There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison

Agree.

using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great

Sort of?

IMO it felt very hamfisted in the way it tried to wrap those plot threads. And it felt like it should have been the culmination of a large number of episodes scattered across multiple seasons. Not a follow-up to a single episode earlier this same season. But if they had spent more time laying the groundwork to explain how the gorn Alien impregnation relates to the Great Cosmic Evil (and why the Great Cosmic Evil is even a relevant theme to explore in this world), then choosing to wrap that all up in a dramatic finale could perhaps have been awesome.

there’s two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats

All the scenes on the planet gave me that sense. It really felt obvious they were acting in front of the Volume. When the main characters just walk up and assault the portal guards, nobody reacts. When they discuss what to do next right there, nobody reacts. When the giant lasers shoot down, nobody reacts.

The planet design was really cool

Agree! I wish we could have explored more about them and their culture, and how it links to the culture of the previous planet the Great Cosmic Evil was on.

It’s interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races

I got the sense (sadly, the episode wasn’t interested in exploring these aspects at all) that it’s because they were contacted by the Orions, who don’t follow the Prime Directive.

I’ve gotta be honest, I’m not completely sure what actually happened here. What was actually happening to allow that time-skipping future? It felt like a cross between The Inner Light and All Good Things, but in both of those the cause was pretty clear. Here, it felt like just something that they wanted to insert, so they did.

Which, tbh, is how the whole premise of the episode felt. Why is Batel suddenly magically connected to this Cosmic Evil? The last episode we had with them didn’t really feel like she was especially key to it. Not to mention that using what seemed like a one-off villain to return in the season finale in a way that felt like it would be more appropriate for an established recurring big bad really dragged the episode down.

Pelia’s Dr Who joke was funny, I’ll grant her that. But I really don’t like the idea that Dr Who and Star Trek could be in the same universe. Both have explored far too much of space for me to accept that, for example, The Federation has never encountered the Daleks, and Dr Who himself has never before encountered the Borg. The fact that the joke came from the most insanely irritating character the franchise has ever introduced (and I already hated Neelix enough that I would have thought nobody could take that role off him) certainly didn’t help there. Seriously, wtf are the writers and actor even doing with that character? She might have been ok as a one-off comic guest appearance…which is what she seemed like when she first showed up. Then they just…made her a member of the core cast?

Neither is Australia, and yet…

you brought up top month and I don’t see how you’d want that to work

The truth is I don’t want “top month”. What I really want is “best result, filtered by this month”. But unfortunately that doesn’t exist, and in the absence of that, I use “top month”.

There’s this meme of ‘why is ChatGPT expert on everything but the area I have knowledge of’.

That’s just Gell-Mann amnesia applied to chat bots.

Cancer is not the only thing asbestos can cause. There’s even a name for it: asbestosis.

I mean, based on the source, they’re still even on Twitter which is a lot more overtly fascist than WhatsApp. So…yeah…

It is incredible how docile the cat was during that whole thing.

This doesn’t have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.

That doesn’t feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less. Regardless of how the search is done, that should remain true. So if you’re using trigram matching, instead of a binary “does the comment contain 80% of the trigrams in the search query”, it should be “if it contains 100% of the trigrams from the search query, rank it higher than something with 90% match, which is higher than 80%.” Or maybe not that precisely, but something so that more relevant results appear above less relevant ones.

Without doing something like that, it’s just…not very useful. Which is the observed behaviour of search on Lemmy right now which started this whole conversation.

Eh, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn’t make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend

Sure, but one would have thought that the ordering in a search is fundamentally different from the ordering in other places. Because you want something that contains the words you’ve searched for near each other to appear ahead of a post that has those words scattered at random because it’s a 500 word essay. You want exact word matches prioritised ahead of entirely unrelated words that include the same characters. Like “enum” should turn up your comment, but rank a comment that contains the text “renumbers” much more lowly. A particularly smart search page might keep “enumerate” high while rejecting “renumbers”, though.

Of course, it’s true that at least in the current latest release, Lemmy fails at all of this. I hope 1.0 is at least fixing some of it?

At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s

I actually don’t agree. This is one area where Reddit’s centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn’t great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html#sorting-comments

That’s a page that really shouldn’t be relevant, and it concerns me if it is, because the search page should not be working on the same ordering logic that comment pages or the front page use.

Anyway, I mainly only use the “top month” option as a proxy for what I really want, which is “filter by posts/comments in the last month”, usually because I’m searching for something I saw recently, and I have a rough idea of when it was posted.

Searching by “posts” on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by “all” or “comments” on Lemmy is absolutely borken

Ah, that makes sense. I’ll try to pay attention to which I’m doing, because my most recent search used only comments, but was absolutely useless.

Here’s a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month (“Top Month”), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

Here’s a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month (“Top Month”), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

Out of interest, what is search like on Piefed? Lemmy’s is all but useless. Even filtering by “last week” will show me two year-old posts and comments, regularly that don’t actually include the word I’m looking for.

The article says “Mississippi and elsewhere”, so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.

As for your second point, I genuinely don’t really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn’t matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.

The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.

Ne t’inquiete pas, je suis un dumb-ass la plupart de temps.

Je suis en train de apprendre aussi le français, la même que @[email protected].

all towels are blankets? Even hand towels?

It honestly woulda been funnier to clumsily edit the meme in Paint than to sincerely fix it from source.