The first season of Strange New Worlds just ended on a high note, and I wanted to write a bit about it and The Orville season 3 which is on-going. No spoilers for SNW, some for The Orville.

SNW has just had the best first season of any Trek show ever. Going in I was a little apprehensive, especially as I felt that Ethan Peck as Spock didn't have the quiet confidence that Leonard Nimoy brought to the role, but here is nailed it. The other cast are excellent as well, especially Anson Mount as Pike. His portrayal of the captain is perfect. Likeable and not remote, with authority that comes from his willingness to listen and his track record.

The other modern Trek shows, Discovery and Picard, suffered from pacing issues which were in part down to their having season long story arcs. SNW is episodic, not completely devoid of on-going arcs like most of the TNG shows were (with the notable exception of DS9), but with self contained stories that were resolved satisfyingly in an hour. No galaxy-ending stakes either, which make the peril that the crew faced that much more engaging as it was the characters who stood to lose, not off-screen galactic citizenry.

SNW also nailed the prequel thing. A lot like Wrath of Khan, which was a sequel to the TOS episode Space Seed, SNW didn't rely on the viewer knowing all the canon, or on fans gushing over all he Easter eggs. Wrath of Khan is a great film even if you have never seen Star Trek before, and so is SNW. Concentrating on just telling good stories and doing its own thing is what makes it great.

The sets and effects on SNW deserve a special mention. They are fantastic, the best work on any Trek show.

Overall 10/10 for the first season. Some episodes are instant classics, easily top 5 Trek episodes ever. Memonto Mori really stands out, but there are no bad ones.

The Orville has gone through some changes in its move to Hulu, and mostly for the better. This season is more serious and a definitely improvement on previous ones. My main issue with The Orville has always been that it's too much like TNG, afraid to really take a stance on anything and mostly just recycling well worn sci-fi tropes.

This season The Orville has started to overcome that. It still suffers from being a Trek knock-off at times, both in terms of having lots of off-brand technology and dialogue, and in terms of posing interesting philosophical questions but then avoiding any controversial outcomes. TOS never shied away from controversy, in fact it would have gone a lot further if Roddenberry had had his way.

Season 3 seems to be a bit bolder. You could say it's gone woke. One episode directly condemned Republican attempts to force people seeing abortions into traumatic situations, such as seeing the foetus or holding a funeral for it. Another came out clearly in favour of the rights of children to determine their gender, even if one of their parents objects. It's still a little bit half hearted, both parents could have objected, but it was still a big improvement on the season 1 episode to which it was a sequel. In that season 1 episode the show deferred to authority in the end, refusing to have the crew take a moral stance in the face of it.

I'm hopeful that The Orville can keep improving. I love TNG but it was of its time, and The Orville would do well to move beyond it. The best episodes are the original ones that aren't just rehashes of classic Trek. Not that revisiting ideas is necessarily bad, SNW did it a couple of times but made it interesting through different outcomes, unexpected twists and by giving the characters person growth through those events rather than being mostly passive observers. The recent time-travel episode of The Orville is a good example, the plot didn't change any of the characters or have any lasting effects on them.

Looking forward to the future of both of these shows. SNW has wrapped up production on season 2 already.

ThinkSpot has failed. It's not a marketplace of ideas and it doesn't support free speech.

The central problem is that you have to pay to post. Jordan Peterson found a way to charge rent on a conservative echo chamber.

Comments are free but posting stories costs $$$. Because it's already a right wing echo chamber and 90% of the users are of that persuasion there are no progressive or liberal stories at all. None. It's just an endless stream of the Jordan Peterson show with guest appearances from Jordan Peterson wannabes with their own books to sell.

There is no meaningful debate or discussion of ideas. It's not even very accepting of non-conservative ideas, with users regularly calling for anything which doesn't follow the established narrative to be deleted or banned.

I'm sure Peterson is happy that he gets to charge these idiots to feel like they are open minded Classical Liberals.

My invite to Think Spot finally came. TS is Jordan Peterson's new "free thought" platform.

Predictably it's pretty bad. Most of the posts are what you would expect - hardcore capitalism, thinly veiled dog whistles, anti-feminism and a lot of of ads for Jordan Peterson's products or things that make him money.

The basic premise is that people can have open, unrestricted conversations. The site tries hard to make sure that doesn't happen though, e.g. by hiding replies to comments by default. In fact it truncates comments longer than a few sentences so you have to click to expand them too. There is no voting or moderation system so everything is presented in chronological order.

The ban-hammer has already been in use too. Someone registered the username "JordanPeterson" and is now banned and renamed to "TOSViolation1". Someone called "amusedtodeath" has already called for me to be banned for "trolling" when I presented an opinion contrary to their preferred narrative.

It's still in beta so maybe it will improve, but right now Think Spot is pretty terrible.

Opus is a free audio codec (RFC, BSD licenced library) for compressing speech. I've been experimenting with compressing audobooks so I can fit more on my phone. I should have splurged on the 128GB model.

For high quality audiobooks, i.e. downloaded from Google Play / Audible or ripped from CD, the results with Opus are excellent. Google uses M4A encoding at 32kHz but I found that by re-sampling to 16kHz and re-encoding with Opus at just 24kbits/sec VBR with the default settings I ended up with a file about 1/3rd the size and very nearly as good audio quality. The improvement over MP3 is even greater, down to around 1/5th the original size.

I have some older books that were ripped from tape and they needed some additional pre-processing to compress well. Noise reduction helps and you can do a fair bit with Audacity's filtering tools since voice tends not to be very dynamic compared to music.

I use fre:ac for encoding as it can go direct from m4a and do the down-sampling in one pass. You need the alpha version to get Opus codec support.

All this could have been avoided if the Pixel 4 hadn't sucked but maybe if I see a cheap Pixel 3 I can upgrade to 128 GB.

The first two episodes of season 2 of The Orville have sucked. Both boring domestic sitcom episodes.

The first season had some decent if very well worn sci-fi ideas. Let's hope it gets better.

Have a look at this comment.

In the first hour it got a flood of moderation, ending up 60% insightful/informative and 40% troll. 24 hours later Mashiki posts a rely, within a minute it's up to +1, and the linked comment gets hit with multiple -1 troll mods.

This is a very clear and unambiguous case of sock puppetry. The probability of multiple people with mod points seeing a new comment in a day old discussion, modding it up and then modding the parent down is tiny. The fact that Mashiki carefully used just one point on his own post (enough to get it above the default threshold of viewability) and the rest attacking the post suggesting he has been mislead is further proof.

Beyond the sock puppet problem, a consistent issue with Mashiki posts, the fact that this post got so many troll mods is an issue too. It's clearly not a troll. Disagreeing with you is not trolling. The mod system is failing to promote an open debate by allowing some views to be censored.

Here's a simple way to improve Slashdot moderation: Prevent people moderating the same account more than once a day, or even once a week.

That will stop of a lot of the stalking that goes on, where someone decided that they just have to spend every mod point modding all your posts down because you upset them.

Original post raising concerns about poor moderation shutting down debate on Slashdot. Modded troll, of course.

Okian Warrior replies and is within minutes at +5.

Follow up is also modded troll.

This is one of the clearest examples yet of the moderation system being abused. Unwarranted troll mods, and very obvious sock-puppet/brigading of Okian Warrior's response. The result is that Okian's theory is disproved by the same people who moderated the thread.

Slashdot used to be about debate and free discussion of issues. Unfortunately the moderation system is being abused and little action is being taken to prevent it. It seems that the Slashdot staff have to manually intervene and have little time to do so, and even when they do it is trivial to create new sock puppet accounts.

Thanks to the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) people in the EU have been getting a lot of requests to confirm their consent for storing and processing data lately. I get a lot from recruiters who have my details on their databases and need by consent to keep it.

The best part is that if you just ignore them they won't have your consent and must delete your data from their systems. It's a great way to unsubscribe from spam emails, which most of these recruiters are.

Thanks for cleaning up by inbox, EU.

Guys, we need to talk about Mashiki.

Take a look at this:

I've never said any of those things, obviously. I'm a humanist, why the hell would I support blasphemy laws?

I don't know if it's the drugs, or the 19 cups of coffee, or the long term exposure or Reddit conspiracy theorists, but Mashiki is in a bad way. Hallucinations, misdirected rage and anger... He doesn't seem to be aware of his own sock-puppets either, suggesting he may have some kind of split personality. One part Alex Jones and one part avid Infowars viewer.

It would be so easy to just show him to the padded cell and only let him read bbc.com/news until he's sane again, but I think we can do better. Care in the Community as they used to call it. We can rehabilitate him right here on Slashdot, little by little, day by day. Next time Mashiki starts imagining things, talking to people who only exist in his mind, hearing voices and reading non-existent posts, just gently remind him of the real world.

The one where powerful people don't run paedophile rings out of a pizza restaurant basement, where Amimojo is a real person and even CNN occasionally gets it right. Offer him a newspaper and politely ignore his rant about the mainstream legacy media. Buy him a decaf.

We love you Mashiki, and we are here for you when you are ready to join us in the real world. It's not that bad, really. Clinton still lost.

A couple of weeks ago something changed on Slashdot. My mod stalker disappeared, presumably their moderation privileges taken away for good. In general the relentless troll and flamebait and overrated mods stopped and for a week or two I didn't have to update my list.

This weekend the trolls came out in force again. They seem to have been triggered by the usual conservative trigger stories: James Damore lost his Labour Board complaint against Google and was slapped down pretty hard, with the legal arguments seeming to not bode well for his lawsuit. Then we had a story about FreeBSD introducing a new code of conduct, and some coverage of the latest school shooting (gun control)...

It seems like the mod trolls are weakened though, being forced to save up their mod points for when they really desperately want to control the narrative. I've come to realize that anything about Damore or other classic right wing triggers are going to be a dumpster fire, with strictly enforced views in the comments. Ironically a lot of these posts are often complaints about censorship and SJWs taking over the world.

Hopefully things will go back to normal this week, and the mod trolls haven't got around whatever the site staff did to them last time.

Take a look at this post: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11620351&cid=55949549

Is that really a troll? Now take a look at this: https://goo.gl/nH76tv

Slashdot has a trolling problem. The moderation system is broken... Maybe not enough people are meta moderating. Maybe it just needs tweaking.

I listed to an interview with CmdrTaco recently where he was talking about the early days of Slashdot. Back then they would manually ban people who moderated badly, and then later introduced metamoderation to do it. So in theory if we meta moderate hard enough it might fix it, but of course there is nothing to stop trolls meta moderating either.

As an aside, I never ever get mod points. Maybe because my karma takes a hit from all the troll mods.

Edit: This statement from an AC sums up the problem:

For some people, contradicting their preconceptions is trolling. This AC is telling me what I think, and when I disagree it's flamebait.

And sadly, this AC isn't the first to admit thinking this.

Reviewing the moderation my posts receive, I see that many of them get both insightful/interesting and troll votes. Often the positive mods outweigh the negative, but not always.

This demonstrates that the current moderation system is somewhat broken for controversial posts. People who disagree with me mod my words "troll" and "flamebait", while fairer moderators who are interested in having an informed and varied debate consider them worthy of consideration. Obviously not everything I post is gold, but this insightful/troll mod dichotomy happens every single day.

To fix this, I suggest making any +1 mod not only count for +1, but also cancel out a single -1. That way positive mods are still only worth +1, but when a post is controversial they cancel out negative mods at twice the normal rate. That will foster more open and varied debate, and prevent troll moderators with an agenda from systematically attacking views they disagree with.

Tried Fedora with KDE Plasma. Much better than GNOME... And Chrome actually opens. There is even a setting for the mouse wheel. Changed it from 3 lines to 10 lines... And Chrome ignored it. How can the mouse wheel be so broken on Linux?!

It's a damn shame because there is now a way to do proper debugging of AVR devices on Linux. The mouse wheel is the only thing holding me back.

I've installed Fedora in a VM.

Fedora is the most broken distro so far. I installed Chrome x64 and it won't even open. Just hangs and then closes. I tried Chromium too, via Software Manager, and it does the same thing.

The software manager has lots of duplicate entries. It has "Recommended Graphics Applications" twice, and "Recommended Productivity Applications" twice.

The UI, GNOME 3, is batshit. There are no window controls except close! How do you minimize a window?

I'm starting to think that Linux is hopeless on the desktop. My various Pi servers are all great, Debian via SSH, but desktop... It's just broken.