It’s not that Disco isn’t progressive; it’s just lazily progressive. Case in point: the scene that bothers me to this day is Adira coming out as non-binary, just beyond cringe-worthy and very 21st century. As a viewer, the scene read like Adira was waiting to be judged harshly for their identity, and it just totally took me out of the era. By the 32nd century, I’d expect that being judged harshly for one’s gender identity would be at least a millennium behind us, and the conversation should either have not happened or been so matter-of-fact that it was treated as nothing. I get what the writers were trying to do, and it fell so flat and felt so bluntly obvious. I’m all for the message, but the delivery was not great.
The saddest thing about Disco to me is that there were great ideas and great intentions, but the execution of those ideas was so poor. Really, it just shows that you can have great actors, great directors, and great concepts, but if the writers can’t make it work, it just all comes apart.
I see your point, but I still don’t think the scene works, but thinking about it like that makes it much more watchable. My point is that the scene is simultaneously poignant and a throw-away. It’s a “big deal” but also just one scene.
By the 32nd century, something like that should be such a non-issue for humans, that it would be like stating just another fact about yourself (amnesia and trust-issues aside), which lends itself to being a throw-away…but that defeats the purpose of the scene. Again, I am all about the message and Stamets’ reaction, but it felt very 21st century and on-the-nose.
I’d have preferred if Adira were just non-binary from the beginning and maybe have a quick correction of someone when they were misgendered. Or, let that scene be the reveal of something else, like the symbiont. With that change (I’d have to rewatch the season to see where this scene was in relation to the symbiont reveal), I think the scene would still work while tightening up the writing. I also think it’d get the message across, too.
Now, if the writers really wanted that scene to stay as-is, there are options. Make them an alien from a culture not as enlightened (which would cause other issues) or have this scene play into a bigger theme of Earth backsliding post-Burn (like a Dark Ages) to have mores closer to the 21st century and show the 23rd century crew as horrified by it and work to bring Earth and humanity back toward enlightenment.
This kinda sums up my main problem with Disco. There were great options on the table to realize a concept, but they just wrote it in an awkward way that is unsatisfying (at least to me). Sometimes, that awkwardness reads as performative/lazily progressive.
I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.
I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.
That’s a bit of a stretch. They aren’t great, but they’re still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.
E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I’d say e-bikes are more versatile.
Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good “first step.” I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.
One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation’s correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.
I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I’d really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.
I’m in Illinois, and my entire family thought I was nuts for supporting bail reform. My cop brother said that we’d have hordes of criminals on the street causing more crime, and my parents again voiced how they “want to move out of state” (because Indiana is sooooooo much better /s). They never could answer why paying to be set free until court was so central to security because it never made sense to tie pre-trial lock up with ability to pay.
They never bring it up anymore, and for that, I’m grateful.
Predicting who Nikki Haley’s supporters might back in a future election depends on various factors such as the candidates, their policies, and the prevailing political climate at the time. Nikki Haley, a prominent Republican figure, served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration. However,...
I mean, not all will vote for Trump. I imagine some supporters will not vote, vote third party, or (gasp) vote for Biden. I think the majority will just vote for Trump because of the R next to his name, though.
Yeah, I agree. It was well-written, and I thought it was good, but saying this was the best SOTU of all time seems a bit far-fetched. Biden straight-up isn’t a great orator, and that’s fine by me. I would rather someone who can do the job than make wonderful speeches.
Now, how Biden dealt with the hecklers was pretty great, I’ll say.
If I remember correctly, he didn’t want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn’t even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.
Star Trek Is Showing More Love To Scott Bakula’s Enterprise (screenrant.com)
Purism (creator of FOSS friendly phones and hardware) 2023 financial report , income grew by 350% in three years and the company is profitable (puri.sm)
The NYTimes is once again trashing the most promising mobility innovation of the 21st century (lemmy.ml)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/16133154...
AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside (www.wired.com)
archive.is link needed
California blew it on bail reform. Now Illinois is showing it works. (www.latimes.com)
Archived at web.archive.org/web/…/illinois-bail-reform-works
House quickly rejects Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's effort to remove Speaker Johnson from office (apnews.com)
Who will Nikki Haley's supporters back in November election? Trump or biden? (www.infoterkiniviral.com)
Predicting who Nikki Haley’s supporters might back in a future election depends on various factors such as the candidates, their policies, and the prevailing political climate at the time. Nikki Haley, a prominent Republican figure, served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration. However,...
Republicans baffled by Katie Britt’s State of the Union response: ‘One of our biggest disasters’ (www.theguardian.com)
FFmpeg Explorer (ffmpeg.lav.io)
Nazis at CPAC is a frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right (www.msnbc.com)
The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease....