this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Risa

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Star Trek memes and shitposts

Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.

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[–] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like all predictions about future technology, Star Trek was both right and way off.

Padds are almost used like portable storage devices. Want to give someone a book? Load it onto a padd for them.

[–] ummthatguy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But who wants to deal with searching through the UI for pertinent info when you can have several PADDs each attuned to a specific set of data?

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 9 points 1 year ago

They can even have their own special UI! The way they talk about reconfiguring panels makes it seem like you can build your own UI on the fly, especially the time Worf yelled at a dude who put the con controls in the engine room of the defiant and didn't use the standard layout.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm more amused by Jake writing his stories on a PADD with a stylus, but you see it and it's all printed text.

[–] TotallyNotSpez@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I get it. I hate typing on mobile devices.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah, but you never see the handwriting part. Like he's writing on it and it's doing handwriting to text, but the handwriting is not on the screen, which just seems like a bad interface.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is a thing that existed even when DS9 was being filmed; taking handwriting and converting it to printed fonts? It wasn't as on the fly IRL, but by the 24th century I'm sure it would be perfect where you could write by hand and instantly have it transformed into print.

[–] gregorum@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Apple MessagePad did it on-the-fly, by the word. Problem was, it was terrible. It was supposed to learn your handwriting and get better over time, but it didn’t. The next to try was Palm, and they mostly got it with their special shorthand glyphs. I had both, and was much happier with my PalmPilots.

[–] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

You'd think they would have ironed out the kinks after 400 year

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, but you can see what you're writing on real devices.

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What if a piece of consumer tech from the mid 90s helped explain? The Apple Newton brought offline handwriting recognition into the public perception and it was thought of as the Next Big Thing like AI or crypto. Inputs were all the rage in the 90s and handwriting recognition fell out of favor when speech to text software was released in the later half of the 90s.

Trek writers were trying to be forward thinking, and maybe there will be a handwriting resurgence that sees a maturation of the OCR tech, but for now it was a nice quiet piece of trivia that will be lost to time.

[–] Jesus_666@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

I mean, Samsung tablets come with handwriting detection. I immediately turned it off of on mine because it expects since kind of cursive that I don't use but it's there.

I consider Palm's Graffiti input system superior – sure, you had to learn the alphabet but every palmtop came with a cheat sheet and one you had it down it was pretty damn quick to write with.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I had a Newton. You could see what you were writing.

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

In the future, kids learn how to hand-write text that looks printed.

[–] dejected_warp_core@startrek.website 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Production reason: without a stylus it looks like he's reading, not writing. Without one, dialogue like "I'm writing a book" would come across as lying, which can completely change a scene for the worse.

In-universe lore reason: Jake is a romantic and probably feels that the more tactile approach is better for his creative process.

I mean, we've still got authors typing up manuscripts on mechanical typewriters and GRRM writing ASOIAF on a DOS computer. Jake wanting to use a pen is possibly one of the least weird things about Trek tech.