I’m not familiar with X-files but BCS and BB didn’t have to have internally consistent supernatural phenomenon. Character driven storytelling seems to be VG’s specialty and that’s why I would accept a handwavily explanation to SOME of this. But I’m with you in hoping for a greater level of nerdy details.

Cheers to that.

As much as I love hard sci fi where everything is internally consistent, I doubt they will use genetics to explain immunity. The whole thing feels kind of magic (they now hinted at it being unconscious communication via EM fields, but then a plurb in a anecoic chamber would be cut off, and they dont seem to play on technicalities to test the scientific consistency of the phenomenon, or to move the story forward) If any explanation to the immunity is given, it’s going to be some psychological one. Misanthropy, loneliness, trauma. If the show will drag long enough to widen the focus from Carol and Manousos, we’ll see that even the most accepting and tame immune people have some kind of backstory that leads to deduce a common denominator among them.

I rarely flay out laugh alone out of something that happens to me of that I think, but I do get a chuckle out of me sometimes.

I rejected the analogies hive/AI until now, mostly because I believe the idea for the story started well before the current state of AI reached mainstream awareness (or well, exist in this state at all). I still think it’s not a good analogy, but the hunger for new content is reminding me of the starvation of pretraining material every big AI company is feeling.

A movie that you would have forgotten 2 hours later. The implications of a hive mind world are mulled in the silent scenes and in the days between episodes. A 2 hour movie would have felt unbearably rushed, shallow and unsatisfactory, to me. I’m also glad they didn’t drop it in one whole season. I watched the first 4 in 3 days and I regret that.

I’m with you. I find the complaints about it so weird. It sounds like “I like this show but I wish it were another show”. There’s plenty to discuss and dislike, but the pace is such a basic part of it.

17% extra isn’t much, especially if the manufacturing is within the EU, where it could be seen as an investment.

It’s not zero either. I wish the real “savings” of relying on final products imports would be more quantified like this. It might not be worth it, sometimes.

But then, how much of that supply chain is china-free, once you go past the first level of the bill of materials.

I get the analogy. I am not sure it’s intentional, we consume stories through the lens of our present time, so it’s reasonable to get to that analogy and useful to debate it, but this story was conceived way before the current vibe of using genAI was a thing at all, much less mainstream.

Why “gentrified” though?

I was “disappointed” with the lack of development in what we know about the others, but the episode was very good. I am not sure how to say that without sounding judgmental but if you feel the need to fast forward scenes without talking you’re probably unaware that in a visual medium images tell part of the story. Possibly not an accessible series (I hope there are audio tracks for visually impaired folks) but flushing half of it down the toilet says more about what dopamine-factory-media did to our brains in the past few years than it says about pluribus itself.

They perform activities where the risk is not zero. They are indeed illogical with the food thing, but they are not entirely risk averse. That being said, I hope, if they address it, that’s not going to be a big part of the story.

I think she would have a similar relationship to the one with Zosia, except the Sodium thiopental trick. She would reject her as truly Helen, but she would be drawn to her (they picked lady pirate for a reason) in a more trusting way, perhaps eventually. In general, it would be a lower drama story, and the choice, painful as it was, worked well for the story.

They seem to be good at channeling the memories and mannerism of a specific individual (Ravi, the indian kid, behaves like a kid) when appropriate. I would demand to “talk” to Helen (or, like, my wife, if I put myself in Carol’s shoes) through another Plurb individual. I would probably profoundly dislike the experience, assuming they would be able to attempt it, as uncanny-valley-like and I would doubt the genuinity of it (would I talk with a AI that is the sum of the knowledge and mannerism of my wife? Would that be my wife? Hard pass, but in that context, I wonder if it would help me get into the frame of mind to ask better questions)

As an ADHD person that watched (until I found it too boring) a lot of The Walking Dead in 2x speed, I kind of see what you mean, but…never in this show I felt the need to skip anything (only when I rewatched episode 2 to convince my wife to stick with the show after she noped-out at the end of the pilot, I had to skip the seizure scenes to keep her attention long enough to make her interested in the mysteries they introduced. I’m not proud of the manipulation. But she’s a Plurb too now, so, eh, ends, means, you know)

Whenever something drags for too long, I look around. The sets have a level of detail and care that few other shows enjoy.

The only thing annoying me is that I would have a list of question as long as my leg, and she’s not asking the right questions. That ain’t solved by fast forwarding, though.

Oh boy, I remember the comment about the eggs. And then the one about stem cells. I absolutely did not put the two together until this comment, and I both hate you and love you for it :)

I waited until I was caught up with the last aired episode to seek confirmation of it, but I recognized him on the first call and found it extremely funny.

PS. Love your handle by the way. The next raktajino at the replimat is on me!

Possibly, but a lot of plants want to be eaten, for lack of a better phrase. Most fruiting plants reproduce by being eaten. You’re not killing a strawberry plant by eating the berry, you’re helping it

I thought the same, and I find it surprising that this thought wasn’t expressed. But then again, it might be that they are aware of it, and still find it immoral to consume something tied to being alive, because of some misguided implicit imperative. There’s only so much innate behavior that you can encode in xNA, and the end result might be contradictory. Just like most people can rationally understand that farming animals is morally questionable, and still eat meat because…they think they really have to. They accept the cognitive dissonance. We all have our own dissonances.

Wildly speculative (my headcanon untill proven wrong, which will happen): The virus was created from a species much like ours, in an attempt to put an end to wars and communication barriers. The broad strokes that the design of the virus allowed in controlling these emerging behaviors made it so that, by erring on the side of EXTREME life preservation instinct, it made it to be not self sustainable. It’s a mistake. But couple that to the other imperative, spreading and replication, and you have a suicidal hyve mind. It’s not that different from extremely aggressive viruses like Ebola. They come in waves because they can’t really become endemic, given that the extreme mortality coupled with the extreme transmissibility burn through the population very fast. It would be an evolutionary advantage for the virus to have mild symptoms and move around with minor consequences, but evolution is not a great optimizer, not on the short term at least, and not when population spikes and ebbs fast. And when something is artificial, it might benefit even less from this long term optimization. So what would this dying population do, faced with imminent death, and an imperative to propagate? Propagate the virus. Turn the entire planetary efforts to broadcasting the virus, as a last ditch effort to try again elsewhere. Perhaps we received the 4th, 5th, or the 960323th rebroadcasting, each intelligent species succumbing to it, and passing it forward. And who knows, it might be that on some species it works different, or it doesn’t work in everybody (hint, hint) and that leads to a different approach to solving the self-annihilation-by-starvation catch.

You can share energy through the grid. You already do if you have a grid following inverter, and that’s the way to do it. Local production and distribution, but no single point of failure and everybody contributes to thr maintenance of the grid. Perhaps giant improvements in solar panels and storage will make microgrids feasible everywhere, but until then the grid is the best thing we have to provide both reliability and allow for local distribution.

The energy-sharing community-laws starting around Europe are not about running cables between neighbors, but allowing the accounting and billing of energy recognizing the already existing local distribution that the grid allows.

Jealous. I recently redid my roof and removed a sloped window in the attic to make room for more solar. The removed window frame and glass sat in the attic all summer and I was imagining using it for something like that. What was stopping me was the fact that it was relatively small and not very deep. … But I waited too long and it was cleared out with the rest of the construction debris. My winter salad would be doing better right now.

This, from the project I use to deploy my server, could be a starting point

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy?tab=readme-ov-file#bridges

Thanks, that’s what I had found. I will set up prosody somewhere and try…