[-] williams_482@startrek.website 1 points 3 hours ago

Transporter clones appear to be vanishingly rare. We're aware of two (Thomas Riker and William Boimler), and the circumstances around Thomas Riker's existence were clearly unheard of to any of the people investigating. Clearly this is not a thing that transporters normally do, or are even capable of outside of extremely unusual circumstances.

It also seems pretty dystopian to require the insertion of artificial genetic markers to make a person more easily recognizable. Would we expect "normal" identical twins to be treated similarly? Or actual clones?

I think the larger lesson on this incident from Starfleet's perspective is that they need to beef up their internal security practices. Big shocker, that. Thomas Riker is neither the first nor last person to successfully impersonate a starfleet officer and cause major troubles in doing so, and most threat vectors can't be solved by preemptively identifying likely perpetrators (such as this likely very offended transporter clone) and modifying them specifically to make infiltration more difficult.

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This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 5x03 The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 4 points 6 days ago

Starfleet seems to have an interesting relationship with the media, giving privileged access to reporters who are willing to make at least some of their subjects look bad. Low-ranking officers also evidently know a whole lot about weird and embarrassing things that other crews have done, so at least basically mission logs must be relatively easy to access.

There are counterexamples, but on the whole, it doesn't seem like the kind of information that would matter to that magazine is controlled much at all.

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This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 5x01 Dos Cerritos and 5x02 Shades of Green.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by williams_482@startrek.website to c/daystrominstitute@startrek.website

It's easy for us to understand that The Doctor is a sapient being.

After all, he acts like one! He's got a slew of odd personality quirks, balances irritating behavior with kindness and sympathy, behaves in a similarly slightly erratic manner as most of us flesh and blood creatures, and responds to difficulties with every appearance of genuine emotion. It's extremely easy for human audiences to look at the early seasons Voyager crew as bigoted for their slow acceptance of him as a "real" member of the crew, and react very harshly to later challenges to his personhood from people outside of the crew. It's not uncommon to see that behavior referenced as proof that 24th century people are no more "enlightened" than the obviously flawed people of today. And maybe they aren't; that's not my topic for today.

But the element I think that argument is missing is something these 24th century people have been exposed to all their lives, and we in 2024 have only begun to encounter: soulless, unconscious entities capable of impressive imitations of a real person.

24th century holograms appear as perfect copies of physical humans, with perfectly recognizable voices, normal human mannerisms, and convincingly human speech that responds naturally and automatically to nearly any expected or unexpected input. Any of us unknowingly tossed onto a 24th century holodeck would be totally convinced that these people projected around us and interacting with us are as real as anybody we meet today: nothing they do will clue us in to the fact that we're interacting with philosophical zombies.

Most of us first encountered something like this when ChatGPT and it's ilk suddenly got really good and easily accessible just a couple years ago. Suddenly a computer could create text that read like a human had written it, responding to context and occasionally interjecting very human behaviors (like making up answers to stuff it didn't know, and attempting to gaslight anyone who called it out for being wrong). A shocking number of modern people seem to genuinely believe that these bots show real consciousness (even some who really ought to know better). And it's not hard to understand why, when these bots can spoof every text-based indication of humanity that most of us look for.

People of the 24th century have spent their entire lives interacting with bots that smash the Turing Test even more thoroughly, and on every level imaginable. They can walk onto a holodeck and spin up a person from scratch who looks, smells, feels, and sounds completely real, who talks coherently and shows perfectly ordinary physical mannerisms. And they also know, with ironclad certainty, that these creations are no more human and no more alive than a tricorder or a hyperspanner. Just about all they have to definitively prove if someone is real or not lies in if they can exist outside the holodeck.

Enter The Doctor. He's very definitively a hologram. When first activated he's no more real than any other holographic creation, and only slowly grows in unanticipated ways which slowly convince his crew that he's become something more than that. This process is slow, but it's actually a bit of a surprise that it happens at all. Excepting Kes and Neelix, everyone on Voyager is quite accustomed to holographically generated people who act human but are purely a facade. That this very reasonable prejudice could be overcome at all should be seen as a triumph of empathy. It's not at all surprising that the people back home on Earth aren't buying it, and can't even be persuaded beyond a bare minimum threshold of plausible uncertainty.

I theorize that people who are growing up right now in an environment of very convincing AI chatbots will find it easier than we did to recognize holographic beings in Star Trek shows as sophisticated extensions of those internet bots, and will mirror the slow acceptance by Voyager's crew that The Doctor is something more than that.

So what does that mean for us? What do we do as more of our instinctive indicators of another person's humanity are effortlessly aped by machines? This is a difficulty which Star Trek shows had only begun to grapple with, but it's fertile ground for future episodes and undeniably a relevant question for our day.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 9 points 1 month ago

Apparently your tap water is dramatically colder than any house or apartment I've lived in.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 4 points 1 month ago

Yes, putting ice in water does make me enjoy it more, and no, letting the tap run doesn't do nearly as much to cool it down as ice cubes do.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 1 points 1 month ago

It's really depressing how any internet discussion about global warming is full of comments like this which only exist to downplay small but existent improvements that others have made. It's whataboutism, plain and simple, and only serves to discourage people from doing anything at all.

This guy getting a more efficient stove isn't going to save the planet, but at least it helps. Your comment (and many others in this thread) doesn't do anything at all about our climate problem, and mostly serves to make other people feel stupid and inadequate for even trying to do something.

There is so much, so fucking much, that needs to be done to save our planet. If you think that political change is the only thing that will "really" matter to save the planet (it's obviously going to be a huge factor), and you are so deeply committed to the ideal that the only things worth doing are those which directly further said political change, then you have serious work to do on your messaging strategy because what you had to say here clearly isn't causing global change.

Alternately, if you think the situation is so impossible that nothing can be done to save it, go find a different void to yell into and stop trying to drag down those of us who still have some hope.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 3 points 1 month ago

Voyager's original CMO was a Lieutenant Commander, which is presumably pretty typical for a ship of Voyager's size. Bashir was commissioned as a Lieutenant Junior Grade to be the CMO on a backwater space station, so that's presumably the bare minimum.

I would expect the Doctor's first official rank (whatever that might be) to stick with him, plus promotion as appropriate. Adjusting it up and down based on posting would be a bizare thing to do for any other crewperson, and I'm sure The Doctor would object vigorously to such a thing.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 1 points 1 month ago

Unfortunately, there was definitely more going on than that. The genetically modified children were telepaths who could move physical chess pieces with their minds.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 6 points 1 month ago

I'm very fond of Jack Frost. It's as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 7 points 1 month ago

The idea of deliberately creating otherwise illegal augmented people purely for the purpose of making it easier to systemically identify other augmented people is so brazenly unethical, I am at a loss for further comment.

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 7 points 1 month ago

it does explain why Bashir’s father was imprisoned but the Darwin station researchers were not.

Does it?

The Darwin Station researchers are human, as are their augmented subjects. Julian Bashir does not live on Earth at the time his augmentation is discovered. The Bashir family did not get this treatment done on Earth, and given the extreme lengths they went to get Julian treated, alongside Richard's documented inability to keep a job consistently, it would have been utterly insane not to move to a different world (instead of a different city on Earth, as they actually did) after they got the treatment if this would also free them from any risk of legal repercussions.

Further, Strange New Worlds explicitly refers to this as a Federation law, and the principal reason why Illyrians are not welcome in the Federation.

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Darwin Station was an explicitly Federation genetic research facility which was creating human children with telepathic and telekinetic powers, rapid physical maturation, and immensely powerful active immune systems (the last of which unwittingly killed the crew of a transport ship). This seems like precisely the sort of genetic engineering which has been banned in the Federation since it's conception, in regulations which are repeatedly referenced in TNG, DS9, and VOY. And yet, nobody even hints at there being an ethical, legal, or regulatory issue with what these researchers are doing. Dr. Pulaski even says of one augment child, without any apparent concern, "We could be looking at the future of humanity."

One would think that if one has a broad reaching policy against genetic augmentation principally motivated by the genetic wars, and by subsequent reinforcement of the idea that arbitrarily enhanced people are likely to be dangerously unstable, this sort of genetic program is exactly what that policy exists to prevent. And yet, there is it.

So, what happened here? Was this the product of a brief lull in Federation policy regarding genetic augmentation? A Federation research team going way off the rails, meeting an Enterprise crew feeling unusually liassez-faire about Federation law? Or something else?

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 2 points 2 months ago

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently... I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V's whole "don't build too many cities, we don't want to have an actual empire here" deal, which definitely isn't my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like "how much research have I put into this tech", "how much production overflowed off this completed build", and "how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it." They haven't opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it's not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very "stop having fun meme", but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

[-] williams_482@startrek.website 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I think you're probably on the right track here, but I think your takes are on the charitable side. The Ferengi would clearly like to believe their attitude is “If you’ve got the lobes and you’ve got the Latinum, I don’t care what you do,” but in practice they are very committed to some massive societal disparities which are not financially profitable.

In a society so deeply stratified by sex (and far from egalitarian in other regards), MtF trans folks would likely be looked down upon for apparently abandoning a way of life which Ferengi males clearly consider both morally superior and far more pleasant than the lot of a woman. In practice I suspect very few would condemn themselves to the legal status of a Ferengi woman by openly transitioning. They'd seek out secret treatment, and private expression, but publicly continue to appear as men.

Conversely, FtM trans people would be viewed with intense suspicion: a conniving, cynical Ferengi would likely view such a case as a woman attempting to escape from her rightful lower place in society. Frankly, given the horrific situation Ferengi women are placed in, if FtM trans folks were accepted as men even in the minimal legal sense, I'd expect at least a few cis women to attempt to take that avenue out of the societally mandated hellhole they would otherwise be condemned to. Perhaps the Ferengi have reliable tests for gender dysphoria that would doom these efforts, or perhaps not.

As for non-binary folks, I don't think they'd get it. Either you're a normal (male) Ferengi, or you're an inferior and powerless woman. How could someone possibly fall between those two states?

In short, the incredibly pervasive and legally enforced sexism of Ferengi society creates significant complications for trans folks of any kind. It's a really horrible and frankly depressing setup, which the Ferengi themselves are willfully oblivious to.

Post Rom, I would expect the women's liberation movement to be a watershed event for trans folks of all sorts, and lead to a fairly rapid normalization of Ferengi publicly being their true selves. It's still going to be a rough road socially, but clearing the legal barriers will go a long ways.

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This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x10 Old Friends, New Planets.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

666

Just in case anyone here was wondering how Reddit's numbers are looking these days...

Data and visuals from https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit

20

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x07 A Few Badgeys More.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

25

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x06 Parth Ferengi's Heart Place.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

14

It's hard to get decent discussions going when everything is drowned out in a deluge of game highlight posts every time there are top level games happening. This stuff is relevant, but to have each game represented by a top level post is not helpful.

12

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x05 Empathalogical Fallacies.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

20

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x04 Something Borrowed, Something Green.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

22

This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Lower Decks 4x03 In the Cradle of Vexilon.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

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williams_482

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