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You are describing Real Time with Bill Maher. People continue to watch his show. At least, I think you are, because I'm not sure what a "questionable guest" even is.

I thought it was just me! I woke up one day to find that I was logged out, and I couldn’t log in via my apps or even via the Lemmy UI. I thought I had been banned!

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

Star Trek celebrates the diversity of humanity. The extremes of genetic engineering and (on the other side of the spectrum, perhaps) the Borg are symbolic of the corruption of that diversity.

For an in-universe explanation, I suppose you could just look at the degree to which cybernetics are tolerated. Rutherford-level cybernetics? No problem! Borg Queen-level cybernetics? Helm, warp nine, full reverse!

It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit for me to figure out that this was a reference to SNW, and not someone trying to push a far-right conspiracy theory. I think I need to take a break from the internet for a while.

Maybe it's time for a DS9 rewatch....

My purpose in life is to be happy. My primary challenge in life is to find the things in life that make me happy and try to find ways that those things can make other people happy.

I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

Our system of measurement. There can be only one!

I’ve just spent a few weeks continually enhancing a script in a language I’m not all that familiar with, exclusively using ChatGPT 4. The experience leaves a LOT to be desired.

The first few prompts are nothing short of amazing. You go from blank page to something that mostly works in a few seconds. Inevitably, though, something needs to change. That’s where things start to go awry.

You’ll get a few changes in, and things will be going well. Then you’ll ask for another change, and the resulting code will eliminate one of your earlier changes. For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a quick python script that does fuzzy matching. I wanted to feed it a list of filenames from a file and have it find the closest match on my hard drive. I asked for a progress bar, which it added. By the time I was done having it generate code, the progress bar had been removed a couple of times, and changed out for a different progress bar at least three times. (On the bright side, I now know of multiple progress bar solutions in Python!)

If you continue on long enough, the “memory” of ChatGPT isn’t sufficient to remember everything you’ve been doing. You get to a point where you need to feed it your script very frequently to give it the context it needs to answer a question or implement a change.

And on top of all that, it doesn’t often implement the best change. In one instance, I wanted it to write a function that would parse a CSV, count up duplicate values in a particular field, and add that value to each row of the CSV. I could tell right away that the first solution was not an efficient way to accomplish the task. I had to question ChatGPT in another prompt about whether it was efficient. (I was soundly impressed that it recognized the problem after I brought it up and gave me something that ended up being quite fast and efficient.)

Moral of the story: you can’t do this effectively without an understanding of computer science.

Thanks for posting this! I was going to buy this on blu ray very soon after launch, but now I think I'll give it some time. The only thing I worry about is that the incorrect version will be sold to retailers, who will just sell me that when I go to buy it next year.

Thank you for posting this. I have been avoiding updating to synergy 3 and now I’m glad I did. I still like version 2. I would still recommend it. I even use it with gaming.

Season 1 has a couple fun extras on the disc. One in particular shows how they use the LED walls to create rich set environments.