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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The Universal Translator is basically magic. TOS came closest to describing how it works, and it boiled down to, “IDK man it does some brain scans to detect your language structure”. There’s no satisfying answer as to why it knows the “Washington State Bridge” is a combination of a proper noun, a geopolitical concept, and a general noun.

    In Enterprise, the Universal Translator is generally depicted as a modern miracle of technology, but one without useful internal intelligence. If it hears a few snippets of Romanian, it’s just going to start brute forcing a translation matrix with every technique it has at its disposal. More speech gives it more data to work with, but it’s still just cycling through its options.

    Sato’s familiarity with xenolinguistics allows her to aid the Universal Translator by narrowing the system’s options or directing it down specific paths. She doesn’t know or learn the alien languages in the traditional sense, but she’s shown for having a knack for picking up on patterns and syntax. Again with the Romanian example, she’s doing the alien equivalent of saying, “This sounds European, skip trying to translate this as an Asian language for now”. The Universal Translator has fewer options to run through and gets to a successful translation matrix faster.

    But again, it’s plot contrivance space magic.






  • This is pretty typical for universities. They don’t want the airwaves clogged, doubling up NAT can lead to networking wonkiness, and they don’t want you giving university network access to unauthorized folks with an open AP.

    When you say VR streaming, you just mean wireless from your PC to the headset, right? There’s a chance you could do that with an offline wireless router if the VR experiences you’re looking to play are single player.






  • I can’t help much on the power draw side of this question, but one thing to look out for with a UPS is some sort of communication option. (Usually NUT over ethernet, but there are some USB options too.) Most modern UPS brands will have a plugin you can install on your Raspberry Pi and Mini PC that allows your UPS to signal, “Hey, I’ve got 3% of battery life, you actually need to gracefully shut down now.” It’s mostly useful for NAS applications with spinning drives, but it could help save your Pi’s SD card potentially.

    It’s a pretty standard feature these days, but the cheapest of the cheap will omit it.









  • Modern Star Trek has its ups and downs. I’m just glad there’s so much of it. Discovery can have a weird National Treasure season, and Picard can have a bumpy Covid year, but there’s probably something interesting going on in Lower Decks or Strange New Worlds. (Or vice versa.)

    I’m just happy characters like Stamets weren’t a one off experiment. It’s delightful to see queer folk continue to pop up in the main cast of other shows.