Oh man this is really sad. I liked SFA way more than I thought I would. The cast was top notch, and they had some good stories. Genuinely sad to see this one go.

Of all the things in the photos that actually made sense. It’s weird, though, and threw me for a loop when I first saw uniforms and such and had to ask back then.

On uniforms, vehicles, etc. the flag is sometimes “backwards” so that the union (the blue and stars) are “forward facing.” The idea is that the flag is flown from the left side in normal orientation, so the union is closest to the pole. If the person or vehicle were carrying a real flag, based on what side a person is observing, the flag may be “mirrored.” In other words, the flag is moving with the person or vehicle and not the opposite way. You’ll see that orientation a lot on American military and para-military uniforms.

I never understood why we don’t just put a normal oriented flag on the opposite shoulder for the same effect, but hey…America is weird.

Any MAGA who fell for this is beyond stupid (plus utterly unfamiliar with the military). Her uniform is wrong (skirt WAYYY too high). No one wears dress uniforms underway at sea in general, ESPECIALLY an enlisted soldier (who would likely be nowhere near a ship, even more especially in dress uniform). The ribbons on her dress uniform not only change from picture to picture, but are also the wrong size (sometimes) and not even actual US ribbons. I’ve never seen a regulation name tag say “US ARMY” and not a name. The undershirt in her camis isn’t regulation. And this was just a quick look at the photos and only tangentially around the Army at work.

Oh and that’s before the visible glitches because it’s AI. This is laughably low effort.

EDIT: Damn, they didn’t even use a real ship as the background. It’s supposed to be a destroyer, and there are no US destroyers with an aft-facing bridge or part of the superstructure forward of the bridge windows. Just truly WTF

EDIT 2.0: I just saw a couple other photos because I got curious. One has her as a one-star general 😂, and a couple others have her wearing a (shitty looking) Combat Infantry Badge, which is only awarded for being in combat. So, I guess women CAN hack it in combat! Hegseth must be in shambles.

There are a surprising amount of false positives when using object detection on maritime imagery. While a carrier is a spec, there are a ton of specs in the ocean that can look similar enough. Plus, weather has a huge hand to play. If it were always perfectly clear, then it’s an easier problem, but one cloud can really mess up the detection. Ultimately, ship detection is a difficult problem (not intractable but still hard).

Sort of. Satellite resources are surprisingly scarce, so a lot are focused where people are, i.e. land. Plus, for the imagery sats that are focused on the ocean, ships are also tiny in a literal ocean of blue. It’s just a spec. While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec. That’s why most countries use signal collection to locate vessels at sea. (I’m over-simplifying a lot, but you get the picture)

Do we know the same people? I asked the two who said this if they actually click on the ads and buy something. You can imagine my horror when they said yes. Meanwhile, I have a Pihole on my network and uBlock on every single browser.

Doylist: Berman was a fatphobic piece of shit who told her to lose weight before she could wear the uniform.

Don’t forget that he was also a misogynist!

Even moreso with ad-blocker and PiHole. I swear that every corporate website has me do a captcha of some kind every time I click a link.

On that note, just denying trackers breaks SO many email links, and it feels like it gets worse and worse each year.

Wow thanks for sharing this! I think I’ll try my hand at some of these recipes.

I can only imagine the blotch’s suffering while being attached to that putrid growth. Best wishes to the blotch.

I mean the petty school rivalry, Caleb and Tarima’s relationship, the sports team antics, and the like. To be clear, I also found episodes like “The Dauphin” annoying too for Wesley’s teenage issues nor was I particularly into Jake’s and Nog’s relationship issues. The difference, I think, between DS9/TNG and SFA on this front is that for the most part, their growth is not the point of the show. SFA, by its nature, is a coming of age show, so there are bound to be teen drama and the stories about being a kid or young adult.

To be clear, my complaint is not a complaint about the quality but rather an expression of my taste. In fact, I think SFA is quite good, and I am enjoying it a lot more than I expected. Like I said, when the episode is a hit, it really is good, and the misses have been the more teen-coded “young people problems.” And even then, many times it’s not an entire episode but just a scene. For example, on the whole, I enjoyed “Series Acclimation Mil,” but the bar scenes I found to be “my-first-drink” fare and irritating to me. To that end, there was nothing particularly bad about the scenes, they just aren’t my thing.

I’ll also agree that the cadets’ drama is more subdued than Wesley (especially in “The Dauphin”) or Jake, but they were each a single character in the show. There are a lot more cadets by the very nature of the show, so even if an individual case is more subdued, there’s still more of it more regularly.

In the end, I think the show is actually really good, and I have enjoyed the scenes with the commissioned officers (especially Lura Thok!). Even the cadets themselves aren’t bad; I really really like Jay-den. In general, I’ve never really liked YA-coded media, and SFA is an exception in that I find it enjoyable.

I’m a bit behind, but I think it’s a bit hit or miss. The hits are really good, though. To be fair to the show, I’ve found the misses to be primarily the parts focusing on teen drama because I just find teen drama annoying…while watching a teen drama show (in other words, it’s not the show, it’s me). The fourth episode, “Vox In Excelso,” has been my favorite so far, and it’s squarely in the field of great Trek stories.

This is just the “Davidson Window,” which is based on a CIA report that Xi directed the PLA to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027. ADM Davidson took that and used it as a warning to the US military that China is ramping up their capabilities, and other officers, lawmakers, and intelligence folks ran with that until they started saying “China will invade Taiwan in 2027.” Evidently, CEOs were briefed for some (probably stupid or corrupt) reason.

Personally, I think too many senior American leaders read into that report and Davidson’s warning. Plus, most people who really know anything about China don’t think that China will move kinetically against Taiwan around 2027.

Edit: Here’s the Wikipedia article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson_window

This has been my position since around the time when same sex marriage was being fought in the courts. Interestingly, a family member who is super conservative and religious came up with this same idea back then, and I was on board. (Her reasoning was that she wasn’t against gay people having the same rights but that marriage is a “holy” bond between a man and a woman 🙄)

I’ve found that it’s a way to get conservatives/religious folks onboard with same-sex marriage if their issue is the word “marriage” and ensuring its sanctity (cue eye-roll). It simultaneously outs the bigots because they can’t hide behind religious BS, and they show their hand. Back in the '00s and early '10s, I would use it as a litmus test of which Republicans in my life I would continue to associate with.

I used to wonder this, too, and think that it couldn’t be that effective. Then I went to my last job, and there were MULTIPLE people who said they actually liked the ads because they learned about new products that they would like. What’s worse is that a couple of those multiple people actually clicked the ads and would buy things.

All that to say, yes, it is actually at least somewhat effective, and it erodes my faith in humanity.

Hi Karim! It’s so cool that you’re doing an AMA on the Fediverse!

Anyway, Jay-den is one of my favorite characters of the post-2017 era of Trek. Jay-den is clearly not like most Klingons, but he still feels like a true Klingon. How did you prepare for the role in taking such a unique character who doesn’t fit the “stereotype” (for lack of a better word) of a Klingon while still making him feel like a “real” Klingon to the audience?

Totally fair question. One of my go-to examples is for a lot of data visualization stuff, just having an LLM spit out basic graphs with the parameters in the function call. Same with mock-ups of basic user interfaces. I’m not a front-end person at all, and I usually want something basic and routine (but still time consuming), like CRUD or something, so just prompting for that and getting a reasonably decent product is a helpful time saver.

For anything more than basic stuff, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more than a single small function that I then verify line by line.

People who say they code faster with an LLM just blindly accept the given answer, maybe with a quick glance and some simple testing. Not in depth code review, which is hard and costs time.

It helps me code faster, but I really only outsource boilerplate to an LLM. I will say it also helps with learning the syntax for libraries I’m unfamiliar with just in that I don’t have to go through several pages of documentation to get the answers I need in the moment. The speed-up is modest and nowhere near the claims of vibe coders.

Honestly, yes. I went in pretty skeptical because I don’t really like the 32nd century setting and find teenage drama tiresome. SFA is actually pretty good. I really liked this episode: classic Trek storytelling and excellent world-building. The teenage drama stuff is annoying (to me personally), but that’s kinda the price of having a show about cadets.

There are some great characters, too. Jay-den (the Klingon and focus of this episode) is great, and Lura Thok, the Cadet Master, is an absolute gem of a character.

the actual debate was always amongst the students. Vance was determined to convince the Klingons to accept asylum, but “compelling” them did not seem to be seriously on the table.

That was my read of it, too. The cadets were debating the course of action with various shades of compulsion in their arguments. I thought that the debate device was great for fleshing out the overriding question of forcing help on people.

I suppose it would be that the Klingons’ readiness to do this ritualistic faux combat shows some growth

This is a great point, and I hadn’t thought of that. I could definitely see 24th century Klingons demand real bloodshed. Though, perhaps the growth is born of a certain pragmatism that must develop when a species is near extinction; they simply do not have the luxury of losing any individuals.