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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

    The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:

    spoiler

    The entire ECH subroutine was created as the result of The Doctor’s daydreaming, so the visualisation of a rank appearing out of thin air makes sense in that context.

    The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.


  • There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:

    spoiler

    Moriarty was reactivated by mistake, and took the ship hostage, demanding to be able to leave the holodeck.

    Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:

    spoiler

    Their transporter turned out to be a holographic fake (and so was Geordi), so who knows if the results were valid.



  • Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

    If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.


  • I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

    To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

    Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.






  • Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).

    On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.

    I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.

    I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.



  • Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.

    A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.