As stupid as it is, at least this attempt at reviving Winamp doesn't seem to have any rhetoric about how it's going to be "built for the glorius inevitable agentic AI future revolution from the ground up" and talk about how "curating music has never been easier" because their "most advanced music AI in human history" takes away the need to have any personality, taste, or ears of your own.
I mean, the Blu-Rays are still easy enough to find and rip, although you have to spend $40 on season 1 because they never released reason 1 as one set. But honestly, giving Paramount cash in any form isn't that compelling.
I basically just gave three (or at least 2, as the DISCO one maybe is a bit iffy) examples of modern Star Trek scrutinizing the means despite the obstensibly good ends.
Also, another example is S2 E2 "Ad Astra Per Aspera" borderline almost literally puts "the moral cost of the means" (keeping good genetically modified people like Una out of Starfleet) that is ostensibly done for the ends of preventing another Eugenics Wars. I wouldn't hesitate to call this episode one of the best in the whole franchise, very much in the tradition of court case ethical discussion episodes like "Measure of a Man".
I don't think one can make a blanket statement about newer Star Trek quitting "believing something"; sure, it may be uneven in quality (maybe more than classic)*, but dismissing all of "NuTrek" out of hand is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
: I mean, there's whatever DIS season 2 was, Section 31, most of PIC, etc., but also, it's not like good swathes of classic Trek aren't also kind of crap - I mean, there's the time Riker murdered his clone and nobody batted an eye, as well as TOS S3, TNG S1, and the inconsistency of VOY. Even in the good classic episodes, it's not like every one is "do the ends justify the means" - in addition to other ethical themes, classic Trek still had room for simply "Cool sci-fi s** happened and we have to deal with it", not to mention episodes focused on interpersonal drama like "Data's Day" or any of Deanna's "Oh f*** my mother is on board" episodes.
I mean, the ends not justifying the means is kind of the entire point of DISCO S1 (whether or not the rest of DISCO embodied it is a different matter); Burnham has to let go of what Lorca summarizes as "Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for kings." or in other words, the ends often justify the means.
Also, SNW is better about it, than say, PIC; for instance, SNW S3 E7 "What is Starfleet?" from 2025, for all its flaws (including in some ways being very similar to TNG "Tin Man"), basically has the crew going "WTF! The ends (saving an alien race from a war they didn't start) do not justify the means (enslaving a sentient space whale)!" Also, SNW 1x06 is basically "ends don't justify means", although mostly because it basically copied "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas".
I'll also add that if you do enable SSH and are stupid enough to expose port 22, then at least make sure you have key-based authentication instead of password authentication and keep your keys safe.
I feel like at the very least, if season 4 never happens, I'm assuming that some time in the 2030s any leftover material will get turned into novels and/or comics.
I already enjoyed the lone Orville novel, Sympathy for the Devil, even if the choice of the
::: spoiler spoiler
Nazis
:::
for its plot was a bit cliched.
I haven't read the comics yet, although seeing their premises, some of them seem a bit camp.
In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I'd choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.
Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be... weird. Like, I don't quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it's very opinionated and doesn't like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.
A long time ago, I tried to tune a Piper voice using Majel Barrett's speech from her reading of the novel "Q In Law", but I didn't get very far - just a small amount of training data collected.
I agree; for reasons other people have discussed in detail here, I think Majel Barrett is probably one of the least ethically ambiguous actors you can do this with.
Honestly, I wouldn't be mad if we got a The Magicks of Megas-tu prequel even if it breaks a bunch of canon and they use a convenient memory wipe to solve all the problems, mostly because it would involve TAS getting any canon recognition whatsoever.
I will admit Lower Deck is always a bit crass and that element never goes away, but the characters develop really well and it’s impressive how attached they get you to them in a total runtime shorter than TNG season 1, and the show gets surprisingly emotionally sincere as it goes on.
And I’d say seasons 3, 4, and maybe 5 have what I’d call legitimate contenders for some of the franchise’s best episodes. Honestly, if it’s really hard for you to watch season 2, just skip to Wej Duj and watch from there.
But honestly, if you can’t get past the crasser elements, I get that.
DS9 is about the only 80s/90s Trek series with an almost completely watchable 1st season, though.
As stupid as it is, at least this attempt at reviving Winamp doesn't seem to have any rhetoric about how it's going to be "built for the glorius inevitable agentic AI future revolution from the ground up" and talk about how "curating music has never been easier" because their "most advanced music AI in human history" takes away the need to have any personality, taste, or ears of your own.
I mean, the Blu-Rays are still easy enough to find and rip, although you have to spend $40 on season 1 because they never released reason 1 as one set. But honestly, giving Paramount cash in any form isn't that compelling.
I basically just gave three (or at least 2, as the DISCO one maybe is a bit iffy) examples of modern Star Trek scrutinizing the means despite the obstensibly good ends.
Also, another example is S2 E2 "Ad Astra Per Aspera" borderline almost literally puts "the moral cost of the means" (keeping good genetically modified people like Una out of Starfleet) that is ostensibly done for the ends of preventing another Eugenics Wars. I wouldn't hesitate to call this episode one of the best in the whole franchise, very much in the tradition of court case ethical discussion episodes like "Measure of a Man".
I don't think one can make a blanket statement about newer Star Trek quitting "believing something"; sure, it may be uneven in quality (maybe more than classic)*, but dismissing all of "NuTrek" out of hand is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
: I mean, there's whatever DIS season 2 was, Section 31, most of PIC, etc., but also, it's not like good swathes of classic Trek aren't also kind of crap - I mean, there's the time Riker murdered his clone and nobody batted an eye, as well as TOS S3, TNG S1, and the inconsistency of VOY. Even in the good classic episodes, it's not like every one is "do the ends justify the means" - in addition to other ethical themes, classic Trek still had room for simply "Cool sci-fi s** happened and we have to deal with it", not to mention episodes focused on interpersonal drama like "Data's Day" or any of Deanna's "Oh f*** my mother is on board" episodes.
Hey, sneaking Alexander onto the holodeck is more than Worf ever did as a father.
I would say it depends.
I mean, the ends not justifying the means is kind of the entire point of DISCO S1 (whether or not the rest of DISCO embodied it is a different matter); Burnham has to let go of what Lorca summarizes as "Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for kings." or in other words, the ends often justify the means.
Also, SNW is better about it, than say, PIC; for instance, SNW S3 E7 "What is Starfleet?" from 2025, for all its flaws (including in some ways being very similar to TNG "Tin Man"), basically has the crew going "WTF! The ends (saving an alien race from a war they didn't start) do not justify the means (enslaving a sentient space whale)!" Also, SNW 1x06 is basically "ends don't justify means", although mostly because it basically copied "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas".
I'll have to see if this is in the officially published edition, but I'm currently at my dorm and both my Tech Manuals are at home.
One I bought in a used book shop in Sedona, and the other I got with a big load of Trek books that someone gave away back in 2025.
Uploading a gz source archive to a Git repository is absolutely cursed. Still, looks like a cool project.
I'll also add that if you do enable SSH and are stupid enough to expose port 22, then at least make sure you have key-based authentication instead of password authentication and keep your keys safe.
I could never get Gnome Network Displays to work, but it's worth a shot.
I saw my baby crying hard as babe could cry. What could I do? My baby's love had gone, and left my baby blue. Nobody knew
Personally, I think the most scarring sci-fi moment I ever had was the Doctor Who episode with the TVs that eat people's faces.
I feel like at the very least, if season 4 never happens, I'm assuming that some time in the 2030s any leftover material will get turned into novels and/or comics.
I already enjoyed the lone Orville novel, Sympathy for the Devil, even if the choice of the ::: spoiler spoiler Nazis ::: for its plot was a bit cliched.
I haven't read the comics yet, although seeing their premises, some of them seem a bit camp.
Looks like that site is dead and has being an AI slop domain squat.
XFCE!
In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I'd choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.
Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be... weird. Like, I don't quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it's very opinionated and doesn't like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.
A long time ago, I tried to tune a Piper voice using Majel Barrett's speech from her reading of the novel "Q In Law", but I didn't get very far - just a small amount of training data collected.
I agree; for reasons other people have discussed in detail here, I think Majel Barrett is probably one of the least ethically ambiguous actors you can do this with.
Technically, Fandom is MediaWiki, just used for its evil aims.
Since Trek is nearing a big lull in activity in the next year or two, I think that might be the optimal time to start up a Memory Alpha fork.
He's using the magic he knows. He's believing.
Honestly, I wouldn't be mad if we got a The Magicks of Megas-tu prequel even if it breaks a bunch of canon and they use a convenient memory wipe to solve all the problems, mostly because it would involve TAS getting any canon recognition whatsoever.
Well then, you might enjoy "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals"...
I will admit Lower Deck is always a bit crass and that element never goes away, but the characters develop really well and it’s impressive how attached they get you to them in a total runtime shorter than TNG season 1, and the show gets surprisingly emotionally sincere as it goes on.
And I’d say seasons 3, 4, and maybe 5 have what I’d call legitimate contenders for some of the franchise’s best episodes. Honestly, if it’s really hard for you to watch season 2, just skip to Wej Duj and watch from there.
But honestly, if you can’t get past the crasser elements, I get that.