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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Modern Star Trek has its ups and downs. I’m just glad there’s so much of it. Discovery can have a weird National Treasure season, and Picard can have a bumpy Covid year, but there’s probably something interesting going on in Lower Decks or Strange New Worlds. (Or vice versa.)

    I’m just happy characters like Stamets weren’t a one off experiment. It’s delightful to see queer folk continue to pop up in the main cast of other shows.








  • Between blowing up a Borg transwarp conduit, averting an Omega catastrophe, and surviving an absurd lost in deep space scenario, is there anything in the Voyager mission log that wouldn’t get chalked up to, “Well you were on your own and had to make some difficult choices.”

    Their botched alliance with the Kazon, giving holographic technology to the Hirogen, and the whole Tuvix episode would likely be footnotes during her debrief. They’d probably spend more time asking questions about meeting Amelia Earhart, proving that a graviton ellipse swallowed the Aries VI orbiter, and wanting to know more about… am I reading this correctly? A space pitcher plant?

    You have to imagine her initial encounter with the Caretaker would get the most interrogation. In hindsight would a Federation council agree with her decision to blow up the caretaker’s array, or would Starfleet captains get sent some additional footnotes to the prime directive about not stranding your crew seventy years away from home?



  • Ah yeah, the Unicode Consortium ran into an issue a while back where they realized their emoji descriptors weren’t specific enough and were leading to confusion in cross-platform conversations. Apple used to have a woman in a red dress for “Dancer”, while most Android distributions showed a man in a disco suit. They started getting more specific in their emoji definitions and in 2016 and introduced a few emoji pairs like “Woman Dancing” and “Man Dancing” to clear up the existing confusion.

    By 2019 the emoji concepts which were gendered (dancing, etc.) and non-gendered (skiing, surfing, etc.) had become pretty arbitrary. They decided to standardize offering a male, female, and generic version of every human emoji. It’s, you know, a standard, so they generally don’t make that many exceptions. Even emoji like “Santa Claus” have a female “Mrs. Claus” and a generic “Claus” options.





  • I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.

    I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.