PokerPirate
19d ago
Maybe people in this forum can help me:
I've got an 8 year old boy I'd like to introduce to Star Trek. I specifically want:
- To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with. (For example, he'll be growing up with personal LLM assistants as background noise, and I want him to see how fantastic this was to people at the time.)
- For him to internalize some of the leadership attitudes that Kirk/Picard/etc demonstrate. I don't know any other series (scifi or otherwise) where there are so many clear examples of how to effectively lead and motivate a team.
So my questions are:
- What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
- And what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch? Wrath of Kahn seems like a decent stand-alone introduction to the whole franchise, but most of the other popular movies/episodes seem like they have too much "fan service" in them. I just watched a few "best of star trek" collection dvds, and all these episodes require way too much background knowledge about the universe to make sense. Something like Trouble with Tribbles, for example, could almost be a good introduction to the series for kids because of the cute tribble creatures, but you already have to understand that the franchise is about space exploration and colonizing planets and the prime directive and the war with klingons to actually make any sense of the setting.
PokerPirate
19d ago
If prosecutors wanted their testimony, they would grant immunity. We've had literal murderers granted immunity by prosecutors so they could go after the real big fish in mafia/drug ring investigations.
PokerPirate
25d ago
It is due to grammar. Here's a github issue that will give you lots of links to follow down if you're really interested in gory details: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/1773
PokerPirate
26d ago
Ummm.... computer science wouldn't exist without this formalism. Compilers use grammars to define/parse the syntax of programming languages. More recently, LLMs use grammars to enforce structured output (like returning JSON). Tiny models on a raspberry pi + good grammar will beat frontier models on many tasks.
PokerPirate
28d ago
I don't think that Chesterton would agree with your thesis that "trad-cath society" was "on the menu" in the 1900 in a way that it is not in the 2026. For example, he wrote in What is Wrong with the World:
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
That doesn't sound like the kind of person who thinks that his Christian ideal is actually "on the menu" in his own time period. Therefore, I suspect that his proposed solution would be basically the same:
the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough.
PokerPirate
28d ago
... ammunition will be the new currency
It seems like in any event where physical gold is more valuable than paper gold, ammunition (and food/tools/etc) will be more valuable than gold.
You missed the real culture war for a made up one.
The newest version of Muzzy omits all of the references to the queen being fat. I found this very frustrating because fat is a super important/basic word. But it's also a major plot point in the sequel that the queen gets stuck between two rocks because she is fat. (The video plays the same here and shows her getting stuck, but the audio goes blank for a bit and the narrator doesn't say that she gets stuck because she is fat.) It's a funny moment that should be teaching kids how to say "because" type clauses that gets removed. "Because" is a hard concept to teach through examples like this, so it's super frustrating that they removed one of the only examples.
Source: I used Muzzy to teach my kids Spanish and Korean.
Also, Corvax is legitimately cruel and evil. That's why the princess rejects him.
PokerPirate
29d ago
You are confusing the derivative of wealth with wealth itself.
There is a lot of human intuition for why these two quantities should be linked, but everyone else in this thread is assuming they are distinct quantities. That is why there is a disagreement.
I'm pretty sure this is the worst episode possible as an intro. It's got lots of great philosophical nuggets to chew on, but there's no reason to identify with why Picard/Riker are so troubled by disassembling a "mere machine" if you haven't actually built a relationship with Data yet by watching him struggle to learn to be human. Without understanding that background, the JAG and cybernetics professor are "obviously right" and the whole episode is boring.
My problem is that all of the recommendations on trek sites I've seen are like this: they are geared towards the "best episodes for experienced fans" rather than "the best episodes for introducing the series".
More options
Context Copy link