“We are stardust” - Joni Mitchell

You made it 45 seconds longer than I did. Still waiting for my hair to stop standing on end.

It’s a bit of a tossup on this one. Main characters don’t die, but Tasha JUST had. Picard and Riker probably had plot armor, but the annoyingly combative older Dr Crusher stand in? It seemed plausible enough.

I remember being freaked out by the realization that I was going to grow old. Like really old, someday. That episode stuck with me for that reason.

However, I don’t remember being concerned because Pulaski’s condition was wrapped up in the “solve” of the episode. If she died it would all have been for naught, and there were so many breadcrumbs in the episode pointing to the super-kids as the problem. Most of the episode is just waiting for them to get on with the solution and dragging out the nail biter as long as they can.

Ah. Wow. Didn’t catch that previously. Agreed

Call it the SuperSwitch to mimic the nes -> supernes era. No new gimmick, just double the specs and ride the wave of portable consoles being “good enough”. Rival the steam deck and all the clones coming, with Nintendo’s amazing first party titles and milk the next 5-7 years

No joke. “Sing” It’s this silly kids cover song movie, but it ends up having a wonderful consistent optimism and a brilliant payoff. It’s not an improbable massive “pulled it off” win, it’s surviving through failure and loving the act of making art so much that you keep doing it anyway. It’s joyful and a masterclass in writing a classic story arc without torturing your characters and your audience to get there.

You could consider running a plex server and using Plexamp to stream from that to your phone. It’s free as of a few days ago!

In my personal opinion, it’s under-hyped. The average person has maybe heard about it on the news but not yet tried it. The models we have show the spark of wit, but are clearly limited. The news cycle moves on.

Even still, some huge changes are coming.

My reasoning is this - in David Epstein’s book “Range” he outlines how and why generalists thrive and why specialization has hurt progress. In narrow fields, specialization gives an advantage, but in complex fields, generalists or people from other disciplines can often see novel approaches and cause leaps ahead in the state of the art. There are countless examples of this in practice, and as technology has progressed, most fields are now complex.

Today, in every university, in every lab, there are smart, specialized people using ChatGPT to riff on ideas, to think about how their problem has been addressed in other industries, and to bring outsider knowledge to bear on their work. I have a strong expectation that this will lead to a distinct acceleration of progress. Conversely, an all-knowing oracle can assist a generalist in becoming conversant in a specialization enough to make meaningful contributions. A chat model is a patient and egoless teacher.

It’s a human progress accelerant. And that’s with the models we have today. With next generation models specialized behind corporate walls with fine tuning on all of their private research, or open source models tuned to specific topics and domains, the utility will only increase. Even for smaller companies, combining ChatGPT with a vector database of their docs, customer support chats, etc will give their rank and file employees better tools to work with

Simply put, what we have today can make average people better at their jobs, and gifted people even more extraordinary.

They quietly have. Most of the restrictions have been rolled back

Yeah no. As a former IT guy the last thing I want is be tech support for my family’s light switch

Okay - some weirder takes here but hear me out. I’d love to see a science-vessel focused on anomaly of the week style episodic writing, with moral and ethical quandaries and personal growth and a search for “the meaning of it all” trumping action, adventure, and universe saving.

Accordingly, I’d want that science vessel to be home to a delightfully nerdy crew of pedants, malcontents and misfits, all seeking something outside of the boring federation life or more militaristic vessels.

The list of people that would be amazing to Star or guest:

Neil Patrick Harris as captain

Felicia day as chief science officer.

Aubrey Plaza on tactical, way too smart and capable for her own good (and sardonic style)

William Jackson Harper (Chidi from The Good Place) as first officer

Warwick Davis as chief engineer, with awesome fully custom/adaptive AR controls and a combo of old-man wit and crazy ideas that gets them in and out of jams

With guest turns from David Hyde Pierce (Niles from Frazier), Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, Donald Glover, etc

Just go full nerd with it like discovery tried to, but without the constant intrigue and epic action. Let them be a family growing together and finding a place where they belong, puzzling through each new chapter together. TNG but for 2023 instead of 1988.

I highly recommend checking out the Zelda and Chill trilogy - https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoupLnv0rZ6yQYLT-H-lDSkoamYZ_-HzG&feature=share