It's great that they are releasing these episodes on YouTube. But what a lot of OG fans would love even more is a proper remaster of some of the classics. Unfortunately the lukewarm response to the TNG remaster proved to media companies that such undertakings are not worth the effort. But I wonder if the advent of AI tools has made remasters more economical. I do know there is an ongoing effort by fans to remaster VOY and DS9 with the help of AI but not sure of the quality or cost.
It was never about the graphics though, at least for me. As long as the writing, the stories, the acting, and so on was stellar, I don't mind how it looks (to an extent).
That said, I found the DS9 upscaled you talked about on a torrent site now, and I'll give it a shot.
As a DS9 fan myself I felt like B5 was the better show. DS9 had greater variance throughout its run, the standout episodes were phenomenal but also lots of weak episodes & filler. If there was tighter editorial control over the episodes & at least 30% of them got cut then it could be a contender.
For me, the appeal of DS9 was that certain episodes In the Pale Moonlight etc. are a bit like a play, very self-contained even if they are in a certain setting. Babylon 5 is kind of the opposite, no plays, just parts of a long arc.
I think both have their appeal, but it's easier to timebox the enjoyment of a play. It's also easier to discuss, or think about.
I think it also leads to more interesting stories if writers are constrained by having the characters end up mostly where they started rather than being able to cheaply generate interest with one spectacular world change after the other.
I watched all of TNG, Voyager and DS9. To me DS9 will always be behind the other ST series.
I felt like it was a bit too much of the social stuff, maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel, but I guess that is exactly what people like about it. The characters and their development and so on. I liked the Garak character for example, but disliked Zisko being some chosen one for the wormhole gods or something. I much prefer Data, or Picard or most of their crew, even if they don't develop as much.
Well, to each their own, they are all good series to watch.
We recently watched all the 80's and 90's Star Trek for the first time. So it's really interesting to compare the series' from the modern perspective.
TNG is a classic, with the classic crew and after the first hiccups is some of the best scifi of all time. Absolutely great actors and amazing writing.
DS9 is the weird one. I do really enjoy the trajectory of many of its characters: Sisko, Odo, Bashir, Dax (one of my favorite characters in all ST), O'Brien, Quark, Kira, Worf, Dukat, Garak, Damar... The list of great characters in DS9 is the best part of this series. The last season was a definite letdown for me though, and I didn't like the ending at all.
Voyager was the surprising one. I expected a lesser series after reading the old discussion about the three Treks of the 90's. But wow. It's banger episodes right from the start, one of the most badass captains in all of Trek and in the fourth season arrives my favorite scifi character: Seven of Nine. There's a lot of great episodes here, and some filler. I didn't like how some characters never went anywhere. But there is more good here than mediocre. As a series I like it more than DS9, I just wished the other characters were up to the writing of Janeway, Seven and Doctor.
People just don't know how to appreciate great plots like having people travel faster than the rules of the fictional universe allow and then turn into lizards and mate.
And no, I'm not sorry for reminding anyone that this episode exists.
Oh yeah. We tried to watch Starfleet Academy but... why are they even calling it Star Trek.
Luckily Lower Decks was good, Picard had some good moments and there were a few good episodes in Strange New Worlds too, even though that series didn't really excite me anymore in its latest season.
Voyager's bad episodes are still better than most of the scifi I've watched in the recent years. They are cringe, but in a funny way.
You should try the stargate series next if you haven’t. They supplanted Star Trek in my pantheon. There are also some time travel series more recently that are also quite enjoyable; Travelers and Continuum.
Travelers definitely has a very distinct "seat-of-your-pants" form of plotting, though, that can seem inconsistent if you're used to something more consistently planned in advance like Babylon 5. Two big changes during S1 also made me bounce off it.
I won't claim my taste is universal: it's just something to be aware of.
Stargate Atlantis: Maybe better than average. On rewatch it's tended to feel bland somehow. Began with SG-1 S8 and ran concurrently with some crossovers (Atlantis premiere happens immediately after SG-1 S8 premiere and contains minor spoilers for it).
Stargate Universe: Nope. Had potential it very much did not live up to. Set years after the first two ended.
Stargate Infinity (cartoon): No way. Additionally was made before SG-1 got very far and has many incorrect guesses about how it would have developed, set decades into the future.
I'm with you there, it tends much more towards space fantasy than the other trek shows.
PS: Did you forget TOS in your lists or leave it out intentionally? IMO it focuses on doing one mostly self contained short story per episode even better than TNG.
Because clearly none of the other series focused on social stuff, except...
TOS, which featured an interracial cast (and kiss) in the 1960s, where nearly every episode was thinly-veiled commentary on communism, where they visited a literal Nazi planet, where they had a black woman as a bridge officer (in the 1960s)...
TNG, which went into deep moral arcs, looked into military tribunals, witch hunts, had entire movies about mindless bloodlust and environmentalism/colonianism, and so much more...
VOY which.....honestly, if you don't get the point by now I'm not going to spend more time listing examples.
Star Trek was BORN "woke" and has always been there, and anyone who claims otherwise was never really paying attention. Star Trek EXISTS because Gene Roddenberry put social commentary into his show "The Lieutenant" which was too controversial for the actual US Military so he had to make a new show set in the future to make all the same points but with less oversight from crusty generals.
I interpreted the GP as saying "social stuff" as in focusing on social interactions between the characters instead of having more action & adventure. "maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel" was what made me think this.
I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself, but I'd love to know what people specifically mean. I.e. "X plot line is like Y thing" in real life right now.
From the beginning, B5 is like the UN with all the pettiness included. As a political storytelling, it was magnificent. The characters were also very high level.
DS9 has some wonderful episodes and fantastic characters, but the overall plot was weak. The world building was plot driven while in B5 it is vice versa and it made all the difference for me.
I've been watching B5 over the past year or so, and I came to the episode(s) where certain characters were pushing "you don't have to follow unlawful orders" about a week after Mark Kelly et al were pushing it.
Exactly! Gene Roddenberry vision of the future is hopeful. I grew up on it and the idea that in the future people would rely on reason and express kindness. The government in B5 seemed hokey and anachronistic to me. At that time.
>I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself,
The series creator and chief writer, J. Michael Straczynski was explicit about that: The Earth Government story arc is lifted straight from the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s.
A significant amount of which we're seeing rebranded as MAGA in the US and other far-right movements elsewhere.
A good example would be the "anti-alien" frenzy in Babylon 5 as compared with the far-right's ridiculous tropes about the undocumented in the US.
There are a bunch more like Trump's obsession with personal loyalty and lack of any empathy is quite similar to Babylon 5's President Clarke.
As I mentioned, that story arc is based upon the fascist regimes of the '30s and '40s, they even have a "Neville Chamberlain"[0] analog[1] who loudly proclaims "Finally, we will at last know 'peace in our time'."
The biggest difference is that in the Babylon 5 universe, the fascist scum are much more competent than those IRL today.
There's lots more, and I'll echo the plaints of others here that Season 1 is uneven and appears meandering, but many of the plot points brought up in Season 1 end up paying off much later in the series.
I heartily recommend watching the series, not just for the parallels with some of our current circumstance, but because it's a good story with the entire five season story arc fleshed out from the beginning, with good character development and character driven story lines.
It was also the first live-action Sci-Fi series that made use of CGI for the space scenes, which was both very cool, but was also limited compared to today's SFX given that 30 second segments could take hours to render on the Unix workstations of the mid 1990s.
Is it perfect, no. But it's worth the effort to watch it IMNSHO.
There's an interview somewhere indicating they didn't come up with the Dominion until the second season, explicitly saying they put the first reference to it in a Ferengi episode to mislead and surprise viewers.
DS9 and B5 came out at roughly the same time and shared a similar concept: The (mis)adventures of the crew of a bustling space station. The divergence from there is extreme.
DS9 very quickly brought in the Defiant so that its characters could escape the station and go on more traditional Star Trek adventures. The station was home base, but the crew got out a lot. It typically felt like the station was well under control, with only minor differences between it and a star-fleet vessel. (Toss Quark and Garak out an airlock and you'd pretty much have a standard starship.)
B5 did send its characters on excursions, but they were fewer and far between. The station was not a safe home base. It was a bigger and wilder place than DS9 ever was. It always felt like some crisis or another was ready to spiral out of control and the staff generally needed all hands on deck to deal with whatever was happening. DS9 had the occasional crowd scene, but B5 had bigger crowds (in record shattering amounts of alien makeup) every episode. DS9 felt like a sleepy frontier fort. B5 felt like a city.
Then there's the continuity. There just wasn't a lot of continuity in anything other than soap operas in the mid 90's. TNG occasionally had multi-part episodes and sometimes referenced earlier episodes, but it was always careful to explain things so you could jump in anywhere and not be lost. DS9 was initially episodic, but had some larger arcs in later seasons, perhaps as a response to what B5 was doing. B5 broke the mold. The first season seemed episodic at first glance, but each episode advanced the central story-line. You could jump into Season 1 at any point and be a little confused, but figure things out. That swiftly changed. Later seasons became completely continuous, and frequently relied on bits of story that happened in earlier seasons without any kind of hand-holding. This caused big problems that probably prevented B5 from being as well received as it should have been.
This is for the young whippersnappers out there who grew up with the internet, streaming, and home video: Today, if you decide to jump into a show, you can call up every episode on demand. If it's not on a streaming service, it's on DVD or VHS. Failing that, there's always piracy. When B5 came out, it was not a given that a TV series would be released on VHS or DVD. The internet was there, but it wasn't yet up to distributing video. There was no such thing as streaming. The era of Netflix mailing you physical discs was years in the future. If you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to tune in when it was broadcast. It was, essentially, live TV.
The kicker is that most broadcasters were utterly irresponsible in how they aired shows. Episodes would frequently be pre-empted or aired out of order. Broadcasters were used to purely episodic content. Who cared if people saw episode 5 before episode 2, or missed episode 3 until it got reran the following year? This royally fubar'd people's ability to follow B5. My personal memory of B5 when it first aired was fragmentary and frustrating. I'd watch an episode and really enjoy it, try to tune in next week only for it to be pre-empted by golf, and then be lost when an episode from much later in the season was aired the week after that. It wasn't until B5 came out on DVD (years later) that I was finally able to watch the show in order and finally appreciate how special it was.
Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week. B5 blazed the trail for them before TV distribution was really ready for continuity. There are a lot of warts to overlook. CG was in its infancy back then. DS9 was still using physical models in its first few seasons. B5 looks like it came out of somebody's Amiga because it literally came out of somebody's Amiga. There probably won't ever be a quality up-scaling of the special effects because a lot of the files from that Amiga were lost. The set design is clever, but stagy. The budget of B5 doesn't even add up to half a shoestring by modern standards for a show with 10 episodes a season, and B5 had 22 episodes a season! The story is so grand and detailed that it still feels rushed at times. (They thought the show would be cancelled at the end of S4, so they crammed most of S5's plot into S4. The result is fantastically dense and frenetic!)
In the end, DS9 was a fantastic show but felt a lot like the station featured in it. It was always well under control and its creators got everything they needed to deliver a compelling show. They knew how far to reach and chose their battles wisely. B5 feels like a wild and overreaching fever dream by comparison. It nearly span out of control, much like its titular station was always threatening to. If they decided to re-make B5 today, they'd probably simplify it immensely. It's story still seems too ambitious for a single TV series to tell. If you can get past the warts, B5 is still a unique and rewarding series to experience. Nothing quite like it has come along since.
> Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week.
It actually feels more like most shows make things up along the way for each episode or at least each season, always trying to one up previous universe-shattering changes in order to give the audience their dopamine hit. While the continuity was well done in B5 it's been mostly a disaster for the industry afterwards.
Regarding architecture, I don't believe a satisfying "why" is in the cards.
Conceptually neural networks are quite simple. You can think of each neural net as a daisy chain of functions that can be efficiently tuned to fulfill some objective via backpropagation.
Their effectiveness (in the dimensions we care about) are more a consequence of the explosion of compute and data that occured in the 2010s.
In my view, every hyped architecture was what yielded the best accuracy given the compute resources available at the time. It's not a given that these architectures are the most optimal and we certainly don't always fully understand why they work. Most of the innovations in this space over the past 15 years have come from private companies that have lacked a strong research focus but are resource rich (endless compute and data capacity).
Well nothing is stopping you from attempting to predict everything with neural networks but that doesn't mean your predictions will be (1) good (2) consistently useful or (3) economical. Transformer models for example suffer from (2) and especially (3) in their current iteration.
Lobste.rs has a hard stance against AI? This can't be true. I browse the front page every so often & there seems to be a fair amount of overlap between it and HN. At least for the upvoted articles.
There isn't a hard stance against it but it's generally not well received IMO and importantly, lobsters is written by people who understand other people have different needs and they provide the option to filter out articles by tags, rather than relying on a concept of "you will see everything or you will see what the crowd deems worthy".
It is estimated that all these pirate streams combined bring in more revenue than Netflix & other established media companies[1]. Margins are of course pretty incredible as capex and opex is effectively zero since the content is "free". Such a great business that it's attracted organized crime.
But on a technical level how can a federated "shadow Netflix" operate out in the open and pull in that kind of revenue without ringing all kinds of alarm bells. They need infrastructure and obviously storing/streaming copyrighted content is against the policy of virtually every cloud provider. I also doubt these guys are bootstrapping & setting up their own datacenters. I would love a speculative analysis on how all of this works that goes in the weeds.
Sure it has been codified into a "law" but really this is just basic social skills / emotional intelligence which engineers on the spectrum struggle with.
If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do.
Casually solving a problem that required a lot of resources and personnel has big implications in the power dynamics of the org. This is like setting off a nuke. You don't just do this unless you are prepared for the blow back or can easily consolidate attention & influence in the immediate aftermath.
Take a look at OpenAI's corporate politics for an example of how this works in practice. All the key talent that defined the company has left or was forced out and will likely languish in whatever ventures they start next, all because they don't understand how humans operate & how to drive change by aligning incentives.
some people discuss these dynamics as sheep versus goats. Social stability was more precious due to scarcity, while goat behavior included 40 armed men killing their rivals with swords (and better if the rivals do not have their own swords). Many, many parallels exist in mammals that live in groups. You might be surprised at the details of how some mammals actually behave in real life!
"Look how clever we were to hire this person and put them in the right place at the right time! We are now ahead of schedule and are reallocating teams."
My rule had always been "hire people smarter than you and give them everything they need to succeed". Set a clearly defined goal, ensure understanding of the reasons behind it then provide the support the team needs to make it happen.
Ditto. And then celebrate them like crazy for every win and give them all the credit, even if you helped. Who wouldn't want to do their absolute best work in an environment like that?
doesn't even need to be "smarter than you", just realise that as a manager your job is not to build the product, it's to build the environment in which the people building the product can thrive and build the best product they are capable of.
It seems like you are suggesting it is lamentable that a group of people with the analytical intelligence to create a technology that has changed the world, don't have the social intelligence to be irrational when that is called for? Shouldn't we instead hate the game itself and lament that leaders can't behave rationally? In my more frustrated moments I wonder about a world following a disease that eliminated all neurotypical people.
Oh dear. The ad doesn’t directly reference openai at all and for those of us out of the loop on all of this we wouldn’t have read it as such. I had no idea openai were considering this.
I think Sam would have been far better off to let this lie. I’m not at all sure of the nature of the ads coming in chatgpt but by responding so personally and aggressively to what appears to be sillyness feels like they hit a bit close to home?
Yeah I just don't think the average person is going to even get what they are talking about and they may not really care about ads in exchange for free-to-use ChatGPT. Most ChatGPT users are just using it as a search and summary tool. And they were seeing ads before via Google so what difference does it make?
While the Anthropic ads might be a hit amongst nerds, it won't compel normies to use Claude over ChatGPT, and in fact, it may just be damaging to AI adoption overall as it presents bad taste examples of how corruptible it all is.
Counterpoint being that Slack, for example, for all its faults, does not have ads in its chats.
If Anthropic is positioned as "thing for professionals to do professional work" then I think you just avoid this issue entirely. Fee for service. OpenAI trying to be the thing everyone is using won't work in that model, though.
A few things. Up until now Anki was not a business and was not meant to be profitable.
AnkiWeb also does not support an unlimited amount of data. It's evident that their storage requirements aren't infinite. They aggressively cull content. Not syncing for 6 months results in automatic deletion last I checked.
I would still expect ingress and egress costs to be significant - as well as storage for content that isn't culled. And while it was not 'meant to be profitable' my point is that it was profitable, apparently exclusively from revenue from the iOS app which I still find surprising that it would cover the Ankiweb costs.
This is the correct take. It's over for Anki. Even assuming a best case scenario where the status quo remains and AnkiWeb continues to be "free", all the valuable data collected in AnkiWeb is now ripe for paywalling & potential abuse. The AnkiWeb privacy policy is likely to undergo a change quite soon - https://ankiweb.net/account/privacy
A really disappointing development all around & I hope it galvanizes the community to fully disassociate itself from AnkiHub & dae.
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