ryan @ ryan @the.coolest.zone

I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social eng

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2 yr. ago

Sorry, I've been out of the cryptoscam news for a while. We're doing eyeball-backed currency now? Someone invented eyeball coins? People are investing in the Orbchain?

Can we just collectively take a step back and... Not?

Agreed. If you set aside the comedy bits for just one second and examine the plots, they're very standard Star Trek, and I love how LD is able to simultaneously be funny and also good Trek.

Frankly, I'm thrilled that it's something different. Especially now that Prodigy has apparently been canned, and I was fascinated by that one because it felt Star Trek but also like they were bringing in some Star Wars-esque character designs and villain...

I do think the key to making Star Trek the "expanded universe" Paramount wanted is to make various different subgenres of shows, but make sure they all adhere to core Star Trek values. (I still want my Starfleet Medical Drama, dammit. I want Star Trek Law and Order where every episode is a courtroom drama. Maybe an anthology series where they just kind of throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks for new shows.)

I don't know what's going on with the Starfleet Academy series but, frankly, I don't care if it's Riverdale level trash as long as the actual Star Trek bits are authentic. Let the teenagers enjoy things.

Every app wants to capture all of your time, but what these app companies don't realize is that it's sometimes better to do one thing really well and capture 100% of time spent on that particular thing.

TikTok already handles text posts - it's called "teenagers pointing at captions on their videos and making faces". It's the culture, and TikTok has excelled at this very video-focused culture. Adding text posts will bore the sorts of people who are on TikTok for videos and may result in less engagement, not more.

If it's about monetarily supporting creators, the answer is "they can't". To monetarily support someone you either need to give them money or do something that gives them money (which, in this case, is watching ads).

In terms of supporting in other ways, someone with a large enough reach might be able to post links to videos to their communities and those other people may watch the videos (and ads), or by subscribing to/ringing the bell for a content creator's channel and being very on top of liking and commenting as soon as something goes up so that the Mystical YouTube Algorithm™️ pushes the video to more people.

"oh shit we drove away our core user base by making our site actively hostile and it turns out the end result of that is no money"

It's interesting that they plan to just milk remaining nostalgia rather than move forward by converting games to HTML5, etc., as that indicates no new games. Or, being more optimistic, maybe the plan IS conversion and new games but this is a stop-gap?

Neopets has changed hands so many times. I was there from the beginning, when it was more of a weirdly British satire site (the original Bruce was not a penguin FYI), and watching everything unfold has been so weird.

SNW S2 so far has been hitting hard on standard Star Trek stories. Everyone's behaving as if they're in Starfleet, the stories have been a good combination of character-driven and interesting sci-fi, and I haven't found myself wanting to take any back to the draft table and re-write them (with the exception of the special green strong boy juice in "The Broken Circle" which I felt could have been accomplished with a less silly phaser fight and maybe M'Benga punching a Klingon or two.)

Similarly, I've said elsewhere that I really liked Picard S3 for the character-driven narration, even if there wasn't a lot of sci-fi to it, and I'd love to see a Star Trek: Legacy to see how Matalas tackles individual stories and such.

And Lower Decks is fantastic, full stop - always a treat to watch.

Honestly, I'm hoping for this season of SNW to finish out like it's been going, just returning to "basics of Star Trek", and then with a solid footing and understanding they can start branching out to larger ongoing plotlines and such. So maybe not 1997 yet... But I feel like the groundwork is being laid, and I'm optimistic.

Wow, I totally forgot to delete my chat history before leaving, but Reddit has done it for me! Thanks, Reddit! 👍

I think it really captured the "human element" of Star Trek. The conversations and the way people interacted with each other was on-point. I feel like the writers were able to bring back the TNG characters in a way that felt appropriate both to who they were and who they might have become in the following decades.

However, there really wasn't much to chew on in the sci-fi department, to the point I really wouldn't say it was even science fiction but a people-driven drama that happened to be set in space. I can understand why some people would've been thrown off by that.

Bing is pretty good for general searching. I've been mostly using it as my primary. I actually really love Bing Chat for this as well - as a langchain LLM, it is able to search for sources before answering, so it's less likely to hallucinate than ChatGPT alone (which only has the sources it was trained on.) However, one should always double check the sources Bing provides as occasionally it misinterprets when restating from what it has found.

When I want technical results which may contain specific errors in quotes, or technical documentation reference for something, I often find myself moving back to Google. Most recently was a very specific component I was researching in quotes - Bing found zero results, Google found one reference to it (and that ended up being enough for me to understand it.)

I believe part of this is related to the lengthy user profile Google almost certainly has on me, in which it knows very well how to fine tune my results based on what I click on. If Bing is doing the same, it will hopefully improve over time for my very specific queries.

Nobody wants to say it aloud because of the legal implications, but the majority of the internet is literal underage children. Like, probably over half of Discord users are actual kids who are vulnerable to being scammed when an account dupe of their favorite YouTuber friends them.

This has the effect of making the average user quite stupid, because they're too young for intelligence or wisdom - but as long as they sign up and promise they're 18 ("really!") then they can be advertised to.

The audience for this sort of letter is not the other side, still less the court, but the client itself – and perhaps the public and media.

Yep, it's to keep Twitter relevant and try to smear Threads as a competitor.

"And then this lady left a gun in my room and very pointedly told me I'm right where I need to be."

It was an odd shot too, like the camera focused on her putting the gun down. It felt like it was meant to, or is meant to in the future, come back, but maybe it's just a dangling thread.

So, the physical release is just... actual garbage? Like sure, someone may proudly display it in their bookshelf or whatever, but then, it eventually becomes trash, and there's no reason to keep any of it because there's no physical copy of the game which can be resold or even borrowed out to friends?

That's not a "physical release", that's a piece of merchandise, as useful as a Funko Pop.