Fair enough. Then we're not really discussing creativity or artistic merit, are we? We're discussing labor economics. You can't have it both ways, friend.

History suggests they'll absolutely try. Capital has been replacing expensive labor with cheaper tools since the first accountant discovered the abacus. But that's a separate argument. You've constructed a false dichotomy where AI is either worthless "prompt-generated garbage" or a tool for eliminating artists. Those are not the only two possibilities. A24 exploring a third option: AI as a collaborator and creative amplifier.

Let go of your bias for a moment. A storyboard artist who can explore fifty concepts in a day instead of five is still creating. A screenwriter who can rapidly test dialogue variations is still writing. A director who can visualize scenes before committing a budget is still directing.

The tool changes. The creative process remains. You seem to be willfully ignoring this reality in your argument. There is way more to being creative than just coming up with an original thought or vision.

I think you are missing some history here. The modern storyboard was popularized at Disney in the early 1930s when Webb Smith started pinning sketches to a board so directors could experiment with sequences before spending time and money animating them. Drawing fifty sketches was cheaper than animating fifty scenes. It was literally a labor-saving innovation that allowed creative people to iterate faster. It was such a useful hack that it became the industry standard very, very quickly.

And other technologies followed the exact same trajectory -- non-linear digital editing systems, CGI, even Photoshop. Every generation of creative tooling is greeted by predictions that creativity itself is under attack. But being creative is more than just coming up with an entertaining idea. It also includes getting it out there so that an audience can appreciate it. That is what directors do. If you want to monetize it at the same time, fine -- that is what studios are for. You have a very narrow definition of creative, if it doesn't include all the scaffolding that creatives actually need to produce a work that can be shared, for profit or otherwise.

The real question is not whether AI can contribute to the creative process. It demonstrably can. The real question is: When an AI is inserted into the process, who captures the productivity gains? That's a debate worth having. You are welcome to join, if you can stop pretending the only possible outcomes are "AI garbage" or "artist unemployment". Until then, you are missing a much more interesting and relevant discussion.

The interesting part here is not that there are suddenly "responsible AI" groups on both sides of the AI policy binary, but that that everyone with a stake in the debate around AI has discovered "guardrails" as the new magic word.

Look at ARIAM. It is not a grassroots creators' revolt. It is a coalition of incumbent content companies, publishers, and mission-aligned tech firms trying to shape the legal environment around AI. Copyright, attribution, liability, and provenance are real issues; I'm fairly certain Disney, Adobe, the New York Times, Conde Nast, Wiley, the BBC, et al. have not wandered into this debate as disinterested philosophers of human creativity. They have assets to defend, licensing markets to create, and future tollbooths to position. You can bet they are trying to figure out how to plant a cop and a tollbooth between creators who see AI as a collaborator and tool, and the vast catalogs of old media that Big Tech AI companies are already pillaging for training sets.

The Guardrails Alliance has the same problem from the political side. Calling this Super PAC "grassroots" is doing a lot of semantic cardio. A Super PAC aiming to convert the discontent of tech workers into cash donations, launched by political operatives (not tech workers!), with millions already in the barrel, is not exactly a grassroots movement. Again, that does not make its policy goals wrong. But it does mean the "ordinary workers vs Big Tech" framing deserves the same skepticism we would apply if the labels were reversed. Guardrails has not filed their first FEC report, so we don't know (yet) where that $5M in seed financing came from. I'm going to bet it wasn't from a collection of disgruntled coders and studio artists worried that they were being asked to train their LLM-based replacements. I wouldn't be surprised if this is just the AI version of every grievance PAC that apparatchiks on both sides of the political divide have been farming low-information voters with since Citizens United made that kind of grift legal. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

I think the pattern that is emerging is pretty straightforward. AI policy is not a binary anymore (if it ever was.) AI policy is a multi-sided auction. One side, Big Tech incumbents like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic, want broad freedom to scrape, train, deploy, and preempt regulation. Another side wants safety rules that may also conveniently raise barriers to entry and protect existing jobs. A third side wants copyright, licensing, and liability rules that let them safely monetize their media catalogs, old and new, and charge rent for anything they control the IP for. And in the back row of the auction house are the indie devs, open-weight model tinkerers, and local-inference gurus trying to run useful AI on hardware they actually own. At least they are not jumping on the guardrails bandwagon. Yet. :)

Everybody can say "we want guardrails around AI." Everybody can invoke democracy, safety, creators, workers, children, innovation, or national competitiveness. The question is not which faction has the prettiest noun pile. The question is who gets paid, who gets regulated out of the market, and who gets to write the definitions of what LLMs are allowed and not allowed to do.

Let's put the guardrails where they really need to be. Before buying any of the rhetoric, I want to see the donor lists, the advisers, the vendors, the affiliated nonprofits, and the model legislation. "Guardrails" can mean public safety. It can also mean a velvet rope around somebody else’s cash register, or a visit from the copyright police because your ChatGPT prompt created a token string that Disney or the BBC or NYT says belongs to them.

I agree with that much. I am not arguing that NASA historically had a secret government rocket foundry staffed by civil servants in short-sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. Apollo, Shuttle, SLS/Artemis, Orion...all of it leaned heavily on private contractors. That is not my objection.

The distinction I am drawing is between “NASA contracts with industry to build hardware under fairly explicit procurement rules” and “a billionaire-controlled company with no orbital launch history gets folded into a public-private Mars mission whose money flow, data rights, ownership structure, and downstream commercial benefits are not very clear from the public announcement.”

COTS is actually a good comparison point, because SpaceX at least had to hit milestones in a program whose purpose was openly to develop commercial cargo transportation. That was the deal: NASA wanted commercial ISS logistics, SpaceX wanted a launch/services business, and the milestones were the meat grinder that Musk had to sausage his way through.

Here, Relativity has not yet put a rocket into orbit, Terran R still has to prove itself, and now the company is talking about a 2028 Mars orbiter, with NASA instruments riding along, while Schmidt is also interested in orbital data centers and private space observatories. Maybe this is brilliant. Maybe NASA gets a bargain. Maybe Schmidt eats most of the risk.

But that is exactly why I want the numbers and terms visible, and why I am more than a little concerned that they are using a 68 year old paragraph in the congressional act that created NASA to hide those numbers and terms, all under the watchful eye of a billionaire appointed to run NASA by a billionaire President.

If the answer is “NASA pays little, the data is public, Relativity carries the performance risk, and the public gets useful science,” great. Put that on the table. If the answer is “NASA supplies credibility, instruments, mission value, and validation while Schmidt’s company gets heritage for a future private infrastructure stack,” then that is Dr Evil wearing a NASA mission patch.

With that said, I agree with your second point completely: picking a company that has not yet reached orbit for an interplanetary transport job on a 2028 timeline is not exactly a low-pucker-factor decision.

Public-private space partnerships are not inherently bad. NASA buying commercial services can make perfect sense. COTS helped give us SpaceX, and whatever else one thinks of Musk, reusable Falcon launches were not exactly a rounding error in the history of spaceflight.

But transparency is the thin line between public-private partnership and a billionaire infrastructure layaway plan.

So now Eric Schmidt, yes, that Eric Schmidt from Google’s deliciously ironic “Don’t be evil” era, takes control of Relativity Space after it runs into funding trouble, installs himself as CEO, and suddenly Relativity gets picked for a Mars orbiter mission. NASA gets useful atmospheric science out of it, sure. Daily global Martian weather data is real science, not hand-wavy TED-talk vapor. But the interesting part is the scaffolding: Relativity supplies the spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations, while NASA supplies the instruments and the public purpose.

That is very close to the Elon Musk template. Do useful work for government customers, gain launch heritage, build factories, normalize regulatory access, wrap the whole thing in national destiny and science, then aim the resulting machine at the founder’s private cathedral. In Musk’s case, Mars colonization and DOGE-flavored state capture. In Schmidt’s case, orbital data centers and privately backed space observatories. And look who approved the deal -- Jared Issacman, Trump’s hand-picked commercial-space billionaire with deep ties to Musk and SpaceX, now sitting on top of the agency that decides which private space companies get wrapped in the flag, the science mission, and the launch manifest.

Maybe this is a good deal. Maybe NASA is getting a bargain. Maybe Schmidt is putting real private money behind real public science. But Eric...remember the don't-be-evil days at Google? If that is the case, show the numbers. Under a Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) contract, the government has explicit data rights and strict oversight. But the Space Act Agreement that this project is authorized under bypasses that transparency.

Who pays whom? Who owns what? What data is public? What infrastructure becomes commercially reusable? What happens if Relativity misses the 2028 launch window? What private projects of yours are going to benefit from NASA-paid mission experience? And why is a “reimbursable” Space Act Agreement being described in the press like NASA hired the company, while the dollar figure remains undisclosed? If the public is funding the operational heritage and validating the hardware platform, does the public own the telemetry? Or is the public merely a tenant in an infrastructure stack you are going to privatize?

This is "go ahead and be evil, if you can hide the bodies" territory. I'm not being cynical or anti-science, here. This is basic hygiene when billionaires start using science as a fig leaf for projects that also happen to build their next monopoly platform.

I would happily own some version of an electric ultralight, gyroplane, or breakfast-hop airport toy if the numbers ever worked for my wallet and my runway.

But that is exactly why the hype needs to be separated from the engineering.

This solid-state flight is pretty cool. A modified Pipistrel Taurus motor glider flying on 410 Wh/kg solid-state cells is genuinely interesting. Current electric aircraft batteries are in the rough neighborhood of 200-260 Wh/kg; 410 Wh/kg is a serious improvement. Push that toward 500 Wh/kg and you have made the battery brick much better. Sadly, it is still a brick, though, and it doesn't really fix the main problem with electric aircraft.

The number this press release is dancing around is energy density. Aviation fuel is roughly 12,000 Wh/kg. Compare that to 410 Wh/kg and you are looking at about a 29:1 raw energy-density gap. Yes, electric motors are far more efficient than piston or turbine engines, so electric clawbacks are real. Give electric a very generous 3x efficiency advantage and you are still looking at a 10:1 practical energy density gap. That is not a rounding error. That is the payload-range equation walking into the room and taking a crowbar to your electric-planes-are-better pitch deck. :)

The payload problem gets ugly fast. Take the simple case: a two-seat airplane versus a four-seat airplane flying the same short route. In a liquid fuel aircraft, adding two passengers increases weight and fuel burn, but the extra fuel needed for that same leg is comparatively small because liquid fuel is so energy-dense, and that fuel is burned off during the flight. In an electric aircraft, those two extra passengers directly displace battery mass. To get the lost range back, you add battery. But now the airplane is heavier because of the added battery, so you need still more battery to carry the battery you just added. That recursive weight penalty is where the spreadsheet turns feral. With liquid fuel, payload growth mostly means a very modest fuel-burn penalty. With batteries, payload growth attacks the core range equation because the energy store is heavy, low-density, and stays aboard all the way to landing.

This matters because commercial aviation is not a science fair lap around the pattern, which is what this test essentially was. It is payload, range, utilization, reserve fuel, alternate-airport planning, maintenance downtime, charging infrastructure, battery cycle life, insurance, certification, and load factor. The airplane has to make money on Tuesday afternoon in ugly weather with a real schedule, not just fly once for a press release while everyone claps.

This is why electric aviation makes sense only for narrowly defined, rigidly constrained missions. Trainers doing pattern work. Self-launching gliders. Short-hop recreational aircraft. Maybe small feeder routes where the aircraft, route, charger, weather limits, payload, and schedule are tightly controlled. Those are real use cases. I would love to see them mature. But multi-passenger commercial electric aviation is a different beast. Every extra passenger is payload and it launches you down the I-need-more-battery recursive rathole that also drags carrying capacity, reserve requirements, battery safety systems, and charging time down that rathole.

Solid-state batteries may expand the envelope for a narrowly defined niche market. Good. I want them to. But they do not repeal physics, and they do not repeal commercial aviation economics. And right now, energy density is going to limit the economic viability of any electric plane, even pleasure craft like this that are targeted at people with an FAA cert and some disposable income.

It does not solve the problem you think it solves. Not by an order of magnitude. The article is talking about a modified Pipistrel Taurus, a motor glider. It's a pleasure craft, not a commercial vehicle at all. It is making short demonstrator flights on solid-state batteries. That is legitimately interesting engineering. The ugly number the press release is dancing around is energy density.

The number the press-release is hiding from you is energy density compared to conventional liquid fuel. Aviation fuel is roughly 12,000 Wh/kg. These new solid-state cells are reported at 410 Wh/kg, and currently deployed batteries are about half that. Granted, electric motors are much more efficient than piston or turbine engines, so you claw some of that back. But -- you do not get all of it back, not even close, actually. You are still hauling around a battery that has a tiny fraction of the energy per pound of liquid fuel. And by tiny, I meant brutally tiny, especially for the current crop of batteries. The current crop of electric aircraft batteries are at ~200-260 Wh/kg. These new batteries plausibly move that toward 400-500 Wh/kg. That is a big deal. It is not a miracle. The battery brick got better, but it is still a brick.

Even the most efficient electric motors out there can't bridge the order of magnitude gap with their liquid fueled competitors. And unlike fuel, the battery does not get lighter during the flight. A conventional aircraft burns off fuel as it goes, so the airplane gets lighter and the range equation improves in flight. A battery airplane lands with essentially the same battery mass it took off with. That battery mass competes directly with passengers, baggage, structure, reserves, dispatch margins, and profit -- even in pleasure craft, where you can substitute usable range for dispatch margins and profit.

In a bucket, electric flight makes sense in only very narrow, very specific mission profiles -- trainers, and pleasure craft like this self-launching glider and other short-hop recreational aircraft. Basically, small, well-defined missions where the aircraft, charger availability, route, weather, and schedule are all tightly controlled. That is real. That is useful -- but in only very narrow economic markets. They do not repeal basic laws of physics and the payload-range equations.

No, this is *exactly* capitalism. It just is not the fairy-tale version of capitalism you learned in your high school civics class. Capitalism is not "all about the free market." Markets are the arena where capitalism operates. Capital is the player trying to own the arena, buy the referee, lock the gates, and charge rent on the exits. Adam Smith understood this problem perfectly well, and warned against it in "The Wealth of Nations." Capitalists aren't trying to preserve competition out of civic virtue. Quite the opposite, actually. They try to restrain competition, capture markets, and secure monopoly rents whenever they can get away with it.

A competitive free market would mean I buy a device, I own the device, I can repair the device, and independent shops can compete for my repair dollars. But a corporation trying to close that repair market is not betraying capitalism. It is pursuing the perfectly capitalist goal of increasing return on capital by eliminating competition. That is the part about "capitalism" that people keep missing. Actual competition is hard on margins and murder on monopoly profits. A capitalist's first duty is to his shareholders, not the marketplace.

Real world example: Cisco refused to sell my company (very large US defense contractor) new routers until we agreed to give them back the routers we were replacing, or certified their destruction. They didn't want the competition from the used router market. Here's another example. The entire automotive industry in America was reined in back in 1975 because of their blatant attempts to control the channels around ownership of dealers, resale, warranty service, parts, diagnostics, and repair. Once the guy with the capital sells you some product, they immediately start looking for ways to keep charging rent on the thing it supposedly sold you. You've heard of Henry Ford, right? He offered to put two Model T's in every garage in America for free, if Uncle Sam would guarantee him a monopoly on repair shops. That is pure capitalism. :)

Sorry for the digression. To bring this back on point: that is exactly the same species of behavior as John Deere here. A company that can use DRM, contracts, patents, firmware locks, parts serialization, and authorized-service monopolies to turn ownership into a subscription will do exactly that unless law, regulation, or organized public pressure stops it. But naively calling this behavior "not capitalism" lets capitalism off the hook. This is apex capitalism at it's most aggressive, and until governments smother it under a blanket of regulation, it's going to keep happening.

...the quantum kind and the PR kind. Assuming the sensor works as advertised, the magnetic signature of a Black Hawk's own avionics and rotor blade static would swamp a human heartbeat's magnetic signature by many, many orders of magnitude. Unless the CIA has figured out how to build a helicopter out of wood and plastic, the most believable version of what happened is something like this:

- intelligence narrowed the search area first
- manned aircraft or drones swept the region using standard sensors.
- AI fused and filtered these multiple sensor channels, narrowing the search area further.
- quantum magnetometry contributed only at closer range. A quantum magnetometer-equipped drone swoops in to get a closer look at an object of interest for signs-of-life, and by closer in, I mean less than a meter.

There's a real technology here, NV-diamond magnetometers, but the article is swapping out physics for PR vibes. NV-diamond magnetometry is absolutely legit. MIT, NIST, and others have shown you can detect biomagnetic signals like a heartbeat. No argument there. The catch is range, and the range problem isn't solvable by engineering, because the problem is physics and simple math.

Magnetic fields fall off as the cube of the distance from the source. That's a brutal curve. If you've got a picoTesla-level signal (typical of human neural anatomy at centimeter distances) by the time you're at a meter you're down in the femtoTesla range, and much past that, you now have to separate the signal from the Earth's magnetic field, the magnetic fields of nearby geological formations, and your own sensor platform noise. A tricorder does this all the time on Star Trek, yeah, but current technology? Nope.

Getting a clean lock at ~1 meter on a picoTesla field takes on the order of a minute or so of integration. Push that to a few meters and you're talking hours. Push it to anything that looks like "search from altitude" and the integration time goes from hours to geological epochs. AI helps, but it helps by integrating over time and rejecting noise. It doesn't repeal the inverse-cube law. So the most plausible reading of the article isn't "we found a heartbeat across the desert," it's "we used AI and quantum magnetometry for close-range confirmation of signs-of-life."

Fwiw, It seems pretty clear that the Trump administration's marketing department turned this sidebar on a successful SAR op into a gee-whiz story to impress the local yokels. Quantum sensors are real, but long-range heartbeat detection is still science fiction.

I think you have the right framing here: the tech is real, the range claim is where things get sketchy. For something like a cardiac signal, you're dealing with ~pT at centimeter scale, and then you take a 1/r^3 hit. By 1 meter you're already down in the few fT range, which is at or below the noise floor of anything you'd be able to loft on a drone, especially outside a shielded lab. At that point detection becomes an exercise in integration for your pet AI.

- sub-meter: plausible with enough dwell time
- 1 meter: maybe, with tens of seconds to minutes
- several meters: hours, assuming ideal conditions
- dozens of meters: not happening on any realistic timescale

AI can absolutely help tease out periodic structure from noise and improve confidence over time, but it's working with whatever signal is physically present. It can't conjure amplitude that isn't there. As the article points out, "it took some time" because they were accumulating weak signals via multiple sensor platforms. I'd ignore the PR blurb from the government and interpret this as sensor fusion with quantum magnetometry in the stack, not stand-off heartbeat detection. The former is believable; the latter runs straight into the inverse-cube wall.

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.