Noooo Strange New Worlds was the best thing that ever happened to trek

The current season has been rather divisive, to say the least. I mean some of these episodes currently have IMDB ratings in the mid 4's to mid 5's range out of 10: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12327578/episodes/?season=4

Personally I didn't hate the gimmick episodes, but enjoying them sort of requires no longer taking the show seriously at all.

The gimmicky episodes were highly entertaining to my decidedly non-Trekkie wife. She loved the Star Trek Muppet episode ("Star Trek in Spaaaaaace") and the soap-opera episode.

As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.

re: taking it seriously, I meant more in terms of whether it is "good art" vs disposable entertainment. On the whole, I felt that TNG and DS9 both eventually found the right balance of drama and humor, often with an intelligent underlying message about aspects of our society and culture. The modern Star Trek shows are sorely lacking in that area!

Eh, I mean TNG, which is probably the best-regarded series, had its fair share of duds, and not just in the not-very-good first season. In particular, I am thinking of the episode where Data's cat turned into a lizard.

> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.

The difference is the sheer number of gimmick episodes: so far half the episodes this season fall into that category. Did you actually watch that puppet episode you're quoting? Gimmick aside, it had one of the dumbest endings of any Star Trek episode I can think of.

Nope; haven’t seen any of this series. The streaming situation for it, at least in this country, is a bit of a mess. But it sounds from the description like a do-over of the cat lizard episode, more or less.

Lower Decks is so good too.

My main agentic coding side project is something that I can't justify paying the apple developer license for. If I was an Android person or I didn't have to pay the developer license, maybe I'd just go for it.

Android got wirse than Apple. It costs 25 dollar now to get ID verified (mandatory) and before you can publish in the Ply store you need 12 betatester that install the app from a special link - those testers must keep the app installed 14days. Only then will you become visible publicly in the play store.

So you end up paying people on Fiverr to do it which costs more than 99€

This kind of thing came up from time to time in the years before LLMs too. Agents would start with something based on English and optimize it until it became unintelligible to researchers. That was often something the researchers would shut down because they needed to be able to understand the comms.

Would love to know what he thinks nowadays

I think I do agree with the central point but a point of order is that if you tell AI to fix the bug and then tell it to fix the next error you might still be building an important skill: learning how to make the AI get good results.

That kinda presumes you get good results.

All you're sure to get is a bigger bill for tokens.

It also assumes the people will somehow develop the skill to verify whether the LLM-result is "good".

That's not guaranteed to happen and it's not a new problem, since it happens when managers are unable to detect problems in the team's product or output.

My unsupervised agentic setup has built something that I wanted for decades but never built, so I guess that’s an increase in capabilities.

I’m curious, what was the application of AI that helped the family?

Most of my family are small business owners, so I've done a handful of Excel automations that they needed that generally take me a while to figure out. Landing pages and a few 3D designed prototypes that I used the Fusion 360 MCP server for

This is exactly my experience. A month of excitement building something that I wouldn’t have had time to do myself, then something broke in the setup and my motivation didn’t extend to fixing it.

I’m only back at it four months later and I don’t really know what happened before, or why it’s working now, I’m just happy that I can scratch that itch again.

That’s a measure of lines of code, I suspect the parent is talking about what results those LOC create.

AI built me a 1.5k+ LOC react component which is probably a 15x increase on the file size I would have created, with negative impact on the project for those extra LOC.

I think that people probably tried to tell me about the amazing stuff, but I couldn't take it in. This created a very pleasant surprise for me when I found out about the good feels after the dread of just expecting everything I know to be upended with no reward.