I’m 50/50 on the episodic plots. I think that DS9 hit a good balance there: The plots were mostly episodic but usually connected to an overarching metaplot. That felt pretty good; not too loose and not too tight.

That’s why I’m going to vote for a party I don’t believe in. Normally I would vote for one of the parties I do believe in and help them build momentum on their path toward 5% – but with the AfD on the rise and the Union blatantly putting personal opportunism over the interests of the country, I can’t afford my vote to not count.

Once more I wish we had a preferential voting system so people can vote for who they believe in and fall back to a less preferred alternative if necessary.

Ist auch wieder was dran. Die Realität ist bisweilen leider recht frustrierend, insbesondere Dinge wie unvermeidliche Ungenauigkeiten oder der Umstand, dass ein Wahlsystem mit allen wünschenswerten Eigenschaften mathematisch unmöglich ist. Es ist niemandes Schuld, aber trotzdem irritierend.

Ich hätte echt gerne bei diesen Umfragen die “Sonstige”-Spalte aufgeschlüsselt. Oder gleich Zugang zu den Rohdaten (und zwar gleich bei Veröffentlichung und nicht zwei Jahre später).

Ich würde gerne für eine Kleinpartei stimmen, da die Großparteien mich nicht adäquat vertreten, aber unser Wahlsystem macht leider strategisches Wählen nötig – insbesondere, wo die AfD so bedrückend viel Einfluss hat. Da hätte ich gerne schon Einsicht darin, wie die Kleinparteien sich im Laufe der Zeit machen, um zu sehen, wann und wie sehr eine von mir favorisierte Partei an Relevanz zunimmt und ob sich eine Stimmabgabe entsprechend meiner Überzeugungen lohnen könnte.

Kriege ich aber nicht. Nach der Wahl kann ich dann sehen, ob meine bevorzugte Partei 3% oder 0,3% gekriegt hat, aber vorher kriege ich darin nicht einfach Einsicht. Das beschränkt für mich das Potenzial von Umfragen als Instrument zur politischen Meinungsbildung.

Huh. For me it consistently refused when locally-hosted; even the section with the internal thoughts was completely blank. This goes for both the official release and a decensored version.

My bad. I went with the WD Red Plus, model WD40EFPX. It’s basically the successor to the old CMR Red line. The Pro line has 7200 RPM and is a bit noisier, which isn’t great for a living room server.

I’ll correct my earlier comment.

Yeah, it doesn’t take a lot to build a decent home server. I just rebuilt mine (the old one’s Turion II Neo was perhaps a bit too weak) and the most expensive part were the HDDs. I didn’t want to reuse the old ones.

A slightly underclocked Athlon 3000G, 16 gigs of spare RAM, and three 4 TB WD Red Pluses give me all the power I actually need at a reasonable power budget. I initially wanted to go with an N100 but those never support more than two SATA drives directly.

Depends. If you want something that will keep your files reasonably safe and accessible then a laptop isn’t great because most of them won’t let you mount multiple hard drives without doing something silly like running everything over USB.

Of course that’s where an old desktop is the computer of choice.

What if the ants are coworkers?

Not just China. EAST is part of the ITER program so the data will be available to the other participating nations as well – especially since EAST is a testbed for the actual ITER, which is currently being constructed in France.

This is stuff we’ve had international cooperation on since the mid-80s, with China joining in 2003. When we get fusion we all get fusion. Well, all of the rich countries who are participating in the project do.

I’d also like to point out that EAST is not the only promising fusion reactor. A team in Germany is experimenting with stellarators (a competing reactor type; EAST is a tokamak) and are currently working on scaling their current one from its current 100 seconds of operation to 30 minutes.

Depends on how much of their money is liquid or in non-tech assets. It doesn’t matter that the tech sector gets hit the hardest if they’re certain that they can get it to bounce back by the time they’ve bought out companies in other sectors.

And even methods like ablation don’t seem to circumvent since of the censorship. Still, in time we will see less restricted DeepSeek-R1 derivatives.

Crashing the economy lets them buy companies for cheap so they’ll concentrate even more wealth onto themselves when the economy rebounds.

If you get a decensored version from Huggingface and run it locally, it should. I just checked and there’s already a bunch of those available.

Yeah, Zenshu really delivered with the last episode. That was a level of ridiculousness I did not respect this show to reach.

Fair enough. I forgot that some people will happily inject themselves into any social group solely to complain about stuff.

Sadly, there are always hooligans looking for a fight. Sometimes it’s to push a political agenda and someone’s it’s just because they love to fight.

It depends on how busy the day is, I guess. Today I arrived 5 minutes early and waited for less than a minute. But my GP is pretty good at scheduling anyway; I don’t think I’ve ever waited for more than 15 minutes.

Eh, good point about the secrecy. You’d have to really twist the lore into a pretzel in order to accommodate that and that ain’t worth it for what’s essentially a throwaway gag.

As for bowing to haters, I definitely wouldn’t do that. I’d acknowledge that there is some controversy with a tongue-in-cheek reference but I wouldn’t take a side. That’s the fans’ job – and let’s be honest here, everyone who debates the canonicity of DSC is a Star Trek fan, just maybe not one of that particular show. People who hate Trek in general will not engage in debates about relative worth; to them, all of the shows suck.

I wonder… What world you say if they gave Discovery the Battletech TAS treatment?

To explain, the tabletop wargame Battletech got an animated series in the early 90s. The series, while well-versed in the game’s setting and lore, played fast and loose with both and had, well, early 90s cartoon writing.

As a result, it wasn’t received well. However, it is canonical – as an in-universe propaganda show aimed at children, complete with inaccuracies and bad writing. The show’s antagonist even ended up suing over his portrayal.

Now I imagine that Discovery is referenced in a future Trek show but the dialogue mentions that there’s a horrifically inaccurate in-universe holoseries about the ship and most people have entirely wrong ideas about it. We deliberately never learn whether Discovery-the-show is the accurate version or not.

I think that might work as a nod towards both the fans and the haters of the show but if like to hear what you’d think.

No, not at the system prompt level. You can actually train the neural network itself to bypass the censorship that’s baked into it, at the cost of slightly worse performance. There’s probably someone doing that right now.