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The elites are lying about the danger!
  • In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That's CRAZY right?...Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

    How about the Borg's willingness to join? What we've been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they've experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

    Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they've allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager's return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

    That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation's intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, "We come in peace", assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to "come in peace", casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet's virtues to the rest of their race.

  • Help needed with pull-ups
  • 8 pullups is great. To get to high rep counts you need more overall weekly volume. One thing you can do is don't think just about how many you can do in 1 session, but instead per day or week. For example, when I was specializing to get to 20 in a row, my preparation would simply be 5-6 sets of 10+ reps, but the progressive overload is that the total for the day's work started at 60, then I would add 5 reps to the total quota for the next week's working sets. That achieves the "progressive overload" requirement to stimulate growth. It is MUCH easier to add 5 reps at some point in the day than to add 5 reps right after the end of the last set. The progression is stronger if you cluster your work together, but if you can't progress in clusters, then you space it out until you can progress. Eventually around 85 reps per day, the 20 in a row became feasible. So by this point most of my sets were 14-17 reps.

    This is similar to how you progress in body building or strength training, at an advanced level you can't progress every workout, so you may add an extra work day elsewhere in the week. Or you just add an extra set to one of those days, the spacing gives you more window for progressive overload and thus progress over 2 weeks or cycles instead of every week. The growth isn't as rapid when spaced, but growth will still happen.

    Also if you aren't lean, get lean. Pullup reps scale very strongly with weight loss, so if you're packing excess bodyfat, your reps will be pretty significantly depressed.

  • Too slow at running 5k after C25K
  • 2 things to try, a day where you practice runing at higher speeds, like intervals or sprints. Also try doing a "long run" once a week where you do 1.8 to 2x your usual running distance, but at a much lower intensity.

    This helps raise your fundamental aerobic capacity so that your usual 5k pace is using a lower percentage of your capacity (which allows you to increase the pace a little).

    Besides those things just keep going and stay consistent. Just being consistent in running is a win, and improvement is going to come.

  • How do I take care of a kid that's not mine/unofficially foster a kid?
  • I'd say the first option is to simply talk to the mother and offer your help and paint it as a means of helping her out. Keeping the focus on the benefit to the mother and the benefit to the kid as secondary to keep her focused on how it would help her. Sympathize with her situation, she'll be more amenable and that's definitely the easiest way to get a constructive dialog going.

    If that fails, involving CPS is still available as a fallback option but.0

  • A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul
  • I would like to learn more about what the U.S does to compete in the propaganda space. I worry about the fundamentally reduced agility in responding to competing powers that are much more centralized.

    As far as I can tell, private industry leads American interest and since the private ownership is still spread amongst these individuals owners, there doesn't seem to be a coordinated drive to spread propaganda without a more direct linkage to profit. However in other countries with more centralized power the national power can dictate the messaging and then private companies follow suit, which allows for a much more coordinated effort.

  • Reddit undeleting comments and hiding them
  • OP is not saying that Google's scrape still retains his reddit comments. He's not referring to seeing this information on Google, but on Reddit.

    He's saying that reddit is retaining his comments and still serving those comments up when refreshed directly. They're de-linked from his reddit account so he doesn't see them through his reddit account, but the information is restored throughout the reddit site to be viewed.

  • 【#holoAdvent】WANTED!【hololive English New Unit Debut PV】
  • Really looking forward to the debuts, especially if the twins are the reincarnation that people suspect. Those girls were really hardworking successful streamers with minimal outside support, they just needed more exposure, glad their hard work has paid off with induction into holopro!

  • Reddit claiming they weren’t recovering deleted posts
  • That's pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I'm being notified about them now as "new" comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.

  • The state of Playstore
  • Hmm, may also possible that vendor/carrier versions of the app carry more ads. This would nevertheless still be an android problem because I don't think Apple allows other companies to do that with their apps.

  • The state of Playstore
  • It looks bad, but try replicating it.

    When I search two dots, I find exactly the matching app, with screenshot previews and details about it. I get only 1/4 of the screen as ad suggestions. The rest of the screen is related suggestions (non-ad suggestions). So about 3/4 is non-ads for me vs. 1/8th from the OP screenshot.

    If I search something more generic like "card battle games", I get a listing of about 7 games, with tags, and zero ads.

    I think what's shown in the OP is what remains after the user has already read the details and approved installing the app. Considering that this is the end of the user story, what else should be on that page?

    Or maybe he's got a different version of play store than me from A/B testing? Anyway, try it out yourself. I don't have a problem with too many ads on playstore, my main issue is more that the good apps go to apple store first and only sometimes port to android because apple users are more lucrative.

  • Ok but what is an actually good solution to the whole AI art debacle?
  • Hm, can you elaborate further? I don't think you've supported in your point in that you say that AI art can achieve the same subjective outcome of invoking emotion and getting a person to think, but you concluded that it's not the same.

    I feel like there's a finer point you want to make but haven't gotten across yet.

  • Vampire Survivors meets Diablo in Halls Of Torment
  • Yeah I have that too! 20 minutes to dawn leans much harder into the bullethell genre and less about the skinnerbox progression aspect of vampire survivors. It's much more challenging with fewer ways to make successive runs easier. I should get back into that one since a lot of updates were probably made. Back then it felt like the starting pistol and character as stronger than all the unlocked weapons and characters.

  • Vampire Survivors meets Diablo in Halls Of Torment
  • I have been absolutely hooked on this game. I loved Vampire survivors and Holocure and this was a great blend of those games with a diablo aesthetic.

    The part that makes it so good is the sharply tuned enemy design to feed you levels steadily with interesting enemy movement patterns to dodge. Well done! Has such a good balance of challenge and progression.

  • What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?
  • Yeah, the simplistic "Just be yourself" advice doesn't take into account the "If you don't love me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" type of attitude.

    It also bypasses the fact that "yourself" is such a fuzzy concept anyway. So because I'm bad at public speaking, that shouldn't mean I should "be myself" and avoid it. I should merely be aware of my current limitations. That was an accurate way to describe myself in the past, but instead of accepting it, I worked on it, forced myself into a job that requires it, and now I'm pretty good at it.

    I think almost everyone can look back 10 years ago and think of some way they ended up changing. So with that being the case, who knows who we'll be 10 years into the future? No need to anchor too hard on who we think we are right now, it's valuable to also give consideration to the kind of person we want to be in the future and take action towards becoming that person.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)YU
    yumcake @lemmy.world
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