That’s not true. The Hoover Dam contributes to Vegas’s power supply, but it’s nowhere near “almost entirely powered” by the dam, except in Fallout: New Vegas.

Couldn’t you just add a comment that says that if the variable is false, then the person is sitting?

Or if the programming language supports it, you could add a getter called is_person_sitting that returns !is_person_standing.

I thought that until just now.

Fair. I didn’t understand what OP was getting at, so I took them literally. It seemed strange to ignore that white people in the early 20th loved depictions of smiling black people in servant roles.

As for ads targeted at black consumers… now I’m curious. I know there were newspapers targeted at black readers. I wonder if they had ads.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cream_of_Wheat#/media/File%3ACream_of_Wheat_Breakfast_Bell_1918_advertisement.jpg ?

As an American, I didn’t get it either.

It was a breath of fresh air after the disappointment of Discovery and proof that there are people who still believe in Star Trek’s optimistic vision of the future. I think for that reason I and many other fans gave it a pass for a lot of it’s flaws.

My biggest problem is that I feel the social commentary is rather poorly done. I’ve gotten into some nasty fights on reddit for saying so.

I’ll start by saying what I think it does well. It’s good at humanizing people who live in an oppressive society and portraying their point of view.

But the ideas it discusses aren’t especially original or insightful. The world building doesn’t exist to support them. The Moclans might be a fine allegory for trans and intersex issues, but they only work as an allegory and make no sense at face value. And they’re portrayed inconsistently to allow whatever kind of episodes the writers want.

I feel like one issue is that McFarlane does not share the ideals of Star Trek. I don’t get the impression that he sees the value of non-interference, for example. But nevertheless, the Union believes in it because the Federation does. Politically, he’s a more conventional thinker than the classic Star Trek writers.

I definitely agree about the messaging. The Orville’s idea of social commentary is: here’s some aliens that built their society around a thing we don’t like for no reason, they’re total dicks for no reason, therefore the thing is bad.

The Moclan gender issue has been praised as an allegory for trans and intersex issues. But my problem with it is it ONLY works as an allegory. Their society makes no sense at all taken at face value, and has been portrayed inconsistently depending on what point the writers want to make. Why would a naturally hermaphroditic species adopt the human concepts of “male” and “female” in the first place?

I do like the show. It’s entertaining, and a sincere attempt to recreate what worked about Star Trek in a way that Disc and Picard weren’t. But the social commentary is just not well done. The Orville writers aren’t visionaries or philosophers on the same level as the classic Trek writers.

I apologize for misunderstanding you.

I guess it would help if we clarified what ethical issues specifically are we talking about? If you tell me what scenario you are concerned with trying to prevent, I will gladly share my thoughts on it.

You say that as if the ethical concerns of AI kept tightly under control by a single organization aren’t infinitely greater. That is no solution at all to any ethical concerns arising from AI.

Competition and open source is how we navigate it. Ensuring that the power is shared, not monopolized by the few.

The conversation was about ChatGPT and not about AGI.

ChatGPT is not AGI.

Really? I actually found it’s gotten less restrictive recently. Maybe it’s just because now I’ve learned to control the context so it doesn’t perceive a request as offensive.

Well, I’ll be the second. Like all tools, generative AI is going to be used for good and evil purposes. Frankly, I’m not comfortable with a large corporation deciding what is and isn’t ethical for all of humanity. Ideally, it would do what the user asked it for, like all other tools, and society would work to control the bad actors, not OpenAI. Any AI doomsday scenario you can picture gets worst when one party has complete control over the AI technology.

I think it’s important that we support unrestricted open source AI, just as it’s important we support federated social media like lemmy.

Matrix? That’s the open source and federated equivalent to discord. And it’s end-to-end encrypted.

If only that was still true. Internet users used to be a niche counter-culture. Now they’re just normal people.

There’s one aspect of it that I didn’t expect, and that’s its exclusivity. Seems like this is a small, but vibrant, community of geeks, just like the whole internet was in the 90s and 2000s.

I’m not 100% sure it’ll be able to replace reddit in the area of getting advice on niche topics, but I do believe I’ll enjoy being here.