SpaceScotsman

This was an ok episode. Very character focused rather than sci-fi.

Everyone should recognise what is happening with ortegas, they really shouldn't be letting her do anything until its figured out, nevermind chain of command training. There must be something seriously wrong with starfleet's psych evals if she had one and they didn't spot this.

Last week I did wonder if the Gorn DNA was going to cause problems, and here we are going to get a... hybridisation of some sort. I wonder where this is going to go - hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went. We know Pike must suffer, and I wonder if he is going to have to deal with losing Batel altogether on top of everything else. I wonder if she is going to have to deal with heightened violent emotions, as the mind meld suggested, and end up having to be "dealt with" in a permanent way.

Zombies. M'benga's "don't call them that" was hilarious - Zombies in Star Trek just feels kind of wrong. They were alright, but, it's zombies. The fact that it came from genetic modification with plants reminds me a bit of Cordyceps which has featured in many other zombie stories. Something that did bug me is M'benga is a medical doctor, and the best mask he could bring was some sort of fabric wrap? Do they not have surgical masks or M95 masks in the future? I wondered if the story could have been about saving the infected, maybe a "do I have to make the choice of cutting off this limb to save someone" moral quandry. The closest we got to that was the klingon that got bit and immediately vaporised. Zombies were kind of just set dressing / a mechanic to keep the characters moving forwards.

A running theme in this episode seems to be the characters falling out of their comfort zones. For all but Scotty, this seems to leave them worse off than when they started. It's good to see him slowly making progress after being thrown in the deep end.

Misc notes:

• The gravity loss shot was very nicely done.
• For all that I didn't like the zombies I did like their design. There was one bit where one got stepped on the head and it slowly deflated, like it was made of plant material.
• With all the AR wall stuff, I liked the actors having some set they could really interact with.
• The viewscreen has a "rear view mirror" display :) why isn't that always visible in the corner?

My point was that brave's solution, like Signal's, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don't want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.

They haven't blocked the windows feature, they're using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.

My theory - M'benga's daughter had a degenerative disease and her pattern was stable enough to put into the buffer.

But Batel's problem is she has loads of living Gorn inside her, and so has Gorn DNA in very close proximity to her own. At one point they even say they're co-dependent on each other. They probably didn't want to end up with a "The Fly"/Tuvix situation.

This was a good mix to start with - a serious episode and a fun silly one.

The first acts as a really good introduction for Scotty, giving him a chance to build up his character with some insurmountable engineering problems that, with some coaching, he surmounts. The second is a nice way to round off Spock and Chapel's relationship, poking fun at the mess that following the canon has left us in, using Trelane as a stand-in for the fans.

various thoughts on the plot:

• Ortegas seems to have been left with a bit of trauma, being part digested will do that to you I guess. Hopefully La'an will spot this and help out.
• Una mentions a "couple of litres" of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because "a couple of litres" is a lot.
• Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language. It gives me a headache and I have to close my eyes whenever they do this. There were quite a few instances of roll in the first episode that were a bit too much for me.
• John de Lancie and Rhys Darby make the perfect duo for these characters.
• Scotty mentions not drinking, but ends up having to take some when he eats something dodgy at the batchelor party. Previously (later?) Scotty has been shown to be a fan of drink, I guess now it's canon that had there not been alien interference, he may have always been teetotal.
• While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars. Then, at the end of the episode when the ship has been suspended between the stars for a long time, no real mention is made of this. I guess the blood infusions and operations just kind of negated all that? Feels like Chekov's gun got loaded and then forgotten about.

I take issue with this article using the language "lagging behind in the use of generative AI". That language seems to imply there is something wrong in this behaviour.

Netflix's short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that's a problem.

Honestly, "country of origin" will have straight lines drawn on a map that are so far removed from where the people who lived there originally considered their borders even that's probably not pinning it down well enough.

I'm surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it's pretty good. I'm also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

Yes, this helps, thanks.

I already understood the need to avoid private money agents like Paypal, visa, etc. In the UK we have the BACS and FPS systems that allow for direct free money transfer. Though they should be more usable for day to day transactions, they work well enough if you need to send a significant amount of money between bank accounts.

Your explanation of the anonymity seems like the real value add of these digital currencies. The fact this only applies to the buyer and not the seller is a good choice, and definitely wins over blockchain crypto. Looking at it more closely, the fact they use signed tokens rather than proof-of-x is also a very good choice.

I will need to read up on Taler's docs more closely. But looking at the summary of features on their site something hits me as an immediate problem - you need to "load up" a wallet. If Jane Doe wants to buy a coffee, it's far easier to just use a bank card (which may interface through a private money agent like visa, or a middleman like google/apple). Loading up private wallets isn't a difficult concept (it's how gift cards work), but it does add extra steps of friction that I think will need to be removed before this can really be taken up by the general public.

It may harm the anonymity aspect, but I think that to get people using it a system that could operate like a tap-once-and-done bank card payment, loading up a wallet for immediate spend seems like the best solution. It would also help alleviate any fears that typically are associated with blockchain based digital currency - primarily of losing the signed digital money as it sits in a wallet out with the bank account's protections. And once the system is normalised and people are used to it, then all the architecture is there for anyone that really needs the anonymity.

There's something I'm really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the "Digital euro" idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that's new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it's just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what's actually new when we're talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I'm missing here.

For a brief brief moment I was elated when I parsed the title as 'Palantir says it has given up on AI'. Then I read the article and was left dejected.