i hate that smooth-rectangle has become the standard

stop it with the extra cameras and the beveled edges, i'd give up half my screen space for some real goddamn buttons

i feel like the answer to what is and isn't canon can be summed up with;

Why do the klingons look different?

They always looked like that, you just didn't notice before.

Canon has always been squishy. The Eugenics Wars takes place in the nineteen-nineties... oh but didn't Voyager's crew visit our nineties? Plus, DISCO had that Elon Musk name drop.

...so the timeline floats up as the present day does. Canon is just a vague sense of the things everyone agrees on.

I like to think by the time Kirk gets the enterprise, all those spacious crew quarters we see in Strange New Worlds have been eaten up by retrofits and upgrades.

The trouble with phrases like 'neural structures' and 'language parsing' is that these descriptions still play into the "AI" narrative that's been used to oversell large language models.

Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn't language parsing, it's still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they're eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I'd rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough...

It's stripping out the copper wiring for cash. Buy a game studio, fire all the employees. Now their paychecks can be served up as profit to shareholders. Move all the files to your servers, it's your "Intellectual Property". Sell off the computers and the desks and anything else not nailed down. Do they own the building? Great, sell that too! Or, better yet, rent it out!

now now, let's be fair

it's also so that evangelicals can ban recreational sex

work customer service long enough and being intolerable starts to be appealing

Squidward is churlish and often over-reacts when his personal time is intruded upon. Maybe his neighbors don't recognize when they're being intrusive, but they do value Squidward's company. It took drastic conditions for him to realize he values their company as well.

the nice thing about drawings is that you can make them say whatever you like

with real people, there's all this inconvenient stuff. Like, for example, what they are actually doing and saying.

Micky Mouse entering public domain is historical benchmark. Cool, but also... that mouse is hollow. Good for a cheap horror game or thumbing your nose at the big theater conglomerate, but otherwise meh

Donald Duck going public domain will be a real treat

Star Trek prefigured a lot of modern police procedurals.

Hello Computer, could you pretend this picture has more pixels? Now, extrapolate wildly off one incidental data point! Oh, could you run this through the face identifier programme? You know, the big database that 100% perfectly identifies everyone on the planet with absolutely no mistakes ever? Thanks computer!