Yeah. It was the weakest writing in the show’s history, including the entire Lore introduction.

I don’t particularly care for this plot.

Q is omniscient, so he already knew that our history is rife with examples of good people and bad people, brilliant and ignorant… and he comes to judge a fairly utopian future society of a unified, post-capitalism, post-religion Earth? My dude, they’re doing fine.

Someday in the not too distant future, we’ll have the technology to swap actors in and out of roles in movies. Not just the masking stuff we see with deep fakes, but fully alter the timing and dialog and reactions.

No. Anything JJ Abrams has ever touched doesn’t count.

That episode had an interesting premise but I hated the interactions between Will and Thomas.

The nerve of cmd. Riker using his rank to bully Thomas.

And in the end, Will is like: “I have all our stuff, but here, I’ll give you one item. Have a nice life.”

It was absurd.

I honestly think that music did more to hurt the show than anything else. It was the musical equivalent of starting EVERY EPISODE with a voiceover saying: “we hate all that old star trek. This is the new WB Network Star Trek, with 70% more down home, Midwestern American values! Yeehaw!”

Reimagining the Gorn:

Writer 1: remember the Gorn?

Writer 2: are you talking about the guy in the lizard costume?

Writer 1: yup.

Writer 2: that was so stupid.

Writer 1: …

Writer 1: okay. But what if we redid the Gorn and made them scary?

Writer 2: scary?

Writer 1: sure. Like … remember the movie ‘Alien’?

Writer 2: of course.

Writer 1: let’s do that.

Writer 2: do what?

Writer 1: let’s do Alien.

Writer 2: I’m not sure that I underst-

Writer 1 scribbling furiously: shut up! We’re doing Alien.

Not necessarily. You can put safeguards in place. For example our appeals courts don’t ever decide fact. They make rulings about the law.

You can also have bipartisan panels that oversee this, with extremely limited power unless they rule unanimously.

You also have congressional oversight adding another check.

If the original inception and scope of all these things is cleverly drafted, we could see a lot of new media pop up that is vastly superior to the crap we have now.

Absolutely. And a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, and guidelines that take into account everything we’ve learned since then about media malfeasance.

I think it would be great to publicly fund journalism. And make public funding contingent on whether news sources accurately represent the full substance of their source material, practiced evidence-based fact-checking, and had rules to prevent the selective application of either of those first two conditions, and by omission bias their audience.

Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded.

Have you tried Whisper from OpenAI? It’s the best I’ve ever seen. I’m curious how it would handle accents.

I’m not ready to talk about it in detail. Even my boss doesn’t know. But you’re in the right ballpark.

I’m actually building a proof-of-concept prototype for what I want to work on… and I’m using a browser extension so that I can build it independently without anyone from the tech team being involved and slowing me down.

Yes it is the paid version, and you should not wait until your budget loosens up.

This is an absolutely CRITICAL new technology. Think of it the way we think of the boomer generation when the computer revolution hit.

Some of them got on board and learned to use this new tech, and some decided it was too hard and assumed they’d never really need it.

I shit you not, learning how to really use gpt-4 has made me probably 100x more efficient at my job in all kinds of ways… most of them unexpected.

Within a few years the workforce is going to be divided between people who are super workers using gpt-4, and people who aren’t.

Someone out there is going to figure out how to use gpt-4 to take your job. So, if you’re smart, you still decide to be that someone.

And you’re already 5 or 6 months late to the party.

In my experience, what makes gpt-4 great for coding is its astonishing knowledge of available software libraries, built-in interface features, etc.

I’ll tell it the task I want done, and it will tell me where to find, and how to install the necessary dependencies.

With zero experience in browser extension design, gpt-4 helped me to build an incredibly complicated Chrome extension, using vector database; creating a custom, cloud-based server; web scraping with headless browsers, voice recognition, speech synthesis, wake-word capabilities, and a sophisticated user interface. I had ZERO experience with ANY of these.

For me, using gpt-4 was like collaborating with a just okay programmer, but one who had extensive experience with literally every programming language, API, protocol, etc.

And it was a collaboration. We would talk through problems together. I would make observations and guesses about why a block of code wasn’t working, and it would tell me why I was wrong, or alternately tell me I was right, and produce a fixed version.

… ?

“delightful”

Not so much.