like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It’s like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.
The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it’s “changed” and that you’re going to stomp off if it doesn’t “change back”. (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)
Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just…a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life–why do you think they’re constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.
You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That’s similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don’t have the time or energy to essentially “volunteer” your time on a small community to help it grow.
But the thing you’re complaining about is…just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn’t).
So, rationally, what’s the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?
Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.
(Here’s something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn’t someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)
Whenever I “can’t understand” something, I stop for a moment, and start interrogating my own assumptions of how the world works, because I clearly made an assumption of how the world or how people in general work and need to correct my own thinking.
It’s very hard to change how others do things. Much easier to start on yourself.
Edit for others: Looks like I fell for your troll ragebait account.
(Or rather, it looks like your type of account has followed its propaganda marching orders from reddit and other places to make Lemmy shitty too.)
(For those unaware, pop fandom spaces are infiltrated by people stirring shit to keep a cultural miasma of misery going on, even for people who disconnect from overtly political/news subs as an attempt to try to avoid it.)
Still, I think what I said is useful, so I’ll leave it up for lurkers.
I’ve seen mindsets like yours coming into book fandom more and more as the years have gone on.
I’m going to say some things from a meta perspective that you might not like. And while I’m making assumptions, and they might even be wrong about you in particular, I think there’s still worth in trying to see my perspective, and trying to understand WHY I am saying what I am saying, and why I’m saying it in response to your post at this particular point in time, even if I’m wildly off base with you as an individual. You’ll probably learn more from doing that than by trying to get into a one-on-one argument with me over details. Like, even if I’m wrong with you–WHY did I choose to say this right now in response to your post? What details in your post made me react in this way?
So, as far as I can tell, looking in from the outside, it looks like takes like yours arise when someone is raised in a religious context, following a holy book of some sort (Bible, Book of Mormon, the Koran–any writing really that is supposed to be your highest moral guide), and then either has not left that religion, but is trying to understand other people’s moralities through the same lens because everyone they personally know forms their morality from the bible or another holy book (so surely everyone else must too? And maybe other people use Star Trek?), or comes from someone who HAS left but hasn’t yet examined old habits left over from that upbringing, and and thus brings them into new spaces, as you seem to be doing here with Star Trek.
Like, I see religious folks, or recently ex-religious folks who have not yet examined their inner drives to get over-involved with the media they consume. They interact with their show the same way they would interact with their church, or with the Bible or another holy book. Even if they claim they are no longer religious, they were still raised in a religious environment which has an effect on habits and thinking esp. re: the topic of morality, and emotionally fandom spaces and fandom drama can feel a lot like church from a socializing and discussion standpoint, so old habits of churchy stuff sometimes seep into fandom.
But not all people interact with stories in this way. In fact, when you look at how people actually interact with media, people often take bits and pieces here and there. They agree with some stuff, disagree or just ignore others, and transform things too. You can truth-check this by looking at your peers in school. How many times did a teacher say something, and someone next to you said it was bullshit? People take in, reject, and transform information all the time. Words are not a total telepathic mind-control, people have agency.
I’m a writer, and it’s fairly common to see a reader interact with what I said and take a totally different insight from what I said, because all of their life experiences are getting tangled up with whatever story I was trying to tell, and that MIXTURE is showing them something new that I might never have realized or thought of. And this is normal–this is how humans interact with fiction.
The idea that a work of fiction has to demonstrate moral things perfectly or else be doomed as irredeemably flawed is really in my opinion more of a religious-brain thing. And no, maybe you didn’t say that directly, but I question the drive behind why you posted this post, listing the things you did. I question your motivations and assumptions. Approaching Trek asking the questions you do doesn’t align with how people actually interact with media in my experience, but it does align with how I’ve seen people utilize religion, and holy books in particular.
I’d encourage you to look up a community college and see if there’s any ethics classes you can take. I had to take an ethics class for the degree I was working on. I didn’t actually want to, as I’m in my 40s and comfortable with my sense of morality–but it ended up being shockingly useful, because it laid out different frameworks in which people can evaluate the morality of something, and the pros and cons of each. It kind of started with the “gut feeling” a lot of people use when they feel more than think, then progressed through religious frameworks, then a few philosophers, and then storytelling frameworks, and basically gave me a lot of different and new tools to evaluate things I hadn’t explicitly had before. It was very useful, much to my own surprise, and I’d recommend the experience to everyone if they go to college.
For those interested in meta discourse…this comment I’m replying to is a good teaching tool to carry out some exercises, so I’m going to pull it apart, instead of actually talking to the guy.
(Think of it as a live-action English class, but instead of pulling apart boring-as-shit short stories written decades ago, I’m gonna do it to this guy.) Note, I’m not an expert, I’m just a novel writer that gets really pissed off when I see people using techniques IRL that I use in fiction.
First, look at timing of that guy’s comment. Original post pops up about the Russian state’s “success in amplifying disinformation” online. Within 16 minutes, we have this guy jumping in to say, “But what about the US!” Just fast as fucking lightning, diverting attention away from a news post shedding light on how online information can be manipulated by state-level actors to amplify lies and misinformation.
Of course, I can imagine a topic like this is a high-priority target to be shut down. “Oh shit, they’re onto us!”
Now, is this guy actually a Russian agent? (Or from some other nation?) I don’t actually know. It’s impossible for me to find out. But whether this guy is totally legit in all the views proclaimed and is an individual American who truly believes them, or a bad actor from elsewhere, it doesn’t matter.
If you set a cup outside and rain fills it up, or if you go over and fill the cup yourself, the end result is the cup is filled. How it comes to be and the intent behind it doesn’t matter. We can’t prove intent here, that’s invisible thoughts in the poster’s head that we can never access. But we can see the actual action they took (posting), and the timing of it (which they chose), and the words contained (all of which they also chose to use), and think about WHY someone would post those words in this thread with that timing. We can’t see their intent, but we can analyze their actions and choices.
And in this case, the end result of them chiming in here and now with “the US does shitty things too!” is in my opinion distraction from a really important topic, that social media (including this site right here!) is being manipulated to sow division. As someone else in this thread pointed out, it’s “whatabout-ism”. The original news article is about one thing, and this guy jumps in pointing to some other topic instead.
Here’s some other things I want to call out, pertaining to their word-choices.
I don’t think we
“We”. In their very first line. They’re trying to put themselves into a group with other Americans, trying to form closeness with their words. Think of in a movie, the used car salesman slinging their arm over your shoulder. WE want to do this thing, right? WE think this way, yeah?
It plays on the human desire to not be left out of the group. And the fear of saying, “No, WE don’t actually think that at all!” in case there’s repercussions for disagreeing.
should put ourselves on a high horse
Again, playing on emotions of people. “High horse” is a phrase that has an emotional weight. I’m a writer and there’s very few places where I’d use that phrase unless I was really pissed and trying to rouse emotions in others by being mocking or belittling.
When combined with the “we”, think of someone throwing their arm over your shoulder and saying, “Now, WE don’t want to be all stuck up on our high horses, DO WE?” and it suggests someone who goes against the speaker is on a high horse or is otherwise speaking with a snootiness that is not in line with their station or social status.
Which, again, goes back to creating fear in the reader. Anxiety. If we engage with the original news article, are we getting above our station in life? Are we acting out of line? Do “good” people get out of line? And if I think I’m a good person what happens if I do something that might be out of line? A bunch of anxiety about one’s unverbalized social status in life swirls around.
Russia hoax was proven false, many Clinton personnel and news stations just ran with it.
The word “hoax” is emotionally charged. People don’t like being embarrassed, they don’t want to fall for hoaxes, so when you use that word, fear is roused in the reader that there’s a chance that THEY have fallen for a hoax, and if they don’t back out quick, people might think less of them, or they might feel stupid. People’s priorities can get super-fucked-up if they just THINK they got caught doing something stupid, if there’s just a chance they fell for a hoax, because there’s a lot of emotion tied up in it–panic, shame, guilt. So there’s ways to manipulate if you start telling them they might’ve fallen for a hoax.
Another emotionally-charged word here is “Clinton” (one, it has decades of political baggage, two, it’s being dropped in this post when Clinton hasn’t actually been doing much or anything politically since she lost, which again suggests the person I’m responding to is shit-stirring as it’s brought up for no reason connected to current events in order to harvest the fearful emotions connected to the name from previous years and decades.)
And then connecting the word “Clinton” to “media” aims at fearmongering that “the left” is controlling media.
It’s kind of like a magician doing something flashy with one hand (invoking the name of Clinton and the fear of Clinton-run media) while doing the actual slight-of-hand sneakily (this post here that’s using whataboutism, the false-closeness of “we”, and other charged words like pulling “Clinton” and “many Clinton…news stations” out of nowhere).
Someone might jump in now that I’ve said this and say that yeah, America has done shitty things, and yeah mainstream media does shitty things–those are important topics too, are you shutting that down/censoring/etc?
But I’m saying that human social interaction has always had a “time and place” component. You don’t go to a funeral and ask the widow if she’s single. Yeah, she technically is…but it’s not the time nor place even if her being single technically is a fact.
Similarly, for a thread that is talking about something that is VERY important (like social media being manipulated by bad actors), it’s not the time and place to jump in and start turning people onto other topics. Unless, you know…you’re trying to sow division and cause chaos. Then I imagine jumping in and saying “we” have done “other” bad things and shouldn’t get on “our high horse” would further your goals.
Anyway. My point with the above isn’t to be some textbook water-tight whatever debating the guy. I honestly don’t care about that bit. It’s more an attempt to talk to people about how timing of a comment is important, and word choice in a comment can rouse emotions (very easily in fact), and these things should be in your mind when you read comments on political threads.
And if you’re tired of the usual political comments–someone says something inflammatory, someone posts a rebuttal–you can jump up to the meta discussion, and start picking apart in your head the timing of the other person’s post, and the emotional “color” and “weight” of the words they chose to use, etc. and ask yourself questions about why they said that, in this place, with this timing, and what kind of person might have that comment they posted in their history, but also all the other posts in their history, and see if you can build up in your mind what sort of individual that might be, with what motivations.
This is like…the one place where those English class analysis of paragraphs or stories actually start to be very important in real life. The one place where those skills have real-world use instead of seeming useless outside of the classroom.
(Extra credit: There’s a few places in THIS post where I used some emotionally colored words. What are they? What effect did they have on you? I don’t actually want anyone to tell me, I have no prizes to give out, I just want you to think about it.)
I’ve been having a lot of vague thoughts about the unconscious bits of our brains and body, in regards to LLMs. The parts of our brains/neurons that started evolving back in simple animals as basically super primitive ways to process visual/audio/whatever input.
Our brains do a LOT of signal processing and filtering that never reaches conscious thought, that we can’t even reach with our conscious thought if we tried, but which is necessary for our squishy body-things to take in input from our environment and turn it into something useful instead of drowning in a screeching eye-searing tangled mess of chaotic sensory input all the time.
LLMs strike me as that sort of low-level input processing, the pattern-recognition and filtering. I think true generalized AI would have to be built on pieces like this–probably a lot of them. Ways to pluck patterns out of complex but repeated input. Like, this stuff definitely isn’t self-aware, but could eventually end up as some sort of processing library for something else far down the line.
Now might be a good time to pick up Peter Watts’ sci-fi book Blindsight. He doesn’t exactly write about AI in it, but he does write about a creature that responds to input but isn’t exactly conscious like you or I.
You know, a “randomize me” choice that was fair (that is to say, not obviously offloading the worst stuff or stinting on portions or giving you the same “random” thing every time) is something I might actually use for meals if I could.
There’s this tea place online I buy tea from, what-cha.com , and they have a “mystery” tea section that’s really awesome for trying out new stuff. And the reason it works is because the “mystery teas” are still decent quality.
But I imagine fast food places don’t implement this because some jerk would harass the workers over it.
I was going to reply, stopped to look at this guy’s comment history. I’m not seeing a lot of worth in it, it’s mostly one-liners about this or that, no real engagement. Some seem mildly divisive simply for division’s sake.
The link to the science article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adf7360
For a new watcher, especially a young one, Strange New Worlds is probably the best start. It has a lot of the classic “Trek” philosophy going on, but paired with modern production and special effects, and also paired with more modern treatment of female characters.
I love The Next Generation, that’s “my Trek”, but certain things haven’t aged well.
I’ve been watching Babylon 5 for the first time (didn’t see it when it was actively airing), and while it’s not Trek, it was produced in the same era as TNG, Voyager, etc. and I find myself jarred by certain ways they portray characters, esp. female ones, and that same sort of stuff is present in older Trek too. Like, Crusher and Troi got absolutely cheated when it came to great arcs and such. Strange New Worlds handles its female characters much, much, MUCH better.
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Personally, I really hope that Saru makes the transition to Starfleet Academy. I love him to bits and Doug Jones could do a ton more with his character if given the chance. I also suspect, due to the way Picard ended, that Brent Spiner’s Data in some form or another might show up as an instructor, maybe as a guest star. I’d actually really like to see a Lore-influenced-Data bringing the snark in a classroom. Data’s earnestness and Lore’s sense of humor are especially charming when combined together, and we only saw a bit of it at the end of Picard. And I’d love to see Saru and Data interacting.
Pelia is also long-lived enough to show up, and she was an instructor prior to becoming the Enterprise’s Engineer. They’ve already set her up to be replaced by Scotty, so I could see the actress moving to Starfleet Academy, since we already know her time on the Enterprise is limited.
Unrelated to Starfleet Academy, I do notice there’s no word on a post-Picard series starring Seven of Nine–I hope that’s mostly because the strikes disrupted early planning or something.
But they set Picard up perfectly to spawn a new series from that and I’d absolutely LOVE to see Seven of Nine as Captain of her own Starfleet ship, and Jack would make an interesting foil to Wesley as the cocky ensign. I think with the topic of AI being a thing now, and all the loose ends with the Borg and with Data’s offspring (and Data himself), we could actually really use right now a series that talks a lot about AI. I imagine interaction with Jurati-Borg could be an ongoing arc. And Soji could appear and we could get some interaction with Data to tie off that storyline.
Humor and comedy have always been able to say things too risky to be said in any other way.
Supposedly, the role of a fool or clown or jester in a monarch’s court was to fulfill this function. Say things everyone else was too terrified to say to the king.
It worked. I’m seeing it on lemmy.world using Firefox. I’m not using any of the special front-ends.
Well, in the context of a world where stories are being told, Spock always being perfect even when young and figuring this stuff out wouldn’t lead to any interesting stories.
Personally, I’ve seen his story with T’pring as a variation on the very common struggle people who grow up in strict cultures go through. Some of those individuals break away from their cultures, some come to terms with it personally.
Spock’s been interesting in that he chooses his Vulcan side ultimately. I think most character stories go the other way–the uptight, rules-following individual breaking away from the rigid culture that nurtured them. Spock in contrast finds a balance.
They took that X away from me a few days later. I’ve switched to Freetube and it’s been pretty smooth.
As far as I’m given to understand from folks who are Russian (but got out of Russia) or Ukrainian, this fellow would more be a change from one strongman to another if he replaced Putin. Apparently his Livejournal has him saying some nasty stuff he hasn’t repudiated. (Unfortunately, I don’t speak or read Russian so I can’t examine the sources myself very well, and machine translation doesn’t bring cultural nuance or context.) (Also, as funny as it sounds to people who remember Livejournal as the first English-speaking major social media for fandom, Livejournal has been the place for years for Russian intellectuals and politicians to say their bit, so it has a different cultural context in Russia than it does elsewhere where it was mainly used for fandom drama.)
It’s been strangely fascinating watching as western media tries to hold him up as some hope, when as far as I can tell when I stop to listen to actual Ukranians or Russians with better cultural knowledge on how Russia works than most western commentators, there’s basically minimal hope he’ll be anything close to a (good) Western-style leader and if he gets into power. (it gets swept under the rug in the west that Russian culture is NOT western european culture and things that are a “given” in European and other western cultures actually are not necessarily established culturally in Russia.)
As far as I understand it, it’ll just be exchanging one dude who’s done obviously terrible things (Putin) for another who probably’s not going to be all that different, and will just do his own brand of bad things. I think perhaps people just hope he’ll be a stable asshole, as opposed to an unstable one as Putin’s become.
Or maybe they just like a scapegoat narrative–it has been fascinating to me that he voluntarily returned to Russia, and it really reminds me that people who aren’t necessarily good can still show courage, and shape narratives that way in their favor. I suspect his actions have motivations underneath that I don’t understand because I don’t understand Russian strongman culture. And I suspect other people interpret his actions through a western lens, without understanding there’s cultural nuance going on that doesn’t align with how a western viewpoint might interpret something, and that’s why western media keeps talking about him so breathlessly.
Someone I read pointed out that in the real world, people are actually largely ok with monarchies and authoritarian rulers so long as the ruler at the top keeps things stable enough for business to be conducted. Ideals like democracy fall by the wayside in light of pragmatism when a nation state is unstable–people crave stability over all, over democracy even, regardless of what method of governance brings it. They will flock to authoritarianism if it promises stability.
And in Russia, the early 90s in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR brought a great deal of instability and hardship along with its “democracy”, so there’s not necessarily a positive feeling towards it as there is in more-functional western nations where it’s been working more or less for decades, as people who lived through the 90s in Russia associate the concept with hardship, not stability. Basically, a good concept implemented like crap can poison the concept in people’s minds for the rest of their life.
So I suspect if Putin is ever ousted, whoever replaces him (whether this guy or another) will be there because people think he can bring stability, not because the successor will actually be a good leader (from a western perspective).
But it’s all operating on a lower level of the “hierarchy of needs” than most people in western countries understand–more concern with base survival, less with being able to flower and thrive. So things might stabilize, but it might still be very bad for people, especially minorities, in Russia, and bad for smaller states if this guy gets into power but also turns his eye to conquering or dominating them in order to garner support.
Anyway. I find it interesting this guy hasn’t yet been executed. Instead they (supposedly) shuffle him off elsewhere. If you were Putin, why not kill him? Must be things going on behind the scenes that we don’t see, or understand, things concerning enough that Putin thinks executing him will be more trouble than it solves.
If Navalny ever comes to power, I don’t have any particular hope he’ll be a “good” leader.
But he has an interesting story, to be sure, and you can’t say he hasn’t been through quite a bit of hardship.