hallettj

That’s quite a poster!

I suppose this video essay is relevant: Actually, Star Trek Has Always Been Horny

There’s also the death slugs in The Expanse

There’s a relevant episode if you don’t mind DS9 spoilers:

I don’t think the Pegasus plan involves all levels of Federation leadership. I think it’s a conspiracy that, although it does include at least one of the highest-ranking Starfleet officers, doesn’t go all the way to the top. From the transcript:

PRESSMAN: It’s not just me, Will. The Chief of Starfleet Security has personally given me her assurance of complete support.

RIKER: Admiral Raner? How many other people know about this?

PRESSMAN: Not many, and it’s up to us to make sure it stays that way. Raner has given me written orders for you.

Pressman says that a small number of people are involved. He doesn’t mention the Federation president or any Federation officials outside of Starfleet (remember that Starfleet is the military-ish arm of the Federation, it’s not the whole organization.) He only mentions one Starfleet officer.

Pressman emphasizes that it’s important to keep the secret from getting out. Of course that’s partly because he doesn’t want the Romulans finding out. But I think it’s mainly that the conspirators don’t want to be held to account for unauthorized actions.

Later in the episode Pressman tells Picard, “the Chief of Starfleet Intelligence herself is watching this one”. I think it’s possible that Chief of Security and Chief of Intelligence are titles used interchangeably for the same office. Or it could be a second officer involved in the conspiracy.

There’s also this conversation:

PICARD: You know, it wasn’t easy to get this record. I had to pull in quite a few favours at Starfleet just to get a look at it. It seems that it was classified by Starfleet Intelligence.

[…]

PICARD: The Judge Advocate also believes that the surviving officers are deliberately withholding vital information from this inquiry. Further investigation is recommended. Will, there was no further investigation. This report was classified and then it was quietly buried. Why?

RIKER: Sir, may I suggest you take this up with Admiral

PICARD: I’m taking this up with you, Will! The Judge Advocate thought you were participating in a conspiracy to cover up the truth. Now, what the hell is going on here, Will?

The judge advocate on the case is not in on the secret. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t go higher, but the conversation does imply that whoever was involved had limited authority to, say, prevent that inquiry in the first place, or to instruct the judge advocate to avoid sensitive topics.

Someone did have the authority to classify and bury the report. Maybe that’s something the Chief of Intelligence could do unilaterally.

Note that Picard is confident that with the secret exposed the project will be shut down. If it had been authorized at all levels you might expect it to continue, but out in the open.

Now Section 31, that does seem to be institutionalized so that’s a different story.

The images probably don’t have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.

Neat! I’d heard of mutualistic mycorrhizal relationships, but not mycoheterotrophy

For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn’t lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it’s a bad idea.

Yeah, the article seems to assume AI is the cause without attempting to rule out other factors. Plus the graph shows a steady decline starting years before ChatGPT appeared.

I’m not positive I’m correctly matching the title to the episode, but I’m sure I remember this one.

I’ve mainly worked as an employee so I don’t have as much experience with freelance gigs. But nearly every job I’ve had in 18 years has been through networking. Organizing and speaking at programming meetups opened a lot of doors for me. It gets a lot of attention on me while I get a chance to present myself as an expert.

Eventually I’d worked with enough people that when I’ve been looking for work I find I know people who’ve moved to new companies that are hiring.