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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I quit my last job because management wanted us back into the office at first one, then two, then three days a week - all so that we had to commute into an office pointlessly and then either spend the entire day on Teams calls, or just sit at desks writing exactly the same code that we would have at home.

    When I accepted my new role, I made very sure that my contract of employment was explicitly set up for full time remote work only.

    I wish the best of luck to anyone attempting the same switch at the moment, the job market in general (and especially in tech) is in a crazy situation at the moment.


  • In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

    The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:

    spoiler

    The entire ECH subroutine was created as the result of The Doctor’s daydreaming, so the visualisation of a rank appearing out of thin air makes sense in that context.

    The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.


  • There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:

    spoiler

    Moriarty was reactivated by mistake, and took the ship hostage, demanding to be able to leave the holodeck.

    Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:

    spoiler

    Their transporter turned out to be a holographic fake (and so was Geordi), so who knows if the results were valid.



  • Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

    If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.


  • I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

    To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

    Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.


  • Rookeh@startrek.websitetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldCyber Stuck
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    4 months ago

    My daily driver is a pure EV, but while I was on holiday a few months ago I was driving a Yaris Hybrid as a rental (which to my understanding is basically a Prius drivetrain in a Yaris body).

    Fuck me it was terrible. Every time I applied even mild acceleration it sounded like the valves were going to eject out of the engine, meanwhile it had about as much get up and go as a sedated elephant. 0-60 in four to six business days. On ramps were an interesting experience.

    The only saving grace was that we only used about a third of a tank of gas during our week long trip.

    I’ll stick with pure electric thanks. No complicated drivetrain with multiple systems to go wrong, no compromised performance, enough range to get me everywhere I need to go, and good enough charging infrastructure (at least in my country) to make longer journeys trivial.


  • Rookeh@startrek.websitetoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas
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    5 months ago

    Regarding battery degradation - I’ve owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it’ll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It’s even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it’s replaced for free.

    And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.

    Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.


  • Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).

    The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don’t give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it

    All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.

    There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won’t change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don’t care enough about avoiding ads to do so.

    I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.

    In the meantime, if you’re unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube’s ads, or pay to skip them, then just don’t engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven’t found a way to monetize that (yet).




  • I don’t have enough superlatives for it. I’m > 300 hours in between three characters, and I’m still finding new stuff to do. Even at full price, worth every penny. Also an amazing co-op experience - played through the whole campaign with a friend, we both agreed it’s probably one of the best games we’ve ever played, period.

    It’s also the first game of this genre that I’ve played, off the back of this I also picked up BG1 & 2, and Neverwinter Nights, which I’m excited to try out to see what I missed out on back in the day.





  • Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

    On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

    I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

    I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.