• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    It’s also a show from the early 90s, when talking to the computer was a fantasy. Remember how they walk around delivering tablets to people for the mail?

    Little details about how technology would actually develop stand out super bad when they get close but just miss how things actually went.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s also a show from the early 90s, when talking to the computer was a fantasy.

      Yeah TNG pilot literally has a character go “Oh you’ve never been on one of these Galaxy class ships” to Riker, after which she shows that you can ask directions from the computer. And then helpful arrows start blinking to direct Riker to the holodeck. (I don’t know if those guiding lights are ever seen again in the canon. Might be, I’m too lazy to find out rn.)

      Majel Barrett sounded so young, I just watched that episode a couple of days ago.

      One episode of Voyager made me giggle a bit. It’s a ship with “bio-neural circuitry”. One cold open, there’s some phenomena they want to look at, so Chakotay tells Seven who then assigns an ensign to take a pad to B’elanna in engineering with the turbolift, and then B’elanna sends a “power requisition” through another person, via a pad, to the theoretical physicist somewhere in the bowels of the ship, who then has a bit of a chat with the person delivering the pad and then enters the changes into his work station.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ud8HJgUoQs

      I get that with ships that complex, you might have people at different points verifying the commands, so that it’s not just automated, but since they’re all connected, what’s the point of physically walking the pads there?

      And that episode aired in 2000.

      • 5too@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        In what I suspect was an unintentional callback, there’s an episode of Strange New Worlds where the computer guides someone as well. No arrows this time, it just blinks the hall lights in a pattern.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Huh. Nice.

          I’m gonna get around to it after I finish TNG rewatch.

          And it wasn’t arrows on TNg either, same the blinking lights

        • hips_and_nips@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Even if they did I doubt they would’ve used aliases. Picard’s tea “routine” is right in-line with his character.

          Unfortunately (/s) plot and character development trump diligent technical details.

          I was just highlighting that the technology had been invented over a decade before.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Alright? And how often do you talk to talk to bash?

        The point is it’s a TV show from the 90s. They had a few misses regarding how technology would end up looking.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            Aliases are not the same as natural language processing, so saying that it already existed for a decade is kinda missing the point, because what they were describing didn’t.
            They were very clearly imitating how people would find the beverage via a menu driven interface, but using voice. It’s similar to how real world initial attempts at touch driven computer interfaces had an otherwise unmodified interference mounted on a wall with a touchscreen, and immediately ran into issues with arm fatigue. They didn’t show the arm fatigue in Star Trek either because it’s a TV show and they didn’t predict the future perfectly.

            It wasn’t a loaded question. I meant literally how often do you speak to the bash prompt via a voice interface.
            The tools and technologies that are used for a textual medium don’t port to voice interfaces, so it makes about as much sense to invoke shell scripting in this context as it does to invoke algebraic variable substitution from the 1500s.

            • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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              8 months ago

              Yeah but a problem with having too many things aliased is that you eventually forget the underlying commands and when you’re on a terminal that doesn’t have your alias you can’t do anything anymore.

              Picard is a guy that gets around the galaxy and probably learned the menu on replicators when he was young. And it’s possible that there’s some weird alien food that sounds like hot earl grey tea. Some older replicators are probably still in operation on some planets, and he’s found that the order of “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” is the most reliable command that works on nearly all replicators. Given how much gets around he got used to always saying it that way so even when he’s in his ready room, he still says it that way without even thinking about it.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      Obviously they have to keep the tablets in airplane mode or it might screw up the navigation system causing the Enterprise to crash into a star.