data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Your body replaces most of its cells over the course of about a decade, give or take a few years (except for brain cells, which admittedly throws a wrench in my point). What’s not to say it didn’t kill the version of you 10 years ago?

    Further more, think of yourself from 1 day ago. Can that exact version of yourself still act on the world, or is that version effectively dead as the result of your mind changing over time? That exact version of you isn’t somehow carried on by soul.

    In some sense, the very continuity of consciousness could be viewed as a continual process of death of the old self; all the transporter does is create a brief gap in that continuum.

    In a nutshell, we’re always dying in some form as a product of the nature of time itself. Why should we get mad at the transporter?

    Maybe the soul is how we transcend these deaths; maybe there’s no such thing as a soul.





  • If only Apple Music would give Linux users some way to access lossless…

    Though honestly, I’m only on Apple Music because my parents pay for it anyway (I’m a college kid), and I’ve already started accumulating a CD/digital audio file collection, which currently covers the first 6 studio albums plus albums 8 and 21 plus 1 B sides compilation, 1 single, half a live album, an album demos compilation, and 1 single.

    Although the 256kpbs limitation on the browser isn’t the worst (better than a lot of video streaming services forcing 480p on unapproved devices), it still irks me.









  • I think PRO should rank above ENT just because ENT cranks the horniness to 10 to the point of interfering with characterization and character development. True, Prodigy is kid-oriented, so it can’t be that horny, but still.

    However, I can understand PRO ranking lower overall because the classic series and LD are so good and PRO, for all its virtues, does have its flaws.

    I mean, I can’t even stand Jankom until season 2; Rok’s similarly a bit a annoying, but becomes a bit more bearable after the timeline. Also, the style’s a bit inconsistent; most of the main cast looks fine (Rok’s eyes could do to be a bit smaller), but real Janeway looks a bit out of Shrek, the Doctor just looks strange, and many of the background and minor characters looks really uncanny valley.

    Also, although I think the plots are better than DIS, the whole “big bad”, “let’s save the entire universe twice” thing is still a bit tiring.

    I think Mr. Tysess is absolutely beautiful with his gigantic chin, though, and I am astonished how much of that beautiful “random Ensign on Picard’s bridge” quality Daveed Diggs’s voice has (Thomas Jefferson is not very Starfleet). I need more Daveed Diggs in Star Trek!




  • From what I’ve heard, ROCm may be finally getting out of its infancy; at the very least, I think by the time we get something useful, local, and ethical, it will be pretty well-developed.

    Honestly, though, I’m in the same boat as you and actively try to avoid most AI stuff on my laptop. The only “AI” thing I use is I occasionally do an image upscale. I find it kind of useless on photos, but it’s sometimes helpful when doing vector traces on bitmap graphics with flat colors; Inkscape’s results aren’t always good with lower resolution images, so putting that specific kind of graphic through “cartoon mode” upscales sometimes improves results dramatically for me.

    Of course, I don’t have GPU ML acceleration, so it just runs on the CPU; it’s a bit slow, but still less than 10 minutes.