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 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”.

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.

I can get it being back by the 32nd century, but I still wonder why Nova Squadron (or any elite academy group beyond a simple honors society) came back in Prodigy relatively shortly after:

1. The Locarno incidents
2. That time Red Squad tried to take over THE ENTIRE FREAKIN’ FEDERATION.

I felt better once they got out the prisons; the ship aesthetics have some generic sci-fi aesthetic to them, but having the reds in them makes it feel overall much brighter and Trek-y. Honestly, even though it’s not as bright as TNG, just being able to actually see scenes was nice.

Late gen Z, generally modern indie centric tastes; there might be a deeper genre name than that, but that’s what I can think of off the top of my head. Also has some 70s-90s stuff, including picking up a few of my favorite They Might Be Giants songs, mostly Lincoln-era stuff.

I don’t know.

If anything, me and my younger sibling were actively annoyed by a lot of the show’s music choices, and modern show music in general. In both this show and recent Stranger Things seasons, they put music in every single moment, even moments that should be silent.

But what about Lower Decks volume 2?

True. At my tech helpdesk, I’ve seen people who keep their Macs on very old versions even if their hardware supports much newer (and non-Tahoe) versions and suffer problems because of it.

For instance, the other day, a woman’s Microsoft Office quit working because she was still on Ventura, which no longer gets security updates. This was on what I believe was a 2022 Macbook.

I think something is seriously wrong with Apple’s update system. I mean, the Windows approach is objectively wrong, but automatic update systems need to be at least a bit aggressive.

Or yt-dlp.

It’s solidly okay. I wish it were in brush form like Photoshop was, and I wish it were better-optimized; it’s written in Python and a bit slow. I think Photoshop GPU accelerates this.

Still, usable for a lot of things.

I don’t think they’re doing so much of a TOS reboot as a TOS continuation with some retconning and reusing some SNW sets and cast.

I’ve heard it floated around that it would depict the start of Kirk’s mission, which TOS didn’t depict, showing the crew already relatively comfortable with the ship. Personally, I’d like them to something of a year 4/5 that takes place either during or after TAS. As I mention elsewhere in this thread, I think “Yesteryear” would be an awesome remake; it could be pulled off in one 50 minute episode (already double TAS length), but I think it would be awesome to extend it to a two parter.

Not sure I’d want a full TOS reboot, but I think a few more retcons wouldn’t hurt so long as they’re in the overall spirit of Trek.

What I’ve mentioned before that I think would be interesting to see is a remake of the TAS episode Yesteryear. Most TAS stories are probably best left as such, or else they would lose their campy charm, but I think Yesteryear could benefit, especially from the dramatic storytelling recent live action Trek has focused on. We could get so much good Vulcan lore out of it, and I’d hope they could do awesome set and costume design.

In my ideal episode, it’s still weeks to months until Sarek takes in Burnham; I feel like otherwise, Spock wouldn’t have to be going back in time to save himself.

To be fair, 5 seasons has become a miracle for any scripted television to attain, period. Heck, even 3 is lucky these days.

Also, I have a feeling they’ve known 5 seasons was the length for a while and have written the ending in a way that allows them to end the show largely on their own terms.

I wish Lemmy had a way to distinguish between disliking the news and shooting the messenger.

For me, as long as Debian still packages it and disables these features, I’ll be fine, but LibreWolf looks more and more tempting these days, and having tried it a bit, I can live with the minor annoyances.

I like to use pythonz in this case; it’s a tool to manage Python installs, and it puts the installs in a directory under your home directory, not affecting anything in the system.

It does build each version from source, which introduces some quirks; I’ve found compilation for some Python versions works better with clang, and sometimes, you need to enable build options.

Still, I think this is a good way to do things; just start whichever Python version you want, and then create a venv with it.

No, I don’t want to spend weeks to learn GDB inside-out, so I don’t have to search online for 15-30 minutes on an AI infested internet every time I want to use it, for each feature I’m using it for that day.

1. Search “gdb cheatsheet” and bookmark it. This looks good, but you have plenty of choices. When you find one you like, you probably almost never have to go to the internet again.
2. Unfortunately, you can’t avoid a search engine while programming; you’re not going to get very far. All you can do is develop your search skills to avoid the slop.
3. If you’re using a statically typed language (C, C++, Rust, etc.) already, basic GDB is comparatively simple. For these languages, not knowing GDB is a bit like an electrician not knowing how to use a multimeter; it’s a matter of necessity rather than “gatekeeping”.

No, I don’t want to gatekeep Linux from “normies”, by making it as user-unfriendly as possible, so I can keep the Linux community a frat club for slur saying techbros.

For your sake, I must emphasize that insulting the people you want help from is not an effective tactic for obtaining help. There are certainly jerks in the broader Linux community, but effectively accusing anyone in this community unable to give you exactly what you want of being a “slur saying techbro” (unless I misunderstand you) is, no offense, an incredibly entitled view to have.

If you wish to make valuable use of internet forums, I would request you take heed of this: www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Anyhow, I wish you luck in your endeavors.

Eh, the Pegasus tattoo doesn’t look great; half of it is missing. Must be embedded in the skin or something…