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My disdain for mega banks knowns no end
  • It was an Australian Senator that said that in a comment about housing affordability for young people, about them being able to afford a deposit if they weren't so frivolous with money.

    Ironically, totting that up, and assuming that they buy that every day ceaselessly, and that the cafe never closes, it's only 10 grand, and Australian housing prices are high enough that in most places, that's not even enough for a 5% deposit for a $500,000 home. You would only be half-way there.

    You'd still not be able to afford the mortgage, even after buying said home.

  • Rabbit data breach: all r1 responses ever given can be downloaded
  • It can depend on your particular part of the tech-sphere. I barely saw anything about either of those, because I wasn't all that interested in AI things, and didn't really follow the kind of people who would talk about it. At most, it was a quick flash in the pan before it was overshadowed by other news.

  • Daily Discussion Thread: 🎙️ or🎤? 🎂 or 😘? Saturday, June 22, 2024
  • Its also the winter solstice (or as close as), ans as such, there's a Solstice celebration event thing going on at CERES, if anyone wants to pop in and have a peek. Doesn't seem to be all that much, though.

    Would also not recommend buying food there. Had a peek at the prices, and they're corked ($9 for a small box of chips?!), even before any likely surcharge.

    On the bright side, the cold weather seems to have let up some today, which is nice. We've had more than our fair share of chills for the past day or two.

  • Minecraft players outraged as Microsoft deletes accounts that weren't transitioned
  • Highly unlikely. Minecraft has a lot of quirky code, and the mods would have been built around that code.

    For all intents and purposes, the clones are a different game entirely, and unless the mod author specifically goes out of their way to make their mod compatible with the clones, or a different version for it, they won't work.

  • the "anti-sex' bed
  • This is a special bed that’s designed to break under the weight of more than one occupant.

    That just sounds like a recipe for it to crumple if multiple people sit on it, or someone jumps into it, rather than gracefully climbing in.

  • Is it just a coincidence that Chromium and Firefox have similar version numbers?
  • One of the reasons why the 1/3rd pound burger lost to the 1/4 pound burger, was because people saw the 1/4, and thought that the quarter-pound was larger for some inexplicable reason.

    I would be very surprised if there wasn't at least some marketing suggestion focused around "number that looks big is better".

  • Annotations for *Star Trek: Discovery* 5x10: “Life, Itself” (SPOILERS)
  • Honestly, after Zora became sapient, it seems like a cruelty to have her just sit around in deep space.

    In Calypso, this was less of an issue, because of the implication that Discovery became sapient after centuries of floating about, developing sapience as part of that time, but Zora would be sapient from the get-go, and leaving a sapient being adrift and alone for Millennia seems like fairly unethical.

  • What would inorganic species call themselves?

    I've been using "mechanoid" as a classification (similar to humanoid, etc), but a friend pointed out that it's both too generic, and that said inorganics might just consider it biology, with organics being the weird outlier.

    11
    Why is "Dear X" considered more formal than "To X" in e-mail/writing?

    You wouldn't start off an e-mail with "My Dear X", or "Dearest X", since that would be too personal for a professional email, so "To X" being more impersonal seems like it would make the letter more professional-sounding, compared to "Dear X".

    25
    What caused the change in electronic terminology?

    What caused the shift from calling things like rheostats and condensers to resistors and capacitors, or the move from cycles to Hertz?

    It seemed to just pop up out of nowhere, seeing as the previous terms seemed fine, and are in use for some things today (like rheostat brakes, or condenser microphones).

    23
    [Stupid Question] Why cut/bulk in cycles instead of doing it all in one go?

    You often see people in fitness mention going through a cut/bulk cycle, or mention one, with plans to follow up with the other. Why is it that cutting and bulking so often happen in cycles, rather than said person just doing both at once, until they hit their desired weight?

    6
    Was the Federation right to grandfather in Earth's laws against genetic modification?

    One of the recent laws in Trek that gets looked at a bit, is the genetic engineering ban within the Federation. It appears to have been passed as a direct result of Earth's Eugenics Wars, to prevent a repeat, and seems to have been grandfathered into Federation law, owing to the hand Earth had in its creation.

    But we also see that doing so came with major downsides. The pre-24th century version of the law applied a complete ban on any genetic modification of any kind, and a good faith attempt to keep to that resulted in the complete extinction of the Illyrians.

    In Enterprise, Phlox specifically attributes the whole issue with the Eugenics Wars to humans going overboard with the idea of genetic engineering, as they are wont to do, trying to improve/perfect the human species, rather than using it for the more sensible goal of eliminating/curing genetic diseases.

    Strange New Worlds raises the question of whether it was right for Earth to enshrine their own disasters with genetic engineering in Federation law like that, particularly given that a fair few aliens didn't have a problematic history with genetic engineering, and some, like the Illyrians, and the Denobulans, used it rather liberally, to no ill-effects.

    At the same time, people being augmented with vast powers in Trek seems to inevitably go poorly. Gary Mitchell, Khan Noonien-Singh, and Charlie X all became megalomaniacs because of the vast amount of power that they were able to access, although both Gary and Charlie received their powers through external intervention, and it is unclear whether Khan was the exception to the rule, having been born with that power, and knowing how to use it properly. Similarly, the Klingon attempt at replicating the human augment programme was infamous, resulting in the loss of their famous forehead ridges, and threatening the species with extinction.

    Was the Federation right to implement Earth's ban on genetic engineering, or is it an issue that seems mostly human/earth-centric, and them impressing the results of their mistakes on the Federation itself?

    9
    What's the food like on your world?

    Can humans eat it? Do they have food at all? What do they have as a staple foodstuff?

    10
    Was the USS Discovery upgraded completely, or does it still keep its original technology?

    Inspired by a bit of discussion over on discord, where there was an argument over whether the USS Discovery had been upgraded by the 32nd century Federation.

    On the one hand, the Discovery did undergo a vast overhaul, being fitted with an upgraded power/propulsion system, detachable nacelles and the works, however, we also know at the end of Discovery Season 3, that Burnham resetting the Discovery's computers effectively put much of the ship back to the 23rd century baseline (or as much of one as it could return to). We're also shown that the Discovery still uses microtapes in its computer room.

    So was the Discovery upgraded completely to 32nd century standards, or is it still a 23rd century ship underneath the 32nd century paint?

    5
    The Federation should not have been surprised that their holograms developed sapience

    We already know from TOS that Mutlitronic computers are able to develop sapience, with the M-5 computer being specifically designed to "think and reason" like a person, and built around Dr Daystrom's neural engrams.

    However, we also know from Voyager that the holomatrix of their Mk 1 EMH also incorporates Multitronic technology, and from DS9 that it's also used in mind-reading devices.

    Assuming that the EMH is designed to more or less be a standard hologram with some medical knowledge added in, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that holograms were either sapient themselves, or were capable of developing sapience. It would only be a logical possibility if technology that allowed human-like thought and reasoning into a hologram.

    If anything, it is more of a surprise that sapient holograms like the Doctor or Moriarty hadn't happened earlier.

    19
    Bringing technologies back from the future ensures that the Federation won't develop their present counterparts

    We often see technology from the future brought back to the present, whether as a case of a chance encounter, or something more.

    However, it’s also fairly uncommon to see those technologies pop up against after they’ve been introduced. One such example is the ablative armour generators that Admiral Janeway fitted to the Voyager, being prototypes from a future Starfleet, which are seen in that episode, and then never again, even in shows that are set after the time she left.

    The reason for this might be that the Federation does not want to run the risk of being accused of violating the temporal prime directive (or accidentally running afoul of it in some other way), and shelves that particular technology entirely.

    From their standpoint, it would be rather difficult to separate a technology that the Federation developed of their own accord, compared to one that they might have developed from being inspired by, or reverse-engineering a piece of future technology, so they shelve it, rather than risk the trouble, never developing the preliminary steps to reach that future technology.

    The only anachronistic part of this is the Doctor’s mobile emitter, which is a variant of 26th century technology, and was developed into Picard, but that can be explained by it being reverse engineered from 26th century technology, by someone in the 20th century, technically making it technology from the past. Since it is Earth technology from their own past, they might be able to get away with iterating on their own version without risking trouble with the various temporal enforcement agencies.

    9
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)T1
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