I learned to love Sisko a lot more than Picard tbh. I find him much more relatable than some pretentious english-frenchman who gets weird around kids. I never understood why he’s such a jerk to Wesley in the beginning.
It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
Fringe definitely handled the continuing storyline much better. The way they blend in, then transition from, the monster-of-the-week format is excellent writing. It did put a deadline on the story, something which the X-Files writers seemed allergic to as the series began aging.
Worth remembering that both the X-Files and Babylon 5 premiered in the same year (1993).
TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs.
Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres.
TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more).
Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
I feel like I'm the only person who didn't really vibe with Firefly. I usually like the "space Western" motif but Firefly was so broad and over the top with it that it just seemed silly to me.
I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run.
The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)
Devil's advocate: deft use of zeitgeist-known settings in time-limited media can make for more efficient storytelling.
A captain of a ship.
An outlaw.
In a western-seeming system of planets.
If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm.
Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.
They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia.
Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie.
Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it.
Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays.
They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
That wouldn't work. The X-Files revolves around a government conspiracy because governments are genuinely scary. They have near infinite resources, can break any law they want at will, are frequently motivated by convoluted social engineering schemes, don't investigate themselves (so it requires a plucky outsider hero character) and so on.
If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
I don't know. Obviously a certain personality type considers government to be an all-encompassing evil (which is the Cold-War era fear the conspiracy theories of the X-Files drew from) but in the modern day corporations (particularly tech companies) seem to be far more competent and dangerous.
And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.
Defense contractors only have one customer - the government. They are "capitalism" in the weakest sense of the world. Tech companies aren't scary. Everyone interacts with them, they're run by well known personalities, they're subject to the courts and follow laws etc. The story tension you'd need just isn't there.
I think the government conspiracy fear works best for the audience who still has some belief in government. So it is a disturbing moral corruption of something they consider powerful and benign. Lots of people older than myself reported this feeling from the 60s and 70s as things like the Pentagon Papers came to light.
The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).
So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?
It would be interestingi to know if AI is less likely to follow rules if the instructions provided to it contain foul or demeaning language. Too bad we couldn't re-play the scenario replacing NEVER F*ING GUESS! with:
**Never guess**
- All behavioral claims must be derived from source, docs, tests, or direct command output.
- If you cannot point to exact evidence, mark it as unknown.
- If a signature, constant, env var, API, or behavior is not clearly established, say so.
Underrated comment here. https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function This study convinced me to be "nice" to AI agents. At least as I understood it, there's something in the weights that activating the "desperate" vector makes it more likely to cheat or cut corners. So yes I would err towards your suggested prompt over NEVER FUCKING GUESS.
The big claim in general appears to be that the signal is not obvious because it averages out to normal background radiation noise. The article doesn't communicate this well though.
The bit that you quoted, I think that's just a random sentence that looks dumb out of context. I don't think it means anything special.
In general, it is very easy to detect that radio signals are present.
A better comparison is with radio signals for which a method of spread-spectrum modulation has been used, chosen such as to have a bandwidth so wide that the averaged signal falls below the thermal noise level.
Such radio signals will also not be detectable without special detectors.
WiFi and Bluetooth use spread-spectrum modulation methods but they have relatively low bandwidths, so they can be easily distinguished from thermal noise. Much wider bandwidths are required to prevent detection.
This is somewhat novel unlike say weapons manufacturing. Also assuming that the GP is in the tech community to some degree, it makes sense they’d have a stronger reaction.
There’s lots of bad stuff humans shouldn’t be doing.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a valid point. This neuron chip stuff is far less problematic than a lot of animal testing where you clearly have a whole organism that experiences something.
Factory farming too. The way we treat chickens in particular is out of a horror movie, and that’s in countries with some standards. Globally I’m sure many billions of animals are constantly submitted to the most grotesque torture for food.
I spoke inaccurately. I’m an ethical vegan and nonconsensual animal industry and testing is an atrocity, as it would be were we to substitute in humans.
That said, the novelty of this, the unknowns, the mind reels at all the possibilities here and it frankly makes me nauseous.
What hells of existence could we create? I have no doubt that we could create an all encompassing misery that is beyond our comprehension.
Sounds like you're applying scifi tropes to real life. Don't do that. That's why some people are developing "AI psychosis" today after playing with LLMs.
The fear is that we don’t really understand what causes consciousness. I think that’s a valid fear, because we can’t know ahead of time whether we will inadvertently create a “person” inside the machine.
Unless your proposition is that no collection of human neurons outside of live birth can become sentient, and I’m not sure how you’d arrive at that conclusion without invoking some kind of spiritual argument.
+1 for highlighting that PR quality is the bottleneck. Garbage-in/garbage-out is exactly what I ran into and it’s why I’m planning to introduce PR templates so the why/what changed/impact is consistently present. For sparse PR bodies, I also optionally add truncated diff context for the LLM summary so the output isn’t just a long list of raw PR titles.
Also agree there is a split between dev-facing changelogs vs user-facing release comms that need to land where users are. What I built is aimed at the "developer-consumer" audience, people using the library, not contributing to it: it renders into our docs and is meant to be readable as a curated changelog, not a raw list of commits.
I agree that the best quality notes are the ones hand written by a thoughtful human. In my case we had about two years of history with no curated notes, and writing that by hand would have meant significant time investment vs shipping fixes and features. The generator helped us get coverage fast, organized the notes chronologically and categorically. I specifically designed the generator with your your concern in mind, in that it preserves manual edits as well as omissions, so we can gradually curate it into something we are proud of.
I agree with the philosophy of curating release notes for the consumer of the release. When I first started looking for a release notes strategy, I was considering towncrier for that exact reason. You are also right that commit messages are not intended for the consumer of the release, but a dialogue between developers.
Your points are well received and largely why I went PR-based (title/body with optional GitHub metadata) instead of commit-based. A PR title and body tend to be focused on the deliverable, whereas commit messages are narrowly focused on the code change at that moment with developers as the intended audience.
Re: git-cliff, I honestly hadn’t evaluated this one, but it looks solid for commit-driven changelogs. I like the rationale behind conventional commits being parsable and templates enforcing consistency. What constraints pushed you toward git-cliff vs writing release notes by hand, and do you have a config/template you have found works well for surfacing breaking changes?
Yeah, that matches what I have seen: if the upstream metadata isn’t reliable, automation can amplify the mess.
I tried to avoid relying solely on contributors to accurately label or tag things correctly. The script is tag-driven only for release boundaries (version tags), while categorization is derived from PR title & body with optional GitHub metadata. The script is idempotent and preserves edits/omissions so you can correct the few bad ones post-generation.
If you are curious, I am happy to share my script and would be genuinely interested whether it reduces the manual cleanup for your workflow. Also, if you run it with `--ai --github` and a PR body is sparse, it fetches a truncated PR diff and uses that as extra context for the LLM summary.
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