Excerpts from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Fit 11 that pretty much summarize how the AI industry really works, so long as you swap a few words.

All aboard the AI Event Horizon train. 😭

EDIT: Sorry, I set my Gitlab permissions wrong. Should be able to view now.

Floppy disks, tablets, and a #FascistRegime, #StarTrek has an eerie insight into the future. They even got the damage to the #WhiteHouse

#ENT @startrek @quarks @guinan #fascist

Despite a rebuff of an initial offer to buy Warner Brothers - Discovery, David Ellison is continuing to talk about it.

Meanwhile, WB-Discovery CEO Zazlav looks to be trying to split off the linear business and market the studios, IP and library.

In the role, he will oversee consumer products, live experiences, publishing, partnerships, and e-commerce for physical products, reporting to Paramount President Jeff Shell. In announcing the hiring, Paramount said Silverman would team with leaders at their key brands, including Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon, in an effort to “bring stories to life in new ways.”

Lots of interesting comments in the interview.

One that stood out to me:

The Duffers emphasized that they don’t plan on becoming prolific producers of a large stable of shows and films. “We don’t want to become like Bad Robot,” Matt Duffer said, name checking J.J. Abrams’ production company. “Ross and I are incapable of juggling that many things.”

Here's a TechCrunch article on the topic too.

First of all I love this idea, especially for nonprofits, universities and governments.

My biggest question is how moderation will work. The "point" of federation is that each instance can moderate their own way, but presumably the paid moderation will be in the style of mastodon.social, which isn't bad, but not exactly in the spirit of the Fediverse.

“Media conglomerate putting together majority cash offer for WBD backed by ultra-rich Ellison family, reports say”

The Wall Street Journal, this Guardian article and other business news media are reporting that the rumoured Warner Brothers - Paramount merger is back under consideration — this time with the deep pockets of the Ellisons.

One can see it as a worthwhile investment for the Ellisons regardless whether the motivation is acquiring IP or media control.

Disquieting for Star Trek franchise fans nonetheless.

I've been seeing a lot of startrek.website shares I do showing the wrong desc and image in the unfurl on the posts lately. It was a few of them a week at first, but it's become multiple a day now.

As the most recent example, the "Look at the time, its 7 of 9" post unfurls like this in signal:

Is this a known issue? Is there a better place to report instance issues? It kind of looks to me like UUID reuse leading to new posts displaying old images.

One of the shorter presentations at FediCon, but definitely interesting, especially since lemmy instances are very much driven by the user base (whereas Linux doesn't really change based on how many users there are). Also interesting since the speaker, Janet Vertesi, is one of the people working on the "Europa Clipper" project (the one where we're flying a satellite through Europa's geysers to get water samples, since landing and drilling under the ice is impractical. This has nothing to do with the presentation, I'm just excited about it).

Video Highlights:

2:00 - The current dominance of a few social media companies was predicted. Although there are lots of neat tools for opting out of Microsoft/Google/etc., but it's the community of these tools that matters

7:30 - Difficulties with how entangled folks are with mainstream tools (maps, calendars, clubs, etc.) - and how to overcome these obstacles. Interesting bit about how all the privacy toggles on Facebook, etc. give a false sense of security and discourage users from making bigger, more effective change. Additionally, behavior change happens at the group level, not the individual level.

12:00 - Building a network of "Tech Reclaimers" to help others make the change. Teaching social and technical skills (e.g., moderation - people are used to the technology doing everything for them on "traditional" social media), taking small steps, etc.

17:30 - Ongoing events

FTA:

The last full version of the webpage, archived by the Internet Archive on July 17, still included the now-deleted sections. Parts of Section 8 of Article I, as well as all of Sections 9 and 10 of Article I are now gone from the live site. The deletions, as of August 6, are also archived here. The change was spotted by users on Lemmy, an open-source aggregation platform and forum.

Variety reports that “Brian Robbins Calls Paramount-Skydance Merger ‘Bittersweet’ in Memo to Staff Amid His Exit as Co-CEO”

David Ellison, the founder of Skydance, will become chairman and CEO of Paramount. Andy Gordon, who leads the West Coast office of RedBird Capital Partners, is set to take the role of chief operating officer and chief strategic officer. RedBird teamed with Skydance to acquire Paramount Global for $8.5 billion.

Looking at how Paramount, since 2021, has failed to deliver on a new Star Trek movie, arguably wound down three successful shows prematurely, it’s difficult to see that this leadership team has done well by the franchise.

Looking at the apparent expeditious compromises Paramount leadership and Shari Redstone were willing to make to clear the way for the sale, I’m willing to look forward to see what comes next.

I’ve been on a bit of a button-making kick, and here’s my latest one.

Bonus: The earlier one I did for TMBW. It needs some work in the margins - I just haven’t gotten to it yet.