m_fayer

Great thought. I think Sisko is Picard in a much more difficult, fallen, and true to life world. The utopia is receding, the man of principal faces trauma and angry traumatized people, terrible decisions to make under pressure. He’s a sadder character in a piece of culture with less room for optimism. I quite like him, and think he was a harbinger.

I thought Kira was very much stuck in one note. Jadzia Dax had very little personality. But many were indeed excellent.

Same here

Great points. I often ask myself why genuine optimism, hope, or nobility (that’s not also cloying cliche) seems impossible in pop culture today.

Emotional maturity too. People knew how to be part of a team, resolve differences, when to stand on principle, how to live with disappointment, and own their mistakes. Compelling indeed.

Agentic coding has slowly but surely allowed me to enhance many aspects of my life, big and small, with self-made software and automation. These systems are just for myself and my loved ones.

I left the mess of Android years ago in favor of iOS. The restrictive distribution system always irked me but never affected me personally. Now though, having to jump hoops and resort to PWAs for many different things I want to do with my devices, iOS truly feels maliciously crippled. I’m in the market for exactly this kind of tablet, if only they’d let me run my own code in peace maybe I’d buy it.

But you’d never be able to get the timing to work such that the conversational timing stays this good. And if you degrade that, you’ve kinda defeated the point.

Most recent voice-related tech is using voice as an interface or interaction mode. It’s a means to an and, and the end is the value provided by the reasoning system on the other side of the voice.

This model is clearly not so smart. So the voice is the whole point, there’s not much value beyond it, at least on its own.

What that adds up to is, impersonation. That’s what this is for, impersonating humans.

I’ve noticed this too. Opus 5.5 has changed how I work almost as much as the introduction of the first agent-capable models.

I’m sure it can go both ways. For young me, I always found the outcome itself and sense of accomplishment to be sufficient motivation to persevere. Perseverance itself was the trait I ended up fostering.

Well said. I’ve often noticed how I have a huge tolerance for frustration and ability to persist compared to many people around me, and this is how I acquired these traits. They’ve turned out to be hugely useful, also beyond just coding. It’ll be a shame for our profession to lose them.

We need to get to work figuring out a digital version of booze to offer the coming AGI, it’s the humane thing to do.

People are more neurotic now because of ubiquitous gamification and scoring. Health and aging and looks are scored, alcohol will cost you. Appearing controlled and on brand is a game, alcohol throws the game off. We’ve chosen a dry panopticon.

I really struggle with the contrast between what seems to me to be a formidable and ground-breaking technology, and the deep unseriousness of the leadership of the leading companies developing that technology. If the behavior was coming from, say, uber - I’d be less surprised.

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time", there's a generation ship wandering space that's a marvel of human engineering, whose inhabitants are getting dumber every generation and losing the capacity to maintain or even respect the incredible environment into which they were born. Certainly rings a bell.