It's a hard comparison. They are both very good, in wildly different ways.
B5 is much more character driven and more of a slow burn that sets up a big payoff in the later seasons that has permanent world-changing impact. It was really ahead of its time, closer to something like Game of Thrones than anything else at the time.
TNG feels more static, even the "big events" don't really change the world all that much in the next episode, except Tasha Yar being written out of the show in season 1 causing Worf's head to shrink in season 2 or something I guess. It's a mystery-of-the-week show, you know what you're gonna get and you know it's good. No complaints, but also nothing mind blowing.
Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.
> Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
Because of the power of lobbyists and their war chests full of cash, even if we made that circle surrounding our congress critter so everyone was pointing at them, we'd still have no effect. Our shame circle would only be uncomfortable for a short time which would quickly be assuaged by the soothing feeling of another large donation from a lobbyist.
Immigration policy is rather a consequence of a demographic pyramid[1] that isn't really looking much like a pyramid anymore. Socialized health care and pensions is really dependent on able-bodied working-age people outnumbering the old and infirm by a pretty large margin.
Lax immigration policies were thought a solution to that, though I think almost anyone would agree (non the least the immigrants themselves) that the implementation of this solution was bungled fairly spectacularly.
Regardless of the merits of immigration as a solution, the nordics are very much, along many other western countries, kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place with regards to the demographic distribution.
Meanwhile, having children is more difficult than ever. Preschools are asking parents for their attested work schedules, just so they don't sneak an hour of leeway between work and picking up kids... What a bait and switch that was, fool everyone that society will provide, nobody has to stay at home, then inch by inch, little by little, take those things away. Let the rich have their tax breaks though, lest they leave for another social democratic paradise.
Sorry, it's tough seeing this play out in real time.
It think anyone with any experience of it will agree that Swedish bureaucracy and policy making is, generously put, as misguided as it is bumbling, but whatever the cause of the declining birth rates is, any explanatory model also needs to account for why it is also happening in South Korea and Japan, along with the nordics and a bunch of other places.
I doubt young adults in in Seoul are skipping kids because of Swedish preschool policies.
I think an additional big part of why LLM-aided coding is so draining is that it has you constantly refreshing your mental model of the code.
Making sense of new or significantly changed code is very taxing. Writing new code is less taxing as you're incrementally updating the model as you go, at a pretty modest pace.
LLMs can produce code at a much higher rate than humans can make sense of it, and assisted coding introduces something akin to cache thrashing, where you constantly need to build mental models of the system to keep up with the changes.
Your bandwidth for comprehending code is as limited as it always was, and taxing this ability to its limits is pretty unpleasant, and in my experience, comes at a cost of other mental capabilities.
It rings true. Then we have a question in front of use - when you're doing the changes yourself you are also building and adapting the mental model of the system - which approach needs less effort in total?
You can still have fun programming. Just sit down and write some code. Ain't nobody holding a gun to your head forcing you to use AI in your projects.
And the part of programming that wasn't your projects, whether back in the days of TPS reports and test coverage meetings, or in the age of generative AI, that bit was always kinda soul draining.
There may be a risk of running into thermal throttling in such a use-case, as laptops are really not designed for sustained loads of any variety. Some deal with it better than others, but few deal with it well.
Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.
Don't underestimate just how much money you can make off funneling visitors to ads at scale. It's basically Google's entire business model.
If OpenAI plays their cards right, they can definitely end up in a similar position. Yeah a lot of programmers would probably pony up for Claude, but every lazy high schooler in the world would gladly hear about Raid: Shadow Legends to have ChatGPT do their homework for them.
Don't get me wrong it's definitely sucks, but man is it ever a profitable way to suck.
This assumes that ads at google's or facebook's level would get them anywhere close to profitability. OpenAI's costs of doing business are only accelerating, all while burn rate continues to get worse. I have no doubt that selling ads will bring in a lot of revenue, but it'll be dwarfed by the numbers OpenAI needs to stop hemorrhaging cash every quarter. The great irony is that the more success OpenAI has in gaining users, the more money they lose at an ever-increasing rate. Lose on every sale, and make up for it in volume!
Feels like there's a number of these trend shifts that are hard to explain, that make a fantastic canvas for projecting world views onto. The school performance dip is one, global decline in birth rates another.
You see it explained as the result of everything. Be it microplastics, mobile phones, immigrants, long covid, climate change (, stress about), social media, AI, glyphosate, 5G, the elders of zion, the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, something to do with late stage capitalism... everyone seems to have their personal landscape of theories as to why this is happening.
You can probably ask someone to enumerate what they think causes this dip, and use it as a pretty reliable embedding for their entire political worldview.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_trim_our_hair_in_accor...
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