Given the level of totally bonkers I feel tempted to suggest that it's a hit piece indirectly commissioned by palantir themselves so that they can for once appear as the good guys in a news story
Not knowing the established history of some characters can actually be nice I think. The difference between a blank slate with conveniently made up background and a background that has already been told, in quite some detail, that difference tends to be very noticeable. No matter how "complex" the background made up on the spot is.
When the background has been told elsewhere, it's a legitimate challenge to the unprepared viewer's mind. But when it's made up on the spot, it's an arbitrary riddle. I know some viewers love that kind of stuff (e.g. everybody who made it through Lost I guess?), but to me that just feels annoying. If you want me to apply myself to the riddle, make it part of the story (like in a whodunnit), or don't keep me guessing.
But when it's organically grown background complexity from another story, I'm perfectly fine with it. Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck: he just pops up later with atomics, the "how" is not part of the movie adaptation. And neither is speculating about it. It's just an obvious indication that yes, there's more happening in this universe than the part squeezed into anamorphic cinemascope.
That being said, yes, watching TNG after DS9 wouldn't work well at all. It's hard enough watching early episodes after late episodes, because even the "adventure of the week" episodes have been told very differently later, but the universe is too much the same to really disconnect.
Starfleet's relationship with the Cardassians was established in TNG, and I think that DS9 failed to reiterate that properly in the first season.
Then you have Obrian's history with the Cardassians - quite significant for his new assignment and without this context the character feels like a fake tough guy. The acting and directing was brilliant, because we could feel the restrain, but without understanding this it comes off cocky. It's like watching Travolta's character dance poorly in Pulp Fiction - if you didn't know who Travolta was, the scene comes off poorly acted. Or Robin Williams playing a gay man playing straight. Some background of the character is important to actually enjoy the acting mastery that we are witnessing.
How dare Europe force card companies to distribute the cost of being poor on all customers. Cashback is effectively a special fee levied exclusively on those who don't qualify.
I was told the other day that the people most likely to choose to avoid the extra 2.5% fees are the wealthier.
In New Zealand, most low margin business (like cafes) ask you to accept an ~2.5% transaction fee (if you use a credit card or paywave). You can avoid the fee by using a debit card with a chip.
I'm unsure what choice the poorer make. If you're actually low income, maybe you don't go to cafes.
I did notice that a thrift store didn't charge the extra 2.5%: so perhaps poorer people have more pressure to use cards with fees?
Amex is noted for its high fees - so perhaps it is a bathtub where only the middleclass care.
When you have to care for money, visibility doing so feels like exposing weakness. But when you care for the little amounts while it's clear that this is unrelated to need, it turns into showing off a quality.
You must frequent a very interesting subset of German web shops then. Yes, some do offer bank transfer (many don't because latency is just so terrible), but I've never seen credit card not on the list. Perhaps with the exception of credit card available only through some intermediary like PayPal (which I tend to prefer over direct credit card, I don't really like spreading my CC details to servers of questionable maintenance state than strictly necessary)
It is quite recent though, but the webshops do all accept credit cards, most of them even use stripe for payments.
Now, of course our corner shop appliance store still only accepts cash. It was fun to pick up cash from multiple ATMs and pay 1500€ with a pile of 20€ bills a few months ago.
Not sure what exactly you're referring to, but legal is a very interesting field to observe, right? I've been wondering about that since quite early in my LLM awareness:
A slightly sarcastic (or perhaps not so slightly..) mental model of legal conflict resolution is that much of it boils down to throwing lots of content at the opposing side, claiming that it shows that the represented side is right and creating a task for the opposite side to find a flaw in that material. I believe that this game of quantity fits through the whole range from "I'll have my lawyer repeat my argument in a letter featuring their letter head" all the way to paper-tsunamis like the Google-Oracle trial.
Now give both sides access to LLM... I wonder if the legal profession will eventually settle on some format of in-person offline resolution with strict limits to recess and/or limits to word count for both documents and notes, because otherwise conflicts fail to get settled in anyone's lifetime (or won by whoever does not run out of tokens first - come thinking of it, the technogarchs would love this, so I guess this is exactly what will happen barring a revolution)
Karma per word would be a terrible metric though: the short, slightly divisive clever quip tends to still net a few points positive as long as it's not all too negative, despite clearly not being great hn content. Great content isn't short, but the vote button is or of sight once you're done reading. Good long texts will certainly still get some upvotes, but rarely enough to outcompete small & clever that just goes with the flow.
The irony is that karma posts are so easy. Take something most of your audience already agrees with, triple down on some reductionist caricature of it, and smother it in pithy glibness. The shorter the better. Particularly effective if you set up a false dichotomy vis-a-vis the person you're replying to. It's a reflexive style of engagement for many, and HN is not immune to it.
I aim to avoid it these days, with varying degrees of success. I don't need fictitious internet points, I want to hear other people's genuine thoughts on a subject of interest. Or sometimes just to share something I thought was neat.
But since all social media are Pavlovian conditioning for points, you rarely get any fruitful exchange. And it seems to be getting rarer and rarer, sadly.
I wonder how one would structure social media to avoid it. HN is good, but the karma system is a double edged sword. Would it increase the quality of the discussion to retain the use of points for ranking posts, but hide point counts completely? Perhaps they could be represented by words: "Positive response", "negative response", but only past -3 and +3, with no changes in wording beyond that score?
Wrt my own posts I like the karma system as feedback for how well I'm getting my point across. Helps to understand what communication style resonates with people. I'd say the biggest flaw is not that it rewards snarky popular opinions, but that it overly rewards first movers on a topic.
I do think that pithy is good. The real world also rewards people who can convey an idea succinctly. ("Healthcare for all" for example is an effective rallying cry despite lack of implementation details.)
If it were an effective rallying cry, it would have worked at any point in the last forty years.
Politics is not assessed in terms of how the slogans sound, but what they achieve. Universal healthcare is further away today than it was in the '90s, and Democrats are less 'rallied' than ever.
Plenty of space still, but we're running into other scaling issues now - power grids are at their limits. And on sunny days there's a lot more supply than demand, but that can be mitigated by adding more (battery) storage.
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