That’s so cool! Thank you again for your answers!

Hi Karim! Thank you for your work on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your work in particular on the show!

The character of Jay-Den has broken with what many fans have considered to be canonically or at least, stereotypically Klingon, and the show has drawn some criticism for this.

Others have praised the writing and your acting as Jay-Den for redefining or at least recontextualizes what being Klingon ultimately means in a Universe that embraces and cultivates people of infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

I was wondering if you could speak to the challenges you may have had in the endeavor to portray Jay-Den given this context?

It is obvious you did your research for the role beforehand and I can only imagine it must have been somewhat intimidating portraying a character on a major franchise that breaks with what some fans consider canon while also pushing the inclusivity of the Star Trek Universe forward.

I’ll reiterate my thanks in advance to you for doing this AMA.

Look, I’m just gonna say it. Fuck Gavin Newsom! If Gavin wants my vote he’ll have to disavow his meeting of the minds with Charlie Kirk as him meeting with a fucking fascist. He’d have to abandon his support of silicon valley oligarchs outright and vow to tax them into nonexistence. He’d have to make homelessness legal in California and set up housing for the unhoused with clear social safety nets designed to uplift them financially and socially. And he’d have to defend Trans people’s rights to play in sports as the gender they identify as.

But we all know Gavin is just more of the same Democratic bullshit with slightly more combative language. I suspect he’d make as bad a President as Kamala would have been, or worse. If there is a presidential election next cycle, it’ll likely come down to Newsom vs a Charlie Kirk wannabe or some Nick Fuentes Groyper.

Don’t let that happen, don’t compromise your ideals. Call out everything wrong with every Democratic candidate, so vehemently it’ll make any centrist’s ears bleed. If a candidate accepted campaign contributions from anyone other than small donors, fuck em. You aren’t their constituency if they do.

Lean so far left the whole country tips over.

Thank you.

Specifically it looks like its The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, an audio book series.

It’s available on audible it looks like.

Again, thanks!

Super interesting. If you can find that episode, I’d love to give it a listen.

Yeah, I’ve heard this response to my argument more times than I care to mention.

Let’s be clear, I don’t want to give off the impression I’m not open to people changing for the better. If you can end bigotry through discussion instead of arguments or worse yet, violence, then obviously that is preferable.

The issue is that for every honest misinformed person I’ve encountered who is open to listening to differing points of view, I’ve easily encountered 10 right wing grifters who are in bad faith trying to distract from the main problem with whataboutisms and other tactics, with the end goal of dehumanizing and ostracizing groups that they perceive as the other, i.e. minorities.

These people are in their adult years, likely grew up in households where they themselves were bullied, harassed, made fun of, and dehumanized. They then went to school where sadly they were likely to have experiences that further eroded their emotional intelligence and ability to connect with anybody who had differing views from them. They then grew up and sought out others who had suffered similar experiences and come to similar misguided conclusions, either online or IRL. These are people who grew up being told that apologizing was a sign of weakness, to never ever admit that they were or ever will be wrong, and to only play at having empathy in order to have a seat at the discussion table where they could then present their ideas as “just asking questions.” When in fact they are trying to sow discord and form a pipeline into their hateful ideology for others who are emotionally vulnerable and open to ideas as to why life didn’t play out for them like they thought it would.

If they lack critical thinking skills and a strong community support structure, these emotionally vulnerable people end up spewing hateful ideology within a few months and it breaks my heart, because usually there’s no coming back for them. They can’t be argued or reasoned with. It’s as if an empathetic child who just needed community died due to abandonment, and some ghoul due to demonic corruption is left in their place.

Its not that I don’t want to believe that people can change for the better. I’ve seen it in myself and others, I know it is real.

But I’ve also been in enough online, and in some cases, offline, spaces to know a bigot when I see one. I can sniff a disingenuous asshole just trying to “ask questions” from a mile away and it always ends up with a bunch of 4chan transphobes either openly or behind closed doors making fun of a minority and in some of the worst cases, planning violence.

My tolerance for even the smallest inkling of hate speech is zero. I’m just done giving these people enough rope to hang people I care about with.

Fair Warning: Long rant ahead.

Great article, and it gets to the heart of something I’ve felt is becoming more and more prominent in the Linux and Open Source Community, and really any community. And it’s something we simply can’t ignore.

That is that you can’t separate politics from life. It’s everywhere. The author points out that Framework’s mission is to encourage right to repair and responsible consumption by discouraging planned obsolescence.

While right to repair might be popular in both left and right wing circles, that is only because both sides want control over their devices and to distance themselves from Big Tech. But their views on regulation with regards to the environment and social equity/inclusion are as far apart as the general right left paradigm is as a whole.

To be blunt, you simply cannot have normal people work under the same tent as crypto fascists, transphobes, and general right wing grifters, no matter how significant their individual contributions might be.

I personally am tired of these sorts of controversies being brushed under the rug by tech influencers like BashBunni and Brodie Robertson who in their coverage of Omarchy did not broach this topic even just to say that there is a controversy at all. It’s cowardice at best, and right wing apologism at worst.

Yes, there are particularly brilliant software engineers that are also assholes. And yeah, without those assholes, we wouldn’t have the technologies we have today. The mistake is thinking that they are brilliant because they are assholes. Another mistake is thinking that holding onto one productive asshole is better than hanging onto the good will and contributions of many normal people that still provide worthwhile contributions.

To be very frank, fuck that. I refuse to believe in the false dichotomy that in order to create good software we have to put up with bigots. If anything, their attitudes end up holding themselves and their colleagues back. We shouldn’t be asking ourselves, “How much less productive would that person have been if they had wasted time/energy on being socially conscious and empathetic.” And instead have asked “How much more productive and better off we all would have been had they been a more empathetic and compassionate person.” Because we’re all worse off when a colleague is being a bigot, and it’s in all of our interests to call it out when we see it.

As well as it was wrapped up all things considered, I really wish they had gotten another season or three. The show was just that good. The acting, writing, art style, all top notch. This award is more than well deserved.

I’ll be looking into this graphic novel. Thanks for the post!

Might I interest you in a podcast?

Morons…so many morons in power…dear fucking god.

Out of curiosity, what do you use to convert markdown to HTML?

Most applications can do just fine with SQLite, but if you need something with a lot more write speed, go with PostgreSQL.

God this tweet makes me mad on so many levels. Anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time in the command line knows this tweet is such bullshit.

EDIT: Further venting of frustrations.

You could tell some plot points in the final episode were very rushed, like Rutherford’s arc. I don’t think this was the ending the writers planned or wanted, and the show is so good, it deserves to have the ending the writers can be satisfied with.

That said, it was as good an ending one could expect given the circumstances, and I really hope we get at least two more seasons and a movie!

Lol, back when I worked at Starbucks, I joked that one day this exact thing would happen. That the education industrial complex would require a bachelor’s degree for all jobs, as it would ensure debt and desperation in the vast majority of people who solely wish to survive.

I also claimed back then that we would all live to see the disastrous effects of climate change. No joke, people back then shook their heads and thought me nuts.

My next prediction: the majority of people who are parents today will wish they never made the decision to have kids in the next 20 years. Good luck everybody.

Same. Best Game Series and storytelling Telltale has ever done.

Yes, the brackets were just there to emphasize it was a search query. Apologies if that was confusing.

Yep. I use Noscript and DDG Lite by default. Just putting into duckduckgo: !g <your search goes here> will search google without having to turn JS on…looks like Duckduckgo wins again, even when it comes to using google, lol.

It’s a lot of work. I’m in a similar boat. I’ve been self teaching myself how to program in various languages and working as a Fullstack developer at a very small startup.

While I’ve learned alot, there’s always more to learn and finding direction is a challenge you’ll hit many times over if you stick with it.

Right now I’m reviewing various Open Source Projects I could contribute to as I know ultimately this will make me a much better developer. There are so many CLI and web development tools I use that I’d like to expand on but will require a marginal jump in my skills. Here are a few examples:

• Add a feature to the rTorrent client that would allow it to torrent over i2p
• Expand the amount of tools available within the SolidJS framework ecosystem to be competitive with React’s ecosystem.
• Create a HTTP server in Rust that has feature parity with Golang’s Caddy
• Add a feature to AntennaPod akin to YouTube Sponsor block that would allow for user contributed timestamps to facilitate auto skipping of ad mentions in podcast episodes.

I also am slowly working out plans to learn enough about Rust and browsers to recreate the terminal based browser Links in Rust.

But these are all just me spitballing. In truth, my skills aren’t quite there yet and the amount of time to get there for each one of these is a lot. So I have to choose wisely and dive in deep on the project’s codebase, probably for at least a year or more to make headway. But this is the mindset I think might help you. Look into the software you use a lot or like the concept of. Figure out how you’d like to improve it or add to it. Reach out to the developers of said software however you can, either make your case for the improvements you want to make or just help out on something they want to do with the software. Learn, listen. Rinse and repeat.

Hope this helps a bit.