MudMan

Yep. Terrible analogy, a bad fit for both the tech and the use cases, tells nothing to anybody, and federation is not the biggest feature most people care about going into Mastodon anyway.

I've been seeing this story do the rounds and I feel like we're burying the lede here.

Who the hell is watching porn over Plex? That is somehow simultaneously the most uninformed and the most complicated way to access porn.

Hey, it's why it's so possible to make loving parodies of Trek, right? If it seems okay to Tony Shalhoub it's fine by me.

I mean, in fairness their strategy for space exploration seems to be to point a starship in a random direction, hit "go" and beam down to every planet with a remotely breathable atmosphere in their PJ onesies.

The impressive part is they still seem to be the dominant superpower in half the galaxy, so... yay for them.

I'd agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I'm a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it's very directly in their way.

Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn't use to work to work better.

A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.

To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn't try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal...

I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I'm saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I'm trying to provide a perspective on those.

I am always amused by how "Linux newbie" guides are consistently tons of pages of choice paralysis and esoteric concepts but they all take a stop at "well, the UI looks kinda like Windows on this one, so that will probably help".

Look, I'm not particularly new to Linux, but also don't daily drive it. In my experience the UI is not the problem. Ever. Compatibility and setup are the problem. Every Linux distro I've ever seen is perfectly usable, nitpicks aside. The part that will make a newcomer bounce off is configuration. Especially if they're trying to mess with relatively unusual hardware like laptops driven by proprietary software, with MUX switched GPUs and whatnot. Only people deep into the ecosystem care about the minutia of the UI and the package management.

This entire article is utterly baffling if you know anything at all about what they're talking about. What the absolute hell did I just read?

Unfortunately if we've learned anything from Twitter and Reddit is that captive audiences are suuuuper captive.

But they're not doing any favors to the goal of stopping the bleeding towards TikTok that would have happened anyway, that's for sure.

It depends on whether the movie says it or it's a thing from an interview, in my book.

As in, if the movie is making a case that something went down a certain way in real life when it didin't (say, JFK) then... yeah, well, that's a bit of an issue, sure.

If the movie is out there being a movie and the director is just saying he liked it more this way and you weren't there to check and get off my hair and watch the movie... well that's not an unreasonable response to people well acksually-ing a movie.

And again, haven't seen the movie. No idea what this is like. All I'm saying is this attitude is not new for the guy and his historical dramas are all heavily stylized and put drama ahead of accuracy for narrative purposes and that's... fine. At worst it's an excuse for people to make nerdy videos about the actual history, which I'm also fine with.

Ah... ok, wow, that's a lot of relativity to explain from scratch for a non-physicist. There must be someone else...

Here, this one is a bit dense but it addresses Star Trek by name, so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTf4eqdQXpA

Bonus points for starting with the point that forget warp, subspace communication breaks causality already, so you don't even need to boldly go anywhere for any of it to be kinda busted.

If that's a bit too dry you can search for a similar subject line, there are TONS of explanations like this one out there.

Anyway, none of it makes sense, it's all for funsies anyway. Suspend disbelief, ye nerds, and enjoy your sci-fi.

Don't make me break out the spacetime diagram, young man. Because I WILL break out the spacetime diagram.

Anyway, doesn't matter. Star Trek has messed with time travel since TOS season 1. And that was after they started introducing magic men with god powers, which they did in episode 3. It makes zero sense to get nerdy about it. That's my point here.

You should get back into it, though. It's all pretty solid, except maybe some of Picard.

I did bounce off on DS9, too. That was a rough time for the franchise. Glad people enjoy it retroactively, though.