Spyke

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Do you have any baseless predictions for the future that you nonetheless expect to occur?

Geoengineering to combat climate change by mass carbon capture will be the solution that saves humanity but will arrive too late to prevent some harrowing effects.

Self-driving vehicles will become good enough to technically be safer for passengers than human drivers soon, but the stigma around them will continue for a long time after they are road legal and their uptake will be very slow.

linux

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Windows 10 refugees flock to Linux in what devs call their "biggest launch ever"

I guess it is the year of the Linux desktop for at least some people.

I've used Linux desktop in various forms for just over two decades, this has to be the fourth time it felt like Linux was having its chance to seize marketshare. Each time it ends up not being the mass adoption that people hope for but it feels like the community grows each time so I think it is neat nonetheless.

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Does anyone truly think times are better now than 30 years ago? (US)

Since it hasn't been mentioned, one thing that I am truly thankful for that we have improved since the 1990s is public smoking. Not having to be prepared for the reek of cigarettes in virtually every public space is such a big win.

Hell, in 1990, which is 35 years ago, you could still smoke on airplanes in the US. Airplanes! Can you imagine flying back then? Your neighbor could light up and there was nothing you could do but sit there and stew in the smoke stream. I'm glad I never had to experience flying with smoke but I had my fair share of being forced to sit in smoking sections of restaurants until my teenage years.

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We've never been closer to truly understanding Dr. Pulaski

I believe a lot of the reason people hate LLM chatbots is that we are being actively, knowingly misled by corporations into believing that they, like Data, have the capacity to reason and learn and to understand what they know and what they do not know, when they are just word salad bots. These tools are being pushed on us even though we largely do not want to use them and they produce shoddy lower-quality work while putting actual people out of work, in order to justify the capital expense, because it makes more profit for them, while all friction and risk of using these tools is assumed by the user.

Pulaski's prejudice against Data doesn't make sense in the show because Data is decidedly not a clanker, but it is forgiveable if we believe that she has had past run-ins with fraudulent LLM-like AIs that do a good job of looking like Data but lack these capacities, and perhaps were pushed by similarly unethical entities.

But on the other hand, a lot of the issues with AI in 2026 would not apply in the Federation of the 24th century, because there is no capitalism or scarcity-based economy that would justify compelling people to use such a flawed tool. Also, the ship's computer in the Enterprise is already far more capable and useful than an LLM chatbot, and no one ever marvels at its capabilities in-universe. So given these things, her hostility towards Data is still puzzling.