The holovids always skip over Voyager’s many, many detours to extract resources and manufacture replacement torpedoes. Between this, negotiating with the Borg, and massively altering the timeline, Captain Janeway is as much a popular topic of conversation outside the federation as she is within.

I wanna see Curzon Dax in SNW. Pretty sure the timetables match up there, given he negotiates the Khitomer accords.

Yeah, if anything the TOS ships are more realistic in regard to their interfaces. In an emergency, when you may not have lights or gravity or whatever, buttons and knobs come with certainty. Flat, featureless touchscreens? Not so much.

i feel like the answer to what is and isn’t canon can be summed up with;

Why do the klingons look different?

They always looked like that, you just didn’t notice before.

Canon has always been squishy. The Eugenics Wars takes place in the nineteen-nineties… oh but didn’t Voyager’s crew visit our nineties? Plus, DISCO had that Elon Musk name drop.

…so the timeline floats up as the present day does. Canon is just a vague sense of the things everyone agrees on.

If i were gonna write the Borg going forward, I’d have the queens be a failed experiment to elevate one drone to the role of tactician specifically to deal with the Federation. It didn’t work, so they don’t do it anymore.

Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.

Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.

I like to think by the time Kirk gets the enterprise, all those spacious crew quarters we see in Strange New Worlds have been eaten up by retrofits and upgrades.

The trouble with phrases like ‘neural structures’ and ‘language parsing’ is that these descriptions still play into the “AI” narrative that’s been used to oversell large language models.

Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn’t language parsing, it’s still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

*Kinda hard to have an equal discussion when being a woman entails being sexually harassed and occasionally assaulted by a bunch of men, mostly ones you barely know or don’t know at all, on a regular basis before you even hit puberty.*

genuine question, how do you expect it to get any better if you aren’t being civil?

The decision matrix here isn’t [civil engagement ||or|| uncivil engagement], but rather:

[civil engagement and incur non-zero risk of uncivil retaliation ||or|| do not engage]

Non-participation is the safer option, broadly speaking. If your speaking with a stranger, it’s better to let a minor slight slide, than to engage civilly. As you get to know someone better, as you become more familiar with conditions, this chart becomes a secondary consideration or even unnecessary. But with strangers, you never know if you’re dealing with an outlier.

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

almost like our property codes were written for an era that is more than a century gone

squatters rights take entirely too long to kick in these days

she’s the only reason the Enterprise runs as smoothly as it does

The ship is the size of a city and it only has a day shift and a night shift, for peat’s sake!

Star Trek prefigured a lot of modern police procedurals.

Hello Computer, could you pretend this picture has more pixels? Now, extrapolate wildly off one incidental data point! Oh, could you run this through the face identifier programme? You know, the big database that 100% perfectly identifies everyone on the planet with absolutely no mistakes ever? Thanks computer!

“AI” will never shake the connotations science fiction has given it. The association is always going to skew towards positronic brains and Commander Data.

In the world of Actual Machines, “AI” is a term that should barely be tolerated in advertising departments, let alone anything remotely close to R&D