Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13439

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    We are many decades, if not centuries, from having to worry about something like that. When people think about the term AI, what they're thinking about is more often than not is what's called Artificial General Intelligence. A computer that can think and reason like a human being. That technology is purely science fiction for a bunch of reasons. Mainly hardware and software limitations on the computer's side. The low end estimate of exactly how much computational power is trapped in the average human's noggin is about 1 exaflop. That's 1 times 10 to the 18th power floating point operations per second. And that's done on about 20 watts of power. Exaflop-scale supercomputers became a thing for the first time in 2022, but they're about a square kilometer in size, made up of around 5,000 separate high-end processors joined by hundreds of kilometers of cabling and coolant piping, draw over 30 million watts of power to operate (nuclear power station level energy demands), and still have all the limits of a machine processing linear operations in binary. They're not capable of fuzzy logic, abstract reasoning, or any of the other insane stuff that your squishy human brain does on a minute-by-minute basis. This is the kind of thing that might become possible when we have quantum supercomputers... but we're still trying to figure out how to reliably store single qbits. The AI technology that the news is fussing over is massively oversold. LLMs like Google's Gemini, Apple's Apple Intelligence, OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, etc. are nothing more than extremely inefficient upscalings of the same kind of text autocomplete in your phone's onscreen keyboard app. They possess no reasoning capability. All they're capable of doing is probability-based pattern-matching. Instead of just guessing the next word you might type based on probabilities from sample text, they're taking keywords and stringing together vast strings of text based purely on the probability of those words appearing in that order based on the gargantuan amount of raw text they've been fed from books and websites and so on. Which is why they "hallucinate". They have no capacity to actually understand the material you're exchanging with them. It's almost an "infinite monkeys" situation, with an extremely powerful server essentially guessing wildly based purely on next word probability until it comes up with a plausible sounding string of words that it vomits up. The art-based ones are no different. They break sample data down into mathematical models and then string those models together based on keywords from your prompt. Because their function is purely probability analysis-based, they can be "poisoned" with junk data that messes up those probability tables and makes them draw or talk even more nonsense than they normally do. Those "AI" pop stars are, variously, just people in mo-cap suits with autotune steering rigged 3D models like a Vtuber or a combination of existing text, speech synthesis, and video synthesis AI software that's just running preprogrammed and vetted prompts to avoid the system spazzing out. Will there be "AI"-powered drone weapons in the near future? Absolutely. Not weapons that can think for themselves, but weapons that use image recognition software to identify people or military vehicles connected to basic fire control systems. Something broadly analogous to the QF-2200 Ghost from Macross Zero, essentially. Something like the Ghost X-9, Sharon Apple, the Siren Delta System, Skynet, Commander Data, etc. is a sci-fi pipe dream with even the foreseeable future's technology.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Not as such, no. The network didn't drop the series, though they did move it to a different time slot. What happened was the show's sponsor withdrew funding for the fourth cour because the series wasn't performing up to expectations, though production of the third cour was allowed to go ahead as normal. It did air in broadcast as a TV edit, same as Re:0096. Yeah, it seems unlikely that the GQuuuuuuX will go for longer than two cours. The way it's been paced makes it feel like it's one-and-done, but we'll have no way of knowing until it happens.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    He didn't say that either. The implication I read in it was that Disney LucasFilm has become a fan of the often unintentionally sexist trope Designated Girl Fight as a way to not-so-subtly highlight the more equitable gender balance in newer Star Wars stories. With newer Star Wars titles depicting more women in positions of leadership and in combat roles, it's inevitable we're going to see more conflicts between female characters in the franchise. The writers are naturally going to be a bit gunshy about conflicts involving female characters because it's a delicate balancing act. If it's not handled well and they show a male character overpowering a female one, they leave themselves open to accusations of sexism and endorsing violence against women. If they show the female character overpowering the man, then they're accused of character shilling or man-hating. It's kind of a no-win scenario, especially since there's still a social taboo against a man fighting/hitting a woman even if they're on an equal footing. The Designated Girl Fight is a kind of narrative safe space and workaround for that. Kleya making a return would make more sense than most alternatives, but I still think it's a terrible idea unless it's handled by the Andor showrunners who know how to handle the more mature and sophisticated characters. Filoni's people write fanfic-tier fanservice, plain and simple. They would not be able to do justice to any Andor character. Given that the political leaders of the Rebel Alliance seem to intensely distrust Kleya on principle simply because she worked with Luthen, a far more effective rebel leader than any of them, I can't really see her returning for any further stories. The only place she really feels like she'd fit would be a sequel trilogy-era story about the Resistance, but if they did it would mean burying her in heavy makeup to age her 30 years and that would probably adversely affect Elizabeth Dulau's performance.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, he didn't say two strong female characters as the primary conflict... just "in conflict". We do see quite a bit more of strong and/or powerful women in conflict with each other in Disney Star Wars stories. Whether that's authorial intent or simply a consequence of the more equitable gender distribution among main characters in more recent Star Wars titles is anyone's guess. Most of these conflicts are ideological rather than martial. For instance, in The Clone Wars there was the ideological conflict between the by-the-book padawan Barriss Offee and the unorthodox Ahsoka Tano which did actually lead to them having an actual fight as Barriss was gradually radicalized by the Clone Wars. It also had something of an ideological/cultural conflict between the actual pacifist Duchess Satine Kryze and her Death Watch-aligned sister Bo-Katan. Rebels had a few minor ones here and there like Ahsoka Tano and the Seventh Sister, Hera and Mon Mothma squaring off on the subject of proactive vs. cautious responses to the situation on Lothal, and Sabina vs. her mother Ursa over whether Mandalore should side with the Empire or Rebellion. The Mandalorian set up a fairly prominent ideological conflict between the religious traditionalist Armorer and the more modern Bo-Katan Kryze, as well as Ahsoka Tano vs. Morgan Elsbeth. Ahsoka has a repeat of the conflict between Hera and Mon Mothma and also implicitly the same conflict between Leia and Mon Mothma. I could go on, but you get the idea.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... in the same sense that it's merely very unlikely, not strictly impossible, that any randomly selected person will be trampled to death by a cow or struck by lightning on any given day. It could theoretically happen, and there are some people it's more likely to happen to than others, but the odds against it are so long that it almost certainly won't. After all, most Star Wars stories would not benefit from bringing back a character like Dedra Meero. She's a villain, sure... but she's a villainous bureaucrat. Former bureaucrat, as of the end of Andor. There's no end of those in Star Wars already. She lacks the adventure hooks of someone like a Sith assassin (Asajj Ventress), a Sith apprentice turned Crime Lord (Maul), a legendary bounty hunter, or a famously brilliant Imperial admiral (Thrawn) that would fit into a more conventional Star Wars story. Dedra Meero's relevance to the story and setting is mostly wrapped up in her connections to the other characters in Andor. What makes her important is her hunt for Cassian, her self-destructive determination to capture the mysterious rebel organizer Axis/Luthen Rael, and the obsession with justice she shared with Syril Karn. Those people are dead and gone now. Even if she weren't rotting in an Imperial prison for mishandling classified materials, a post-Andor Meero would be just another interchangeable sadistic evil Imperial bureaucrat like Minister Tua or Governor Price from Rebels. The only reason to bring her back would be for the New Republic to put her on trial for the Ghorman Massacre... and war crimes trials aren't exactly the thing Star Wars stories are usually made of.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    After War Gundam X wasn't out-and-out cancelled, per se. Its broadcast run was reduced by one cour partway through production due to lower-than-expected ratings and sales of plastic model kits and a move to a different time slot at several networks. Gundam: Reconguista in G was always a 26 episode series from the earliest stages of its development. Director Yoshiyuki Tomino deliberately restricted the length of the series to two cours, as he felt that was the limit to what he could do at his age and with the current state of the industry at the time. The series was poorly received, though not so much so that its run was affected. The Witch from Mercury, for all its many flaws, was also always planned to be a two cour series and was reportedly reasonably well-recieved in Japan. How long GQuuuuuuX will end up being, I have no idea. The last UC TV anime, Advent of the Red Comet, was just one cour... but like its predecessor Re:0096 it was a re-edit of a pre-existing OVA. I think I'd be pretty OK with GQuuuuuuX ending as a one cour series. Studio Khara has made such a mess of it that I don't think there's any saving the story... it would probably be better to tie off the bloody stump of the story and move on.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Disney is just LucasFilm's parent company. Their only involvement in its day-to-day operations is appointing the members of its Board of Directors. The development and production of new Star Wars stories is managed within LucasFilm itself by its Chief Creative Officer (Dave Filoni) and the various producers working under him. Dave Filoni has brought characters back past their use-by date, as noted previously, but that's effectively a fate reserved for Filoni's personal stable of action-friendly Creator's Pet characters that he used heavily in his Star Wars: the Clone Wars series and its spinoffs. As a non-action girl and a non-Filoni original character, Dedra Meero is profoundly unlikely to make a comeback at any point. 🤣
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The era of Gundam titles being ~50 episodes as standard has been over for a while now. We've only had two Gundam titles longer than two cours in the last fifteen years: Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (2011) and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (2015). IIRC, only three mainline Gundam titles have been shorter than four cours, those being After War Gundam X (3), Reconguista in G (2), and The Witch from Mercury (2). The pacing in Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is so awful that it's honestly hard to tell if the series is meant to be just one cour like the last proper UC series (Advent of the Red Comet) or if it's meant to be two.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Have they, though? 🤔 As far as I can find, they actually haven't. Normally when a character's ticket is explicitly punched they stay down. Andor (and Rogue One) just isn't that kind of story... and Dedra Meero's not that kind of character. She is done.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, no... but recent Gundam titles have stopped at 24 or less.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    At no point does the series actually say that she was sent to prison as a rebel spy. Meero's off-the-record interrogation by Director Krennic has Krennic suggest she was initially detained on suspicion of being a rebel spy. However, by the time she's interrogated Krennic seems to already be aware that the late Supervisor Jung was the rebel spy and Krennic makes it very clear that she's in much deeper trouble for other reasons. Namely: Her interference in Supervisor Heert's investigation and planned arrest of Luthen Rael/Axis, which she bungled so thoroughly in her eagerness that she cost the ISB their chance to interrogate a key rebel organizer they'd been chasing for almost five years. Her personal files were found to contain a huge amount of classified information about the Death Star program that she wasn't cleared to have, and which she confessed she had deliberately failed to report receiving in error. Information that was believed to have been compromised by Lonni Jung's intrusion into her files. Even if she were, on paper, sent to Narkina as a suspected rebel spy... the Rebel Alliance knows that she wasn't one. Within the hierarchy of the Empire's anti-rebel efforts, she was pretty darn high-profile. She was a relatively humble newly-promoted Supervisor at the start of the series, but partway through season one she ended up in charge of the ISB's counterintelligence hunt for rebel organizers like Luthen. Director Krennic himself actively seeks her advice on how to deal with Ghorman, and makes her his point man for the operation... and he's high enough up the Imperial hierarchy that he can beef with the Emperor's inner circle of trusted governors without fear. Maybe. Then again, the fact that her entire life has been destroyed by her own hand would make her a likely-seeming candidate for the hot floor. Not to mention that the Narkina prison factories are set up to prevent breakouts and prison riots by simply killing everyone. The only reason Cassian is able to escape the way he does is because he found a way to short out the floor in 52D.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    She'd almost certainly be found out fairly easily if she's still alive when the Rebel Alliance/New Republic finally takes control of the prison she's been left to rot in. After all, Dedra Meero was/is the Imperial officer responsible for orchestrating one of the Empire's first really overt and undisguised atrocities. She is a high profile war criminal in the eyes of the Rebel Alliance. The kind of person they're likely to want to bring to justice one way or the other. Whether that justice takes the form of a shoot-on-sight order or an order to arrest them and bring them to trial to be either re-imprisoned or executed depends on when and who finds her. (I'd assume the Rebels likely have some kind of card deck for high-profile Imperial officers and war criminals the way the US does to help troops identify enemy leaders.) Of course, this all presumes that she would still be alive at the time the Rebel Alliance either located and took control of the prison complex or the New Republic took over from the Empire. There is a very strong argument that she would not be alive by the time that happens. Unlike a regular Narkina inmate, ex-ISB supervisor Dedra Meero knows full bloody well that she's been handed a death sentence. Nobody is ever actually released from the prison. They just get shuffled around until they're worked to death or kill themselves. With her entire life and career now destroyed and being well aware that she is there to be worked to death, it's likely she will opt to step onto a hot floor and fry herself as we saw inmates do in season one rather than suffer for years. If her identity as a former ISB supervisor becomes known to her fellow inmates, she's likely to find herself being killed by her fellow prisoners. If she at any point lets slip that there is no actual release from the Narkina prisons, she's likely to find herself and everyone else on her floor being killed by the guards to keep the information a secret as we saw happen in season one. If the Empire decides to withdraw from or shut down the prisons because they are either not needed or at risk of falling into Rebel hands, the most likely outcome is that the Empire will simply activate ALL the floors and kill every inmate in the prison so that none of them will join the fight against them. Ultimately, the odds of Meero still being alive to be found by the Rebel Alliance or New Republic are very very slim. It's vastly more likely that she would be dead, either at her own hand or that of the prison guards, by the time the prisons come under Rebel or New Republic control.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Mon is not specifically mentioned to be involved with Meero, but Ghorman had been her particular issue in the Senate for literal years before the massacre and her denunciation of the Emperor in the Senate. She first mentions it all the way back in season 1, around 3 years before the actual massacre. It's a fairly safe bet she knows most of the information about what happened there. If not upfront, then at least after the fact. It was her key wedge issue that led to the creation of the Rebel Alliance. She absolutely would not break Meero out of prison though. She would probably put her on trial and send her back to prison rather than execute her though.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    If you're thinking of Darth Vader, he didn't have a redemption arc... he had a last second change of heart after his boss spent like 30 minutes interviewing his replacement right in front of him, then immediately f***ing died. He never had to work with anyone to prove he had changed or try to earn forgiveness from anyone. That he gets to come back as a "good" ghost owes a lot to his worst atrocities being retcons from the prequel trilogy, the Force's BS moral absolutes (and apparently only saving his last known moral alignment), and his status as The Chosen One and former violent offender apparently making him ideal to do the Force version of a "scared straight" PSA in Ahsoka. 🤣 (I'm told that, in the EU, the few people he tries to speak to as a ghost tell him to F off because his last-second change of heart doesn't absolve him of all the horrible sh*t he did.) If you're thinking of Kylo Ren, he also didn't really have a redemption arc... he had a last second change of heart after his new boss started creeping on his crush and his mom died, then he almost immediately f***ing died. Only a few of them (e.g. Cassian, Melshi, K-2SO) and only years after the massacre, leaving them lots of time to share intel. It's not said that the Ghorman Front survivors who joined the Alliance in Rebels were wiped out. We know that there is one person for whom the Ghorman Massacre was a very personal subject who is absolutely still around decades later too... Mon Mothma. Your whole line of reasoning does not work.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's demonstrably untrue... even just within the context of Andor itself. Dedra Meero was an ISB supervisor who was in charge of multiple sectors and a major conflict zone (Ghorman). She wasn't quite a public figure, but she was someone that was under scrutiny by the Ghorman Front, by Luthen's agents, and by other rebel groups. As we know from multiple stories, most of those groups shared intelligence. There's also two years between the Ghorman Massacre and the events of Rogue One in which survivors of the Ghorman Front, Cassian Andor, and possibly K-2SO could share all their intelligence with the newly formed Rebel Alliance. Plus the Alliance also has Kleya, who knows all about Dedra Meero and many other top-ranking ISB operatives. Not only that, but the Ghorman Massacre was one of the Empire's worst public atrocities and individuals involved in it would naturally have been marked as war criminals that the Rebel Alliance (and New Republic) would wantt o bring to trial. (The briefing room scene where Cassian relays Kleya's message suggests the Alliance is well aware of who the ISB's supervisors are and what they've done.) So no... it's not like all information on Dedra Meero and her war crimes magically disappeared and she can be mistaken for a rebel spy. The very idea is ridiculous. Uh, no... no I did not. In fact, what I stated was the opposite. That Dedra Meero is a True Believer in the Empire and the ISB's vision of Imperial Justice. There is nothing morally ambiguous about her. She is full-on Lawful Evil. Two entire seasons of the series clearly show that she is not in any way conflicted about her role in the ISB. She's blase about mass arrest quotas and the detainees being worked to death in prison labor camps. She quite calmly advocates that a captured rebel pilot be murdered to avoid tipping off his compatriots that he had been captured. On Ferrix, she's shown to be enjoying herself watching Dr. Gorse torture suspected Rebel agents like Bix and Salman Paak to the brink of insanity with audio recordings of a genocide as a way of collecting intelligence and has no problem with the local prefect executing Salman by hanging afterward. She not only proposes a Final Solution to the "Ghorman problem" at Krennic's conference, she personally creates the conditions for the Ghorman Massacre to occur and then gives the order to start the massacre herself. She justifies the massacre to her boyfriend as necessary to advance their careers. The only time she's ever shown to be in any way bothered by what she does is when her boyfriend attempts to wring her neck after learning that she's actively trying to make the situation on Ghorman worse, and he ends up dead as a result. Her role in season two is a very overt echo of a real world war criminal responsible for a genocide. That's not moral ambiguity, that's genuine evil. Not the cackling melodramatic kind embodied by Emperor Palpatine, but unambiguous evil nonetheless. What makes you assume her thirst for revenge would be focused on the Empire? Remember, the Empire is what she believes in. What she has devoted her entire life to. What literally raised her, according to her own account of her past to Eedy. Her service to the ISB and the Empire is practically her entire identity and her faith in the Empire is practically absolute. The Rebels utterly disgust her, as we see on many occasions in the series. And remember, when Director Krennic confronts her in the ISB interrogation room on Coruscant, we see her put two and two together VERY quickly and realize that the person who stole her credentials and accessed the files about the Death Star that had been mistakenly sent to her was a Rebel agent and the person responsible for the leak. As far as Dedra's concerned, she's in that prison because a rebel spy broke into her files and destroyed her career. That's not likely to endear the Rebellion to her. Not to mention, of course, that a "redemption" arc would be a boneheaded reversal of her entire character arc across both seasons of the show. It's like proposing a redemption arc for Tarkin... he's a Complete Monster, those don't get redeemed they get destroyed.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Oh please no. That's so dumb and it would ruin her entire character arc. Meero's role in the story, like Karn's, is to show that the Empire emphatically does not care about anyone. The Empire's authoritarian desire for total control means that deviation from its edicts is seen as a challenge to its authority and punished without mercy, no matter how loyal or well-intentioned that person is. It's only ever a matter of time before the regime turns on and destroys even its most mindlessly loyal lackeys for some perceived or actual failure, mistake, or misstep. Dedra Meero was a true believer in the Empire and the ISB's particularly draconian idea of "justice". She all but unflinchingly ordered a genocide for the Empire's benefit. Neither her lifelong loyalty nor her professional achievements in the Empire's service mattered a damn once she finally made a mistake that affected the Empire's objectives. She wound up sent to be worked to death in the very same prison labor camps she spent her days shipping people to. That irony is the perfect end to her story. A redemption arc would be absolutely ridiculous... not only is Meero someone who absolutely loathes the Rebellion, there's no way the Rebels are going to overlook what she's done. Not only did she likely send many thousands of people to prison labor camps like Narkina to be worked to death, she literally orchestrated a genocide. The very genocide that directly led to the formation of the Rebel Alliance. There's already a better character for that role from the same period too... ISB Agent Kallus.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episode last night... another frustrating disappointment from a series that seems to specialize in them. Eight episodes in, and the series really still has not done anything worthwhile with its main characters, its premise, or its setting. GQuuuuuuX's writers seem content to do the bare minimum with the main cast of Machu, Shuji, and Nyan. They seem to be far more interested in Steamed Hams-ing this other, vastly more relevant, interesting, and consequential story going on in parallel with GQuuuuuuX's story. No, we're not allowed to see it for ourselves... but they'll happily take anywhere from two to ten minutes out of every episode to have the Zeon secondary characters tell each other about it for the audience's benefit. A cynical person might get the impression that Machu, Shuji, and Nyan's story is an unnecessary addition because Studio Khara couldn't get Bandai Namco to agree to finance an anime based on a straight Gihren's Greed scenario.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... that one took me a second. Nicely done.👍 It definitely could've been worse. He could've been Val Kyrie or some such. I'm definitely curious to get into the part after that, since most of that section introducing Tom Kato is about his US Navy and later UN Forces service, but he mentions a testing accident that occurred during his brief stint working as an engine tester for OTEC where a 150m area of London was apparently compressed into a singularity.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I haven't done the whole section, but I greatly appreciated the lengths they went to for a single absolutely dreadful dad joke. Y'see... that section is presented as a collection of anecdotes from its in-story author who participated in the VF-X test flights. He takes a moment in that section part, titled "The Right Stuff", to properly introduce himself. He's a Japanese-American from the great state of California, a CalTech graduate with a BS in Aerospace Engineering, a US Navy F-14D Tomcat pilot who served alongside Roy Focker in the Unification Wars, and later a member of the in-story Multiconfiguration Analysis Team under Col. Chiba. His family claims to descend from the legendary 16th century ninja master Kato Danzo AKA "Flying Kato". The name of this amazing Tomcat fighter ace? Tom Kato. UGH. 🤣
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the obvious counterargument there is Borderlands. That too was an adaptation of a popular video game with a barely-there plot beloved for its visual aesthetic and gameplay in the hands of a respected production company with a somewhat uneven track record and an average (for an action movie) budget of about $113M. It should have been able to break even and turn a profit without breaking a sweat as long as it didn't lose the fans. A couple questionable creative decisions and dubious casting choices later... and the studio found itself $80M in the red as the not-so-proud owner of the third biggest box office bomb of 2024.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Some parts of that story are likely too unremarkable/mundane/boring to bother putting into a series too. For instance, the theft of the shuttle is probably a nonevent. Rebels steal Imperial shuttles so often in Star Wars shows that how easily and how often they're stolen has become a bit of an in-story running joke across multiple series. "How is it the Empire lets us keep stealing these things?" - Kanan Jarrus
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... I'm one of those people. I think we talked a brief bit about it during SDCon back before the COVID lockdowns. My translation of the Special Edition book is about 80% complete. I'd hoped to be done with it inside of a year, but free time became a rather scarce commodity a few weeks after that first lockdown and hasn't really recovered. 😅
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I've only ever seen copies of Special Edition and Vol.4 in person. I've managed to score a couple copies of Special Edition over the years on YJA and Mandarake and so on. Just a fantastic book, IMO. You can really feel the team's love for the series in the massive attention to detail they put into it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Adapting a popular property with an extremely vague or borderline non-existent story just means the probability that the film's story will be harshly criticized by the game's fans for "getting it wrong" is almost 100%.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Just cast Jack Black as Let Me Solo Her and make the whole thing a comedy. It'll save a lot of trouble in the long run.
×
×
  • Create New...