When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.

In their defence, they explicitly say they are not space military. Everyone else just treats them as such. Just because they’ve got exploration cruisers armed like warships.

Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?

It’s not any more or less explodable than the rest of the ship. But we do see a good reason. The main screens on the bridge are physical on most ships. So if the master computer fails, they don’t lose visibility completely.

Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.

Only if you can power it, and if you can afford to power a replicator, chances are, you can power a phaser enough to be useful, and they’re far more versatile devices.

A regular gun using bullets is just a wasteful toy by comparison.

If anything, there’s the question if why they didn’t just run their phasers at wide beam, and deal with it that way.

In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?

There’s no good point. From memory, Worf has to dismantle his badge for it, and it doesn’t last for very long.

Most people just don’t go down where there are bullets flying, and most civilisations use energy weapons like laser cannons.

If bullets were more common, they probably would have them. Similar to why the Borg don’t block bullets with their shields.

Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?

Why have pockets if you can have everyone look like they’re in wetsuits? It’s like why no-one has first aid kits, or emergency supplies on them. Who has time for sensibility if you can have the ✨Aesthetique✨?

Change.

Star Trek seems to be allergic to any deviation from the status quo. Everything forward must be recognisable to the past, whereas reality is not like that. Everything has to look recognisable, and be recognisable, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Everything has to have impulse, warp drive, for example, or engines that make it behave much the same. All the alien ships work like that, even centuries into the future, when that makes no sense at all. There has to be a Federation.

There’s very rarely any sort of major lasting change that we see on-screen, and I think what Star Trek needs is that growth.

Star Trek’s biology also tends to be infamously awful. It’s always played fast and loose with it, arguably more so than a lot of the other scientific disciplines it covers.

Barclay’s Cold Virus cure causing Worf to devolve into a precursor species, and several of the crew to evolve into hybrid creatures just because it altered the introns and exons. Doing that doesn’t automatically turn you into something else, or else radiation would be far worse than it is.

Same for the Klingon redundant organs. It’s still the same system, so the Klingon redundancies wouldn’t do much good, unless they had something on their planet that meant they needed it, that isn’t just being a fighter planet.

And it doesn’t really address the physiological differences very well. A human and a Klingon hit the same, and have much of the same vulnerabilities. Worf has slight super-strength, but that’s about it.

Copycats might also be an issue. I remember that when Douglas Wreden published his book, he had to deal with numerous AI-generated copycats popping up one after the other, using his name and face, trying to trick people into buying their book, because his had become popular.

Yes, Saint Olga of Kyiv.

ITAR has severely restricted access to nav system tech export, but there was always this open question about reckoning position by visual cues rather than GPS + dead reckoning. We all knew it was technically feasible, but we assumed that having “visual” cues was further out because AI at the time wasn’t up to the task.

There’s always going back to the old-fashioned method of having a trained pigeon inside of the device instead of a sophisticated computer vision system.

Or some old cheap/free one. A nearby university open day recently had a stack of free 8 GB USB sticks they were giving out.

At least one major manufacturer also outright pulled out of the consumer market entirely. There’s no guarantee that they’ll come back, or else they would have just kept the consumer arm.

Microsoft seems intent on pushing people to alternatives. Not only did they quietly remove the higher RAM recommendation, but now the OS is more expensive.

So what people are likely to get an underpowered computer that costs more if they have to buy a new laptop. On the tail of Apple recently releasing a relatively nice and cheap laptop to much fanfare, no less.

It sounds like we’re about to see a repeat of the Windows Vista days. Where people hate Windows because it’s slow and horrible, and it is slow and horrible because it’s running on an underspecced machine barely meant to run the previous version of windows.

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Especially since if you’re choosing that, you usually have the device handy. At which point a direct transfer is easy to do, and that’s been a feature for a while.

It’s also good advertising. “We’ve powered this data centre with our solar panels, think of what it could power for you”.

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Odd to think that the Windows Vista days are coming around again.

Wasn’t that one of the reasons that people didn’t like it? A lot of manufacturers basically just crammed it onto XP-spec machines, so it ran horrendously, and was generally awful to use.

Especially since when you ask it those questions, it’s still massively limited.

I once tried Apple’s replacement AI Siri thing, and asked it what the date would be next Tuesday. I got “I can’t help with that”.

Regular old Siri handled that just fine.

Even then, neither worked with “When’s the last occurrence of this event on my calendar?”. They’d either go “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”, or happily tell me when the next event was.

Neither of them seem like very difficult questions.

Pretty much. The implied plan is that they want to replace the keyword/rule-based automatic moderation system moderators have access to with LLM-based automation.

So if you had a subreddit that banned all use of the letter e, you could whack a rule up to remove according to criteria .*[eE].* which would have it remove all instances of the letter e.

The new system supposedly replaces it with a prompt-based system, where all messages run through an LLM, and you write out a prompt informing it what it should remove (“remove all messages containing the letter e”).

Is it actually doing it in-device? Given that it’s attached to OneDrive, I was rather under the impression that it was just offloading the processing to their servers.

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Interesting. I would have expected cameras to be more resilient between both their internal filters and the sensor material being tougher than human eyeballs, so anything that could overwhelm that and burn out a camera sensor would be able to ruin someone’s vision almost instantly.

That’s a bad idea. You don’t want to get a stranger, or yourself in the eye.

Anything that would do meaningful damage to a camera sensor will easily do that to human eyeballs if it refracts or gets reflected.

Especially for cheaper high-power lasers, which may not properly filter out invisible wavelengths like IR.

Human brains are also considerably more efficient than an artificial neural network. Most modern ones only replicate the function of a human brain and its neurons in the most basic of aspects.

Things like encoding data itself in how the signal is transmitted are still pretty uncommon in artificial neural networks, for example.

We’d probably need somewhere close to several times the size and computing power of a human brain to even start coming close with current technology, assuming that it is possible to begin with.