Turning off the targeted ads settings indeed prevents Google from showing you overtly targeted ads. It makes no claim that it prevents Google from harvesting the same data that is used to target ads

I watched every episode, all the seasons. It does get better over time, and the last season is the best of them (imo). I feel like they started to actually figure themselves out by the last season, but I’d still say it was okay, not “good”. I think I would have liked a sixth season to see if it would have become “good”.

If we think of Discovery as a drama show that’s about people’s relationships that happens to be set in a sci-fi universe, I guess it’s an okay show. It’s just not what Trek or sci-fi fans want: sci-fi. Was it a good choice to make that kind of show? Well, you know, I wouldn’t necessarily say “no”, but I don’t think it should have been “Star Trek”. You can have drama shows in space, just call it something else. Trek as a franchise has a certain level of expectation, and disappointment exists in the gap between expectation and reality.

I watched all of Discovery. It is, by far, the worst of all Star Treks. (Disclosure: I have not seen TAS.)

The reason is simple: Discovery is really the Michael Burnham show. She is the Mariest Sue who ever Mary Sued. Discovery could have been a really great show if it had been an ensemble show because it has a lot of very interesting characters whom we never explore.

Instead, everything centres around Burnham. She is the reason for the war at the start of the show. She is the magical, fated solution. She is Spock’s (adopted) sister and had immeasurable impact on his life. Even through timey-wimey things, her (biological) mother comes to save her and the universe.

And on top of all that is the crying. Oh, gosh, everything is so emotional on this show. There is a time and place for emotions, but Discovery was too much of it, including inappropriate times. Burnham and her maybe-broken-up-boyfriend stop in the middle of an infiltration in a hostile station to talk about their relationship.

Even the really great characters, Saru and (Emperor Georgiou) centre around Burnham. She is like a sister to Saru, she saved his life, he gives up being a Captain to continue serving under her captaincy. Burnham is Georgiou’s daughter (not actually), and Georgiou’s love for her (as much as she can love) changes her.

No one has a story unless its actually about Burnham. Or they get a story and then get killed off.

The best thing about Discovery is it brought Trek back on TV and it gave us the rest of this era of shows.

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he’s in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he’s doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

Truly, without sarcasm, I invite you to read the gospels and actually get to now about Jesus. The shortest is Mark and can be read through in one evening.

The story progression was predictable and the pacing was not the best. Still, I appreciated the focus on Ortegas and Navia’s acting. In this interview she alludes to not being able to dance when others are; I presume she’s talking about the death of her partner late 2021 (which was after the worst of covid restrictions, but not so long after them). When it came to the rescue scene and La’an killed the Gorn, Ortegas’ only friend in a lonely time and place, it made me sad to think Navia was probably going back to that loss.

But this episode was really made to retcon people not knowing the Gorn in TOS. The writers needed to make up a reason for people to forget a species they’ve now encountered several times, including medical breakthroughs (Batel). Still, more Ortegas, please. And still more range, please.

Since La’an doesn’t make it to TOS, my guess is she dies by the end of the show and the pain of losing her drives Spock to push his humanity aside. I was expecting that to happen with the Chapel break-up, but then they brought La’an into things, so I transferred the theory onto her instead 😂

Forgive me for saying this, but the final Kelpian design looks much, um, tastier than the original one. I can’t imagine Terrans looking at a green and brown multi-eyed triangular headed alien and think “delicacy”.

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

We barely rejected the right wing nuts, and they could easily take the next election. While relief is warranted, we should not be smug or complacent about it, either. Lies more faster than the truth, it’s still an uphill battle for morality and decency.

Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

So credit card issuers are bad now?

There’s too much to keep track of these days.

Bloodletting is therapeutic… for some very specific conditions. For example, hemochromatosis, where the body has too much iron, and there has been some preliminary study that blood donations are a way to reduce the amount of PFAS in blood.

But everyone has PFAS in their blood; not every male has (beyond normal) phimosis.

As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

DEI can still be achieved without using that terminology directly.

I agree that not longer having a policy or metrics around diversity doesn’t mean that the people in a company won’t still value it. I’m a part-time student and the school’s director recently did an AMA. He said an upcoming event was renamed to avoid the threats that are being directed at “DEI”, but the event itself is still about cultural diversity. I forget what the new name was, something about the stories of our people or something like that.

The best use, for me, is asking ChatGPT to give me five (or however many) scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on a topic. Then I search for said articles by title and author name on my school library database.

It saves me so much time compared to doing a keyword search on said same database and reading a ton of abstracts to find a few articles. I can get to actually reading them and working on my assignment way faster.

AI is a great tool for people who use it properly.

I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.