I’d more argue Star Trek is a procedural cop show in space, but yeah pretty much. The last really good science fiction movie I saw was probably Arrival, and that was ten years ago.

You’d be surprised. I gave up on the second episode of Picard and thought the first season of DISC was alright right up until they went to the mirror universe. Decided it wasn’t for me.

But my dad watched every single episode of everything that Paramount has put out. He hates them, but he watched 'em. Talks about them the same way he talks about ENT or the JJ Abrams movies.

O’Brien crashing out would have been a much better long term setup and payoff than putting the dax worm in a different actor.

I think this was my favorite Voyager episode

Why should our machines for doing sums also just happen be capable of reproducing the same phenomenon of consciousness that brains do? Doesn’t that seem awful convenient? Especially considering that we have a very thorough understanding of computers, but we really don’t understand consciousness.

algorithm that’s been modelled after the real world structure and behaviour of neurons and how they process signals

Except the Neural Net model doesn’t actually reproduce everything real, living neurons do. A mathematician in the 70s said, “hey what if this is how brains work?” He didn’t actually study brains, he just put forward a model. It’s a useful model. But it’s also an extreme misrepresentation to say it approximates actual neurons.

Please tell me you don’t actually think “AGI” is possible.

The term AGI had to be coined because the things they called AI weren’t actually AI. Artificial Intelligence originates from science fiction. It has no strict definition in computer science!

Maybe you learn up a little. Go read Isaac Asimov

I think what people are struggling to articulate is that, the way AI gets thrown around now, it’s basically being used as a replacement for the word “algorithm”.

It’s obfuscating the truth that this is all (relatively) comprehensible mathematics. Even the black box stuff. Just because the programmer doesn’t know each step the end program takes, doesn’t mean they don’t know the principals behind how it was made, or didn’t make deliberate choices to shape the outcome.

There’s some very neat mathematics, yes, and an utterly staggering amount of data and hardware. But at the end of the day its still just an (large) algorithm. Calling it AI is dubious at best, and con-artistry at worst.

Literally, LLMs are extensions of the techniques developed for autocomplete in phones. There’s a direct lineage. Same fundamental mathematics under the hood, but given a humongous scope.

Langton’s ant can procedurally generate things, if you set it up right. Would you call that AI?

As for enemies in gaming, it got called that because game makers wanted to give the appearance of intelligence in enemy encounters. Aspirationally cribbing a word from sci-fi. It could just as accurately have been called “puppet behavior”… more accurately, really.

The point is “AI” is not a useful word. A bunch of different disciplines across computing all use it to describe different things, each trying to cash in on the cultural associations of a term that comes from fiction.

Aging really is a game of swings and roundabouts

Dear god, that’s not actual dialog from the show, is it?

Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock. Here is its prompt: Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.

are you using the same prompt?

Oh for sure. Keep working, throw it in a low-risk low-yield index and use the interest to supplement your income. A modest 5% return gives you an extra 25k a year.

But as others have pointed out, the real problem comes from the awkward questions that come from trying to convert the gold into cash.

She has 5 bars, though, so wouldn’t that be $500,000? Half a million is almost enough for a so called “starter home”

Part of the reason the show works is that we never really see Federation life outside of Starfleet. Mostly this is for practical budget reasons; what does a post-scarcity egalitarian society actually look like? That’s difficult to depict in a show designed to recycle the same set every episode and only very occasionally go outside to film.

So what little we see of the civilian federation looks… a lot like the US. There’s a president. Member states planets. Constant references to US history. A military that operates how Americans like to think their military works, rather than what it actually historically has done.

Newer shows take this even further. Section 31, as it was first introduced, was supposed to be a highly illegal, unsanctioned conspiracy acting in the shadow of the proper Federation. Now they’re presented as the ultra official, coolest badasses who are the only reason any of the egalitarian principals are able to survive.

They certainly could have gone that rout. It would have made her situationship with Dukat make more sense.

Overall, I think DS9 was a rare inversion of the usual trek formula - the writing started strong but got shakier as the series went on. That got masked somewhat by the actors becoming more comfortable with their characters, so the performances carried where the world building and arcs may not have landed on their own.

So is this a more classic case of Apple’s usual tactic making their things needlessly different to move more product?