Maybe they got poached elsewhere? There was Mistral, but it got bought out by Google.

Their own older model, no less.

It would be weirder/more of note if their new model was worse.

If one Dr Crusher could operate an entire Enterprise all to herself, no reason why you can’t have a dreadnought that needs 3 people, or no people, but just set to ramming speed.

Unfortunately nothing new on that front. We’ve had geofencing for years.

Since those smaller models are technically fine-tunes of Meta/Facebook’s LLAMA, using Deepseek’s outputs, I wonder if they would be covered by the bill at all.

Doctor Who has gone downhill ever since they revealed a police box that could travel in both space and time.

I’d argue that Star Trek is much the same, they just put a veneer of grounded scientific explanation on top of it. Psychics/ESP is basically magic, being able to think your way to the edge of the universe and back is also magic, Q and their abilities are basically magic, the Megans literally just use magic, etc.

A Federation starship is basically powered by a magic crystal.

You say that, but Star Trek Earth 2025 - 2050 didn’t exactly go great, even if they managed to sort things out in the end. It took them at least a whole century to really clean up their act.

“Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”

I don’t get what they expect the priest to do about that, since they’re quoting the Bible.

Do they expect them to outright make up something about how everything is fire and brimstone?

If I remember right, it wasn’t sonic, but a psychic blast. The scream was just the usual “a telepath hits breaking point and explodes while screaming” Due to his biochemical links to the dilithium, it acted as an amplifier, and was momentarily rendered inert, which is extremely bad news when you have a bunch of stuff on the verge of constantly exploding, relying on a specific property of dilithium.

For us, it’d be like Q briefly snapping away the neutron absorption features of nuclear moderator rods. Things would go south extremely quickly, especially if no-one was expecting anything like that to happen.

It would be very funny if they had kept the trend and de-escalation, and Season 7 is just that lunch is threatened because one of the duotronic circuits in the food synthesiser computer banks broke, and people haven’t used duotronics in centuries.

I especially find that bit with the spore energy extractor in the mirror universe that could kill all life in the multiverse if not stopped jarring, because, if you have a potentially limitlessness number of alternative timelines, and the massive expanse of space, to develop that tech in, the odds that nobody else ever built one of these drops to essentially zero, except that the existence of the plot at all implies nobody else ever has.

Agreed. It’d have been perfectly fine to scale it down to have the extractor messing up the nearby mycelial network/subspace enough that the spore hub drive would become inoperable, and they’d lose the only method they had to get home.

If anything, that might be more compelling, since you could easily squeeze in a character conflict with some people wanting to leave, damn the consequences, or make preparations for a long term stay in the mirror universe if they got stuck.

In some way, its probably similar to Lazarus’ machine. He managed to build something capable of obliterating two universes. It didn’t seem that difficult, or that much more advanced than the Enterprise, you’d think someone else would have built something similar, and accidentally destroyed the universe in so doing.

I feel like one of the main issues with Discovery is also that it’s much more serialised, and more compact, to its detriment.

There wasn’t an ambiguous downtime between adventures, or for things to happen off-screen, everything happened one after the other. We didn’t have space to develop and explore the characters, basically everything was plot, which made the emotional parts feel unearned.

The characters were rarely more than the bare minimum to enable said plot.

It hugely needed downtime it didn’t really get, and could have benefited from stretching out either the seasons or the episodes out to have them be more fleshed out and normal, instead of dealing with crisis after crisis after crisis. In all of three seasons, we had about a single segment of episode where they had any memorable recreation at all.

There was never an equivalent of the “The Doctor is a good singer, Worf hates children, Spock likes chess” moments for the Discovery characters to expand into between the big plot points. They don’t really have long-term flaws, or room to grow for the most part.

Discovery also fails because that lack of competence is everywhere in the crew.

I’d actually disagree with you on discovery showing a lack of competence. If anything, besides the attitude, it felt more like the characters were too competent. They didn’t have varied, specific flaws and weaknesses that made them seem more human, instead being universally omnicompetent.

Even TNG, otherwise a shining bastion of competency, worked best when the characters had individual flaws and weaknesses that they collectively mitigated by relying on each other, rather than everyone being perfect and good at everything.

Discovery lacks that kind of deferring to better expertise, and often comes across as Burnham does everything. Except when she’s coming up with a plan that will fix everything, there was barely any consultation, or back and forth. There wasn’t really ever a “I can think of something that could help, but have no idea how to execute it, anyone know how we might pull it off?”, or “That’s not a bad thought, but if we do it this other way, it might be better”.

At the same time, it was a very TOS plot and resolution, and Discovery is based on that.

Charlie X was a child who would have blown up the entire Federation, because he was upset that people told him “no”.

Lazarus nearly detonated the entire universe, and for at least one moment, caused it to cease to exist.

Which doesn’t gel with the post-TNG Trek, which is more scientifically grounded, but “child got given godlike powers and nearly wiped out the galaxy because they were upset” fits in perfectly with TOS. It’s just missing a reset button to put everything to rights.

It shouldn’t be, but it is. 20 years ago, in the far-off year of 2005, a lot of tech companies more or less followed the same path, where it took decades for them to actually be profitable, if they were at all.

YouTube ran at a deficit for something close to 15 years. AI companies are likely following this trend, and running mostly on investment money, rather than being self-sufficient.

I don’t think he can. He’s not Scotty. Voyager tried to replicate the trick, and could only hold someone in there for a few hours.

Assuming it’s possible to copy patterns at all (maybe DS9 might know?). Barclay didn’t clone the mid-transport people. The person he grabbed would be the original. The pattern was just maintained for an unusually long time, like a natural version of what Scotty did in Relics.

Wasn’t that basically Geordi’s original plan using Hugh?

Those hormones affect fat distribution, which can make someone appear younger.

It already existed. They called it Bebo before it went Bebust.

Its also terrible for originality. Itcan create a basic template, but that is all it will be. If you want to make music for your game, and you have a specific kind of theme and instrument in mind, you’d be hard-pressed getting that right with generative AI.