This is a stack of bad moves in one sentence. “ZERO chance” is absolutism masquerading as insight. “Today’s culture” is a vague, all-purpose boogeyman with no defined meaning. “Deconstructed” is doing culture-war labor here, not analytical labor. It is a loaded buzzword meant to trigger a mood, not convey a testable claim. In plain English: this is an appeal to panic, wrapped in a sweeping generalization, with the evidence conveniently left out of frame.

That is not an argument. "Sanity” here is just a disguised value judgment: made according to your ideological preferences. You are trying to smuggle your taste in through the side door and present it as common sense. That is called "poisoning the well", and it is a favorite tactic of people who are trying to ride the anti-woke bandwagon.

And so an AC helpfully tries to upgrade your unsupported claim into a civilizational diagnosis. The fallacies here are almost gift-wrapped: hasty generalization, appeal to common knowledge, and unsupported claim to universiality. “Our society does this with everything” is the kind of sentence people write when they want the grandeur of cultural analysis without the burden of naming three examples that survive contact with reality. This is the rhetoric of the echo chamber—it aims for the grandeur of cultural analysis without the heavy lifting of actual data.

And there it is: the coward’s escape hatch. Refusing to provide examples because they are “plain as day” is not confidence, it is evasion. We have a name for this -- argument by insinuation. People who deploy it want their false conclusions to feel self-evident so they don’t have to do the work of proving it. Conveniently, that also makes the claim immune to scrutiny, because any request for evidence can be dismissed as blindness. Again, this what you see at any anti-DEI, anti-woke rally. It only works if your audience is already on board that particular crazy train.

And this is your cleanest self-own in the thread. No, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That is how claims work. You do not get to declare modern television garbage, provide no evidence, and then act as if skeptics must disprove your ridiculous claim. That is not Russell’s teapot, by the way. If you are going to use it in a post, your really need to understand what it actually is saying. Russell’s teapot says the person asserting the invisible teapot bears the burden, not the person declining to genuflect before it. I know you don't want to believe this of yourself, but you are not invoking Russell’s teapot here. You are faceplanting into its exact opposite.

Also no. “Self-evident” is not a substitute for evidence. It is what people say when they are trying to upgrade a vibe into a fact. If the evidence were actually self-evident, you would name it. This tells us everything we need to know about you and your intellectual integrity.

This is the only intellectually honest move in the chain. It asks for definition, scope, and evidence. That is exactly why your culture-war script short-circuits here. Once somebody asks for receipts, you spin into a symphony of fallacies and rhetorical errors.

“I have consumed media, therefore my sweeping thesis stands” is not reasoning. It is just anecdote cosplaying as a conclusion. Which series, specifically? If the evidence is plain as day then naming the garbage should be the easiest part of your argument. Without it, you're just gesturing at a cloud.

What you are doing here is not criticism. It is culture-war fortune telling. You make an absolute claim, refuses to define terms, decline to give examples, then try to reverse the burden of proof when challenged. That is not skepticism. That is ideological freeloading. This whole chain is a nice little museum of bad argument: loaded language, hasty generalization, appeal to vaguely defined terms, refusal to provide examples, and burden-shifting dressed up as common sense. The only thing missing is a PowerPoint deck titled “trust me, bro” that you got at some Turning Point USA rally. Your posts are textbook examples of 'Argument by Vibe'—a collection of loaded language and burden-shifting that collapses the moment someone asks for a single concrete example.

A lot of people in this thread seem stuck on "yay, Firefly, boo cartoon, no AI thank you" as if animation and AI are automatically some kind of downgrade. I think that gets this exactly backwards.

Fillion has to thread a bunch of needles to make this project work. The timeline placement is not just a continuity dodge. It is also the one place where the project can still use Wash without crashing headlong into the fanbase's cognitive dissonance from the Serenity film, but it also slams into a different problem, the actor existence failure problem, where an important character outlives his canon actor. Live action does not solve either of those problems, without creating even more cognitive dissonance. Live action just adds budget pain, aging actors, and the awkward spectacle of trying to pretend twenty-plus years have not passed. Don't misconstrue me, here, I am not saying it can't be done -- ST:SNW is pretty much walking that exact line right now, and doing it superbly, though I think it was a very lucky accident, not Paramount's tactical genius.

But Fillion's company does not have the deep, deep coffers that Paramount does. He needs something that pleases existing fans, doesn’t scare off new ones, can actually be financed, and allows him to address the death of a key actor in a way that doesn't alienate the fanbase. He knows what he's up against -- a franchise still haunted by a film that put not one, but two bullets into the existing fandom’s emotional center of mass. I'm fairly certain Whedon wanted Serenity to kill off any idea of a reboot. This is not going to be easy. Fillion has his work cut out for him.

And yes, that brings us straight to the AI minefield. Under current California law (AB 1836), which Fillion's company Collision33 and their partner Disney must abide by, the Ron Glass estate has total veto power and financial claim over his vocal likeness. I am not seeing the AI-fucks-actors moral apocalypse here. If his family chooses to treat AI as a digital legacy tool and are guaranteed compensation, what is the problem?

We’re talking about a high-fidelity preservation of a performance style, not a replacement of the performer. It’s less deepfake, and more digital restoration of a voice we already lost. If it worked for James Earl Jones and Darth Vader, why can't it work for Ron Glass and Book?

I know this is not a universally shared view, especially on Slashdot, where reports of the use of AI in *any* project is an open invite to anti-AI drive-by trolls, but the idea that AI-assisted recreation of an actor's recorded voice is somehow a disqualifying sin strikes me as backwards. Ron Glass did not take his talent with him to the grave. Glass' talent is still with us, preserved in recordings, from Barney Miller to Firefly. We still cherish it precisely because it was captured. If his family signed off, the estate was compensated, and the use was clearly disclosed, I would not see an AI-assisted vocal reconstruction as "fake." I would see it as one more tool for preserving a performance tradition that the medium itself made possible.

Hollywood -- writers, studios, actors, fans, everybody in this ecosystem -- is going to have to come to terms with this whether it likes it or not. AI is not just a productivity gimmick or a cost-cutting toy. Used well, it can also be a preservation tool. The blanket claim that AI recreation of a deceased actor is inherently disrespectful makes about as much sense to me as saying film restoration is disrespectful because the original negatives aged.

Fwiw, I still think the safe-pocket-in-the-timeline move is doing a lot of the creative heavy lifting here, but I do love the fuck-you-Fox signal that the Athenia pilot is sending -- it actually respects the episode order that Whedon intended for the series that Fox ignored because they wanted more humor and action in the opener to reduce the risk of scaring off their target demographic. I'm not out on a limb, here -- it was that target demographic's lack of sophistication, and Fox's very lucrative history of pandering to it, that doomed Firefly's run. And yes, I still think invoking Whedon's blessing for this project is tactically clumsy; baggage added to a pitch that already has enough risk baked in. But it's Fillion's call, and I'll back him, because I'd like to see the series rebooted, and he's the guy in a position that could make it happen.

I am fairly certain that Fillion's choice to use animation, and to honor Ron Glass's voice by recreating it (either by a voice actor or by AI) do not justify the anti-animation, anti-AI drive-by trolling permeating this thread. AI and animation are part of the solution set Fillion is trying to find to get this Firefly project out of his head and into our lives again. If AI can help preserve the presence of a performer people loved, with consent and transparency, then treating that as some kind of moral apocalypse seems bonkers to me. At the end of the day, for a Firefly reboot, animation and AI isn't just a budget call -- it’s a recovery project. It’s the original cast taking back the controls from the executives who steered them into a ditch two decades ago. If AI and ShadowMachine -- an animation studio with multiple awards, including an Oscar -- are the tools Fillion needs to get Firefly going again, I'm all for it.

Sorry to burst your bubble man, but we are way beyond the "wouldn't it be cool if Trigger did it?" stage. Honestly, I was hoping Fillion had lined up Pixar. In reality, Fillion has already got a studio, and they've already produced concept art, and it looks pretty good. Not cartoonish at all, so your anime dreams are dead on arrival. The studio is Shadowmachine, and they are not some low-bid offshore spec-animation mill. Not Pixar, sadly, but definitely playing in the same league. They're the studio behind Guillermo del Toro's "Pinocchio" (2023 Oscar for best animated film) and the cult-favorite BoJack Horseman (2020 Critic's Choice Best Animated Series). This strongly suggests Fillion is aiming a little higher, and for a little more relevance, than a nostalgia cartoon. Seriously, Cowboy Bebop was 28 years ago, ffs. But by all means, keep casting the anime version in your head; the rest of us are happy to go with Shadowmachine.

...what worked for rescuing an IP hopelessly mired in canon with a devoted fanbase is (probably) not gong to work for Firefly. I'm thinking of Paramount's against-all-odds successful reboot of ST:TOS with the canon-drenched, near-peer ST:SNW. I think that was a lucky accident, not a tactical call by paramount. Strange New Worlds landed in that narrow band where canon could be respected without being strangled by it. And I'm calling it a lucky guess, not a deliberate strategy, because of what happened with Enterprise. Enterprise fled so far into the past that it felt less like a prequel, and more like a deliberate attempt to get out from under the fanbase's radar. A dick move, basically, and the fandom responded accordingly.

This new Firefly cartoon feels like the same kind of maneuver: find a nice soft continuity pocket between the series and Serenity, tuck the story in there, and hope nobody notices that safe timeline placement is doing a lot of the creative heavy lifting. It is basically a safe-space reboot for a property whose closure-granting movie was unusually clean and graceful, but still managed to piss off the series' fanbase.

So I have a couple of questions:

Does Fillion really think that this is going to mollify the still-pissed-off chunk of the fanbase? "Oh, hey, look it's Book. He's going to die, you know. so is Wash. Pretty soon, too, if canon is any indication. But let's watch anyway, right?" I can see that fanbase already rolling their eyes and sharpening their social-media swords for the premier. TBH, i should say, "if that premier actually happens." Fillion still needs a distributor. And to a distributor like Netflix or Amazon, a reboot of a cult classic is a risky asset, and this particular package that Fillion has pulled together even more so, because of the cognitive dissonance "Serenity" is going to generate in potential viewers familiar with the canon storyline.

And why a cartoon? Animation is not a magic defibrillator for a beloved science-fiction property flatlined by executive meddling. Babylon 5 already reminded us that an animated return can be perfectly respectable and still not reignite the old fusion torch. And Paramount's casting of (relatively) fresh new talent for canon-drenched characters shows that you don't need to resort to animation to preserve the look-and-feel of a series, decades after the original actors aged out of their canon roles. Seriously, who'd a-thunk an installment in the Trek universe where a no-name actor replaced Shatner as Captain Kirk would actually succeed? Yeah, I know...caught me by surprise, too. :)

Maybe Fillion and company can pull it off. I hope they do. I liked Firefly, and I really liked Serenity the movie. But "an animated series we found a safe pocket in the timeline for" is not, by itself, a reason to believe lightning will strike twice.

And one more question: If Whedon is not creatively involved, why foreground his blessing at all? All it does is drag a creator's baggage into every pitch meeting for a project that already has enough risk baked in. I want to see the project land a distributor, but this is not a tactically sound move by Fillion.

It makes perfect sense that CachyOS is dominating the ProtonDB charts right now. As the article points out, they are basically pre-packaging the tweaks, driver configurations, and heroic duct tape that the rest of us have spent years applying by hand. But while we're looking at these adoption numbers, we need to be honest about what we are actually cheering for.

The harder and more honest argument is that desktop Linux gaming is still, to a depressing extent, a compatibility story -- not a first-class commercial platform. Proton is not some triumphant proof that Linux gaming has arrived on its own terms. It is Valve's game-tuned Wine fork, wrapped in DXVK, vkd3d-proton, Steam runtime glue, and a thousand game-specific evasive maneuvers to keep Windows binaries from faceplanting on a non-Windows OS. That is technically impressive. It is also an admission that the center of gravity is still Microsoft, and their bloated OS.

Linux gaming advocates keep pointing at ProtonDB as if it settles the argument. It does not. It is a compatibility scaffold, not a native ecosystem. It exists because the commercial desktop gaming world still targets Windows first, last, and always, and gaming on Linux survives by translating, shimming, wrapping, and shaking a dead chicken in the general direction of Redmond. I am not speaking theoretically here. I built a high-end Ubuntu gaming rig around a 4090 a year ago, and spent weeks discovering that "runs on Linux" often means "runs after enough ritual incantation."

The worst bugs weren't even game-related. It was my audio stack. First, Linux did an embarrassingly bad job managing multiple audio streams at different bitrates, something native Windows apps have no issue with at all. Even with pipewire/pulseaudio, I had to do major surgery in both my audio stack and in my Steam launch strings to get clean audio when I had Spotify or Winamp running in the background instead of the game's native music. Second, my HDMI-connected soundbar vomited a bogus EDID payload into the DRM path advertising a phantom VGA display. Because EDID is an ancient compatibility sewer that still gets to vote, the kernel decided that the imaginary monitor hanging off the soundbar was the primary display, not my actual Samsung Odyssey G8 on DP-1. So on boot, the desktop went into the void until I physically disconnected HDMI. The fix was not a setting, not a package, not a friendly little checkbox. The fix was kernel surgery: patching drm_edid.c so the kernel would stop believing the lies my soundbar was telling it. That is not a consumer gaming experience. That is field-expedient systems archaeology.

And that is why I remain skeptical whenever people talk about Linux gaming winning the battle for gamers' hearts and minds on the general-purpose desktop. The article explicitly mentions Bazzite and Chris Titus. I saw both his review and JayzTwoCents' take on Bazzite on YouTube, and I honestly couldn't stop laughing. Their hearts are in the right place, but watching them attempt to frame Linux gaming as a seamless, drop-in replacement for Windows is both amusing and misguided. They are deliberately hiding the complexities of Linux-anything compared to the sheer ease of Microsoft Windows. They are promoting an illusion of parity, not championing parity itself.

Full disclosure: I got Doom running on a Slackware distro when I was an undergrad CS student way back in 1994, but it was an actual port. I got sucked into the compatibility world several years later, trying to get Diablo to run under wine on my Mandrake distro. I spent a lot of time surfing comp.os.linux and browsing tsx-11 and sunSITE for anything that would help. I gave up in frustration and I spent the next couple of decades contentedly gaming on Windows via steam. I switched away finally last year when Microsoft's aggressive telemetry became too much to tolerate, and I got hit by that borked windows 11 upgrade path last year that actually bricked my gaming box. It has become increasingly clear that the actual way forward for Linux is curated appliances and forks: Android phones, SteamOS-style consoles, handhelds like the ones Bazzite targets, locked-down vendor stacks, and other environments where somebody else absorbs the compatibility blast radius.

If you stay perfectly within those curated lines, it's fine. But the moment you step off that path to push high-end hardware, you are back in the trenches. On my rig, getting MechWarrior 5, Cyberpunk 2077, and Horizon: Zero Dawn to behave required a dissertation-length launch string on Steam. Here is what it takes running against Steam's GE-Proton9-20 compatibility layer:

PULSE_PROP="channel-map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe,side-left,side-right" NVPRESENT_ENABLE_SMOOTH_MOTION=1 VKD3D_DISABLE_EXTENSIONS=VK_KHR_present_wait PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11,dxr VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_2 ~/.local/bin/run-with-vibrance.sh 256 gamescope -f -W 6144 -H 3456 -r 120 --force-grab-cursor -- %command% --launcher-skip

See what I mean? You are not just playing a game; you are performing postmodern systems integration on a consumer entertainment product. Proton is impressive engineering, but let us not pretend it is normal consumer software: any platform that asks me to hand-feed PULSE_PROP, VKD3D_CONFIG, PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI, a custom vibrance wrapper, and a 6144x3456 Gamescope envelope before I can go shoot stuff in 6k at 100 FPS has not solved gaming on Linux. It just makes the ritual reproducible.

Now go convince the management.
They will sell out their best and brightest for short term gains, collect a golden parachute then do it again at the next company.

It is the only job I know of that you are hired to enforce what you don't know or understand.
Remember the lawyer (DA) is the one who knows the laws, the police guess and figure if it affects their authority then it is illegal.

Wait a second, so the pretense was they are "which authorities were investigating for their connection to arson, vandalism and doxing"

And the charges were dropped meaning they had done none of these things at all not even a little bit of connection (or they would have prosecuted). And we are looking at proton mail or self hosting or paying for the site as the issue?
Have we really started missing the real issue?

I noticed this line.
"and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities"
so when am I allowed to enter special rate agreements, that I am willing to bet a lot, that they will be lower than consumer rates.

The usa tried this going with the daylight savings time instead of standard time.
It lasted 1 year. The outrage was so great they changed it back after 1 year.
Why they didn't just adopt Standard Time is .. well... its congress what do you expect.
Why we can't just keep Standard time year round is absurd to me.

Work hard, bank as much as you can.
Then retire to a different country where you can actually afford:
Rent / Home
Medical Treatment
Internet
Car
Cell phone plan
etc

Even if you say that companies and customers are the victims, in todays WH guess who will get paid.

Wall Street firm goes to an importer and says, youâ(TM)ve now paid $10 million in tariffs. Iâ(TM)ll pay you $2 million right now for the right to collect the refund if courts ever end up deciding the tariffs were illegal. My friend had also heard that one of the most aggressive buyers was Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm until recently headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by Lutnickâ(TM)s sons.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/...

Mmmmm the tax was paid when they bought the product. Not on their tax return. So yes anyone who bought just about anything in the last year has been impacted at the higher tax rate (tariffs). That is how they came up with the number.

Can we do facebook next?

anyone else wondering how they found out? Was there a common thread that each AI would follow that allowed KPMG to figure out it was AI written?
Requested Firewall logs? or proxy server logs?
The reason I was wondering is are companies now flagging AI written resumes as not legit while putting the resumes through AI to match candidates?