See, this is part of his long con. Clarence knows his wife is crazy, so instead of divorcing her, he's just going to make their marriage illegal. /s

This right here. I liked how TNG did it. Series premier bring an oldster in to launch, maybe have a special episode or two with another.

If we really wanted Colm back, have it in the premier of Starfleet Academy where the new cadets are going through a hall of distinguished professors and have an elderly O'Brien do a cameo with a sample of one of his lectures. Nice to connect the show to lore and nostalgia but short enough to let the new cast stand on their own.

That said, I agree with Colm. Let O'Brien stay as he is. He had a perfect send-off.

It should be a conspiracy of like-minded individuals that exists parasitically within Starfleet, not an official (or an “unofficial official” agency).

I agree. When 31 was first introduced, and Sloan explained that Section 31 was sanctioned by Starfleet under Article 14, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter, the implication was that they were people who misinterpreted or construed a (probably minor) part of the Starfleet Charter and used it to justify damn near anything.

Personally, I hate how Section 31 has been changed to be misunderstood, cool good guy/anti-hero types who are doing the wrong things for the right reason. DS9 had it right with portraying them as the villains within who should be snuffed out because the ends don't justify the means.

I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it's beyond uncomfortable.

Depends on your skills. Documentation is always useful. If you have language skills, translation of documentation or helping create language packs/translations.

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I thought about it, I could come up with more.

YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out "uh...emails and productivity and things."

I'm in Illinois, and my entire family thought I was nuts for supporting bail reform. My cop brother said that we'd have hordes of criminals on the street causing more crime, and my parents again voiced how they "want to move out of state" (because Indiana is sooooooo much better /s). They never could answer why paying to be set free until court was so central to security because it never made sense to tie pre-trial lock up with ability to pay.

They never bring it up anymore, and for that, I'm grateful.

I work/study in AI, and it is completely over-hyped. For one thing, the C-suite can't wrap it's head around the fact that AI != LLM; they all seem to think all AI is just LLMs. On top of that, they are way too eager to throw humans out of the loop.

That said, I think LLM applications, even in their current form, are super useful in development and business practices. I myself use it to increase my productivity in coding. But, I use it as an augmentation rather than a replacement. One of my friends put it best the other day, "LLMs are like a junior dev to your senior dev. You need to be hyper-specific, and you need to check it's output." In other words, it's great for off-loading some work, but it isn't going to completely replace humans.

With that said, I'm a bit annoyed that other AI fields are being over-shadowed by LLMs. There's a ton of other interesting work being done in those fields that is super useful and important. All of them, though, are not going to replace humans but rather augment and make humans more productive. I've found that an AI-Human team is most effective.

I think that's exactly what the Republicans want.

I think what they're saying is that Americans don't pay attention and forgot how terrible the Trump presidency was because it's been a few years. Most people think that "we're better now" and any major issues have abated without understanding that nothing has fundamentally changed. Because of all that, Trump will win the election. The DnD portion of the post is just what got OP to think about this.

Sad thing is that there's merit to the argument. It's the old trope of "Americans have short memories."

Cool, Bill Gates has opinions. I think he's being hasty and speaking out of turn and only partially correct. From my understanding, the "big innovation" of GPT-4 was adding more parameters and scaling up compute. The core algorithms are generally agreed to be mostly the same from earlier versions (not that we know for sure since OpenAI has only released a technical report). Based on that, the real limit on this technology is compute and number of parameters (as boring as that is), and so he's right that the algorithm design may have plateaued. However, we really don't know what will happen if truly monster rigs with tens-of-trillions of parameters are used when trained on the entirety of human written knowledge (morality of that notwithstanding), and that's where he's wrong.

:wq Thanks Bram for a great editor! Vim is probably one of the most useful pieces of software ever written. I know that I use it literally every day.