Setting aside stuff like Plan Nine and Manos and The Room and Birdemic, probably Star Trek XI, the one that JJ made. Splicing together test footage of Bela Lugosi and his chiropractor is one thing, but desecrating something beautiful is a sin.
People will believe some preposterous things to keep their beliefs intact. Capitalists somehow still believe that markets efficiently allocate resources, and any evidence they don't is chalked up to government interference or whatever. Christians believe that saying "God works in mysterious ways" and/or "that's the price of free will" accounts for how fucked up the world is. And communists believe that, when a communist does it, it's not an atrocity.
Is it conventional or synthetic?
I think it's better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn't any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn't enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.
If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.
Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I'm curious why, but unless you're in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.
Edit: Didn't notice what community this was. Since it's a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I'm pretty sure they're easier to resize as conditions change.
Userland malloc comes from libc, which is most likely glibc. Maybe this will tell you what you wanna know: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MallocInternals
As I recall, the basic differences between employee and contractor are whether the employer can dictate time, place, and manner. The problem for gig "contractors" is that they're in a much tougher spot on exercising their rights, since not many people who can afford a lawyer deliver food. And they aren't exactly in short supply, so if Uber oversteps and individual "contractors" try to push back, they'll just be fired. Which gets back to the lawyer issue.
Daily Trek: TOS 1x21, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" — I think we have a real UFO on our hands
Synopsis
Remember back in "The Naked Time," the Enterprise was thrown back in time a bit by excessive warp speed. This was used (by my count) three more times: "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," "Assignment: Earth" (TOS 2x26), and The Voyage Home.
On this occasion, time travel was unintentional, and the Enterprise is spotted on Air Force radar. A jet is scrambled to investigate, and the Enterprise accidentally destroys it with its tractor. They beam the pilot aboard, and get caught in a conundrum: do they send USAF Captain John Christopher back to Earth, knowing he knows the future? Worse, it turns out Christopher's son will be an astronaut himself, so they can't bring Christopher back to the future.
They decide they need to destroy all physical evidence of their presence, so Kirk and Sulu snoop around an Air Force base looking for computer tapes and film negatives. They get caught by an MP, who also gets accidentally beamed up to the Enterprise. Then Kirk is captured by the bas
Sounds like gin and tea, served hot with a twist of lemon.
I'm not sure this is a level headed take... They say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Meta has already made it very clear who they are; I'm not sure skepticism is really in order.
I'm not a Mastodon expert, but I'm pretty sure you can still get their memes if they reply to you (or @ you), or if they post to a tag you're following.
Well... They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don't have a lot of privacy. It's necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.
So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can't be stopped.
It seems to me, the dangers are more like...
Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.
It'll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Then yes there's EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I'm pretty confident the Lemmy developers won't give them the time of day.
Daily Trek: TOS 1x20, "The Alternative Factor" — He's fled me across all the years... All the empty years, to a dead future...
Forgive me for what I'm about to do.
Synopsis
The universe experiences a dragon break while the Enterprise is in orbit around an arid planet. They beam down to find Todd Howard with a stringy goatee has crashed his concept car in the California desert.
They take the Toddhead back to the ship, where he oscillates between between being reasonable and crazy, and injuries keep appearing and disappearing on him. Yes, it's true: the Toddhead has divided himself into the primordial forces of Anu and Padomay. If they should ever meet, the universe will be destroyed.
Anu (good Todd) steals dilithium crystals in order to power his car back up. Padomay (evil Todd) also steals dilithium crystals, also to power his car back up. As far as I can tell through the messy storytellin
Daily Trek: TOS 1x19, "Arena" — Like most humans, I seem to have an instinctive revulsion to reptiles
Synopsis
The Enterprise is called to a far-flung colony on Cestus III. When they get there, the colony has already been destroyed. We learn that, in the future, mortar shells don't launch shrapnel. Also Starfleet seems to have continued that ludicrous US project to shoot nukes from artillery cannons. Happy Fourth of July everyone!
This episode is a two-for-one first contact. First we have the gorn, a race of people in clumsy green prosthetics, and second we have the metrons, a race of superpowered narcissists. The Enterprise chases the gorn (who destroyed the Federation colony) into metron space, and the metrons decide to have Kirk face the gorn captain in the most awkward one-on-one fight imaginable.
After Kirk and the gorn captain get tired of throwing big pieces of foam at each other, Kirk realizes the planet has all the materials to make a gun just sort of laying around. He picks up a section of bamboo; mixes sulfur, potassium nitrate, and carbon; puts chunks of diamonds
Daily Trek: TOS 1x18, "The Squire of Gothos" — "Fascinating" is a word I use for the unexpected; in this case, I should think "interesting" would suffice
Okay, so "Daily Trek" means Weekday Trek. This is a nice way of coming down from the workday. By the weekend I just don't seem to have the energy for it.
Synopsis
In a stellar desert, the Enterprise encounters an uninhabited planet. They try to go around, but Kirk and Sulu vanish. Eventually the Enterprise finds a habitable zone on the planet, and McCoy beams down with two red-shirts. Shockingly, the red-shirts survive the entire episode.
They find an Eighteenth Century drawing room and a weirdo named General Trelane, retired, but you can call him the squire of Gothos. He didn't account for light delay, so he thinks his castle is contemporary. He's obsessed with militarism and honor, but it becomes very clear that those are just words.
Trelane says that he has matter-energy conversion technology, and Kirk reasons that it's being mediated by some device. Trelane's attentions are split between his playthings and his mirror, so Kirk challenges him to a pistol duel and uses his
I suppose I disagree with the formulation of the argument. The entscheidungsproblem and the halting problem are limitations on formal analysis. It isn't relevant to talk about either of them in terms of "solving them," that's why we use the term undecidable. The halting problem asks, in modern terms—
Given a computer program and a set of inputs to it, can you write a second computer program that decides whether the input program halts (i.e., finishes running)?
The answer to that question is no. In limited terms, this tells you something fundamental about the capabilities of Turing machines and lambda calculus; in general terms, this tells you something deeply important about formal analysis. This all started with the question—
Can you create a formal process for deciding whether a proposition, given an axiomatic system in first-order logic, is always true?
The answer to this question is also no. Digital computers were devised as a means of specifying a formal process for solving logic problems, so the undecidability of the entscheidungsproblem was proven through the undecidability of the halting problem. This is why there are still open logic problems despite the invention of digital computers, and despite how many flops a modern supercomputer can pull off.
We don't use formal process for most of the things we do. And when we do try to use formal process for ourselves, it turns into a nightmare called civil and criminal law. The inadequacies of those formal processes are why we have a massive judicial system, and why the whole thing has devolved into a circus. Importantly, the inherent informality of law in practice is why we have so many lawyers, and why they can get away with charging so much.
As for whether it's necessary to be able to write a computer program that can effectively analyze computer programs, to be able to write a computer program that can effectively write computer programs, consider... Even the loosey goosey horseshit called "deep learning" is based on error functions. If you can't compute how far away you are from your target, then you've got nothing.
This is proof of one thing: that our brains are nothing like digital computers as laid out by Turing and Church.
What I mean about compilers is, compiler optimizations are only valid if a particular bit of code rewriting does exactly the same thing under all conditions as what the human wrote. This is chiefly only possible if the code in question doesn't include any branches (if, loops, function calls). A section of code with no branches is called a basic block. Rust is special because it harshly constrains the kinds of programs you can write: another consequence of the halting problem is that, in general, you can't track pointer aliasing outside a basic block, but the Rust program constraints do make this possible. It just foists the intellectual load onto the programmer. This is also why Rust is far and away my favorite language; I respect the boldness of this play, and the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
To me, general AI means a computer program having at least the same capabilities as a human. You can go further down this rabbit hole and read about the question that spawned the halting problem, called the entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) to see that AI is actually more impossible than I let on.
Computer numerical simulation is a different kind of shell game from AI. The only reason it's done is because most differential equations aren't solvable in the ordinary sense, so instead they're discretized and approximated. Zeno's paradox for the modern world. Since the discretization doesn't work out, they're then hacked to make the results look right. This is also why they always want more flops, because they believe that, if you just discretize finely enough, you'll eventually reach infinity (or infinitesimal).
This also should not fill you with hope for general AI.
Evidence, not really, but that's kind of meaningless here since we're talking theory of computation. It's a direct consequence of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematical analysis of loops cannot be done because loops, in general, don't take on any particular value; if they did, then the halting problem would be decidable. Given that writing a computer program requires an exact specification, which cannot be provided for the general analysis of computer programs, general AI trips and falls at the very first hurdle: being able to write other computer programs. Which should be a simple task, compared to the other things people expect of it.
Yes there's more complexity here, what about compiler optimization or Rust's borrow checker? which I don't care to get into at the moment; suffice it to say, those only operate on certain special conditions. To posit general AI, you need to think bigger than basic block instruction reordering.
This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.
The thing that amazes me the most about AI Discourse is, we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible. My best guess is that people with a CS degree who believe in AI slept through all their classes.
The actual answer is that "difficult" comes from "difficulty," which is itself from the French "difficulté." "Cult" is a direct shortening of the Latin "cultus."
If you ever really want to look at word origins, the Online Etymology Dictionary is great: https://www.etymonline.com/word/cult#etymonline_v_450
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I sometimes get mistaken for the human pope, while you can clearly see that I'm the raccoon pope.
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While there are technical solutions to that problem, realistically it's only a problem if people start thinking they're celebrities. Personally I prefer a platform that lets people dunk on celebrities.
What a dumb question, you can hold your boyfriend's hand in a manual as long as he's willing to put his hand on the shifter too.
Daily Trek: TOS 1x17, "Shore Leave" — The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play
Synopsis
The last sixteen episodes have taken their toll on the crew. They find an uninhabited planet that looks awfully similar to Southern California and send out scouting parties, in preparation for letting the crew take shore leave.
Everything is in order... until McCoy sees a giant, white rabbit being chased by an English girl. Kirk postpones shore leave until they figure out what's going on.
Kirk and McCoy talk about an obnoxious Irishman—and geez, this show sure is racist against the Irish—that bullied him at Starfleet Academy. Suddenly the bully appears and Kirk gets into a fight.
Similar events happen all over: a samurai attacks Sulu, the new Yeoman Barrows is accosted by Don Juan, and a couple of red-shirts hide from a tiger. Kirk runs into yet another old flame. Barrows discovers a princess dress, and randy old McCoy asks her to put it on. McCoy gets impaled by a jousting knight.
Anyway, the planet has mind-reading devices and replicators that fabricate anything any
So uh... who put the house up for sale? Did the bank foreclose on the house?
Daily Trek: TOS 0/1x15/1x16, "The Cage" and "The Menagerie" — When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating
Synopsis—The Cage
The Enterprise picks up a radio distress call, meaning it was sent decades ago. Spock points out that a ship, the Columbia, did crash on Talos IV eighteen years ago. Pike decides that, absent evidence of survivors, they'll stay on their current mission.
But then they get an interstellar fax saying there actually are survivors.
They find a camp of old men and one hot chick. Before they can beam anyone up, Pike is lured away by the hot chick and captured by big-brained aliens. The camp vanishes.
The aliens can make illusions, and they've trapped Pike in their menagerie. The hot chick, Vina, tells him that the Talosians destroyed the surface in a war, hid underground, and developed mind powers that let them create illusions. Pike wonders why he's talking to an illusion, though Vina tells him that the illusions can still make him feel pain, so he can't brush them off.
The Talosians manipulate the transporter control such that only Number One and Yeoman Colt b
Daily Trek: TOS 1x14, "Court Martial" — I'm talking about rights!
I hate it when Star Trek tries to do Perry Mason, with one exception. And the exception is not "The Measure of a Man."
Synopsis
An officer dies in an ion storm, and computer records show that Kirk caused his death through negligence. The man is the ship's records officer, Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney. This sends Kirk to a court martial, and an old flame is the prosecutor.
The prosecution's evidence hinges on this wacky control panel, where the only three usable buttons are yellow alert, red alert, and kill a guy. Video from the bridge shows Kirk sending Finney into a pod, signaling yellow alert, telling Finney to stand by to leave the pod, then ejecting the pod into the ion storm.
Years ago, Kirk and Finney were ensigns on the Republic. Finney left the engines in a dangerous state, then Kirk came on shift and logged the mistake. This put a black mark on Finney's career. The prosecutor latches onto a theory that Kirk reflected Finney's resentment back at him, and someho
Daily Trek: TOS 1x13, "The Galileo Seven" — It is more rational to sacrifice one life than six, Doctor
Synopsis
The Enterprise is delivering medical supplies to Makus III, but they encounter a quasar. Kirk launches the shuttle Galileo to gather data. Unfortunately, the Galileo immediately loses control due to space stuff from the quasar and crash lands on a shit planet called Taurus II. Which leaves open the question of why they call it Earth rather than Sol III.
There's some stuffy Federation jerk pressing Kirk to abandon the crew of the Galileo, but Kirk insists on searching.
The main cast members on the Galileo are Spock, McCoy, and Scott, with Spock the ranking officer. McCoy points out to Spock that this is his first command, and Spock replies, "I realize that command does have its fascinations, even under circumstances such as these, but I neither enjoy the idea of command, nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists, and I will do whatever logically needs to be done."
Taurus II turns out to be inhabited by people in goofy yeti costumes who throw even goofier spe
Daily Trek: TOS 1x12, "The Conscience of the King" — Let bloody vengeance take its final course! And see what difference it makes to this universe of yours
This episode is the 60s at its best.
Synopsis
Is Anton Karidian, classical actor, in fact the aptly named Kodos the Executioner? Kirk's friend Thomas Leighton thinks so, and the water gets bloodier after Leighton turns up dead.
Anton's company performs Macbeth, and Leighton thinks he recognized the voice. Kirk seduces Anton's daughter Lenore who, of course, played Lady Macbeth. At this point you know everything that happens for the rest of the episode.
Kirk uses some connections and some wile to put Lenore into a position of asking him to transport the company to their next show. Kirk plays hard to get, but agrees to transport them when Lenore offers to perform for the crew.
Three very important things drive us to our conclusion:
First, Spock retraces Kirk's steps and logically concludes that Anton is Kodos. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy debate the issues. Kirk wants more than logic to accuse. McCoy wants to know if Kirk wants justice or vengeance. "Do you play God? Carry his head
Daily Trek: TOS 1x11, "Miri" — Miri... Pretty name... for a pretty young woman
This episode is deeply uncomfortable.
Synopsis
The Enterprise receives a distress signal and tracks it to a duplicate Earth. They beam down to find decayed infrastructure, horrible incongruous architecture, diminishing food supplies, mass unemployment, vagrants roaming the streets... just as it was in the year 2023.
My only guess is that this episode is set on a duplicate Earth for budgetary reasons.
Anyway...
They discover that the people of 2023 were trying to build an immortality virus—though the virology lab seems to be in the US, so they missed that prediction—but instead it killed every adult. The children were blessed (?) with very long childhoods, but once they reach puberty they die.
Children, it turns out, are little assholes. The Enterprise crew who beam down (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand, and two red-shirts) are infected, and the kids steal their communicators because why not?
Miri is a girl on the cusp of womanhood. I imagine that the script intended for Kirk to
Many of you will die here like rotten cabbages
I've been watching an episode of Star Trek a day, starting from the beginning, so last night I watched "Dagger of the Mind". It's pretty similar to "A Change of Mind," and that reminded me of something else from The Prisoner...
There are at least two episodes, "Free for All" and "A Change of Mind," where the Villagers have "spontaneous," organized reactions that also line up with Number Two's plans. In "Free for All," Number Six's campaign was ready-made, with an army of supporters with posters and chants. In "A Change of Mind," everyone is quick to shun the Unmutual, and just as quick to welcome back the Reformed.
There are obviously agents among the Villagers, but the premise of "Checkmate" is that the prisoners are afraid of the guards.
So what do you think is the deal with how easily the Villagers coalesce around Number Two's schemes? Are they being coerced, are Number Six's campaign crowds mostly guards, is it "Pavlovian" (such that coerc
Daily Trek: TOS 1x10, "Dagger of the Mind" — It's hard to believe a man could die of loneliness
Sorry I missed yesterday. I was too tired. Which I guess is fitting for this episode.
Synopsis
During a cargo exchange, the Enterprise picks up a stowaway from a penal colony/mental hospital. They capture the fugitive and discover that he's Dr Simon van Gelder, one of the staff psychiatrists. He's pretty deranged, and winces in pain whenever he tries to talk about the colony.
The Enterprise returns, but McCoy insists Kirk investigate. Kirk beams down with a psychologist, Dr Helen Noel, and gets a tour. Everything seems to be in order, except for a strange treatment room.
Spock mind melds with van Gelder—the first time that power is used—and discovers the treatment room is a "neural neutralizer." It empties the subject's mind completely, which makes them tremendously suggestible.
Kirk asks Noel to demonstrate the neutralizer by using it on him, but midway through the facility director, Dr Tristan Adams, catches them and implants his own suggestions: Kirk loves Noel and woul
Daily Trek: TOS 1x09, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" — Do you think I could love a machine?
Here's a curious fact... Christine Chapel accompanies Kirk in this episode. The android bodyguard, Ruk, is played by Ted Cassidy, who was Lurch on The Addams Family. Chapel, of course, is played by Majel Barrett. Ruk is instructed to protect Chapel, and to follow her orders.
In The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, Majel Barrett played Lwaxana Troi, Deanna's mother. Lwaxana's valet, Mr Homn, is played by Carel Struycken, who was Lurch on The Addams Family.
Synopsis
The Enterprise is sent to search for Roger Korby, an anthropologist presumed dead on an icy planet. Chapel is engaged to marry him. They do get in contact with Korby, and he asks Kirk to beam down alone. Kirk brings Chapel along, and when they arrive and don't find Korby, Kirk has two red-shirts follow.
Lurch kills the red-shirts while nobody is looking, and it's quickly revealed that Exo III is a den of androids and Korby is the ringleader. Kirk makes Korby tell Lurch to protect Chapel, and to follow he
⭐️ Daily Trek: TOS 1x08, "Balance of Terror"
There are some episodes/movies that are so special, they deserve special recognition. I glanced through episode lists, and found sixteen: TOS—Balance of Terror, The City on the Edge of Forever; TOS movies—The Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country; TNG—Family, The Drumhead, The Inner Light, Lower Decks, All Good Things; DS9—Duet, The Visitor, Homefront, Paradise Lost, Far Beyond the Stars, In the Pale Moonlight, It's Only a Paper Moon.
It's not that Voyager and Enterprise are bad; they have a lot of fun episodes, and a lot of good episodes, but not that good. I may have missed some, and there are some great episodes (like "The Best of Both Worlds") that don't quite make the cut for me.
These entries will not have synopses. You owe it to yourself to watch them, and if you've already seen them, you owe it to yourself to watch them again.
Commentary
Game theory is a domain for insane people. I don't mean this lightly. If you've ever seen Dr Strangelove, the titular characte