Dion Starfire

Solid point. I was definitely assuming a StarTAC rather than an old Android phone that could be turned into a Home Assistant dashboard or digital photo frame.

If it’s 3g-only, it won’t get a network signal anymore. So mostly it’s a novelty that can play badly written Java games.

The litter box thing gets even better - the root of it was a school that did indeed have litter boxes in every classroom, meant for human use. But it had nothing to do with Therian kids identifying as cats. It was in response to the question “what if a kid needs to use the bathroom during an active shooter lockdown?”

Let’s take the pronouns out of it. Suppose you have a child named Elizabeth who wants to be called “Beth”. This child tells the teacher “please don’t tell my parents that I’m going by Beth; they’ll beat me if you do”. In a rational world, the teacher would be able to report this as the child abuse it is. But imagine this teacher lives in a city/state/country where the judicial system refuses to prosecute nickname-related beatings as child abuse.

What is the morally correct action for this teacher to take?

Ironically, Star Trek is considered “hard sci-fi”, even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn’t related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the “science”, and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.

Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.

Hard sci-fi says “this is how this works”, even if it’s complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says “just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices”.

This concept is why I have a deep respect for DuckDuckGo as a company. When interviewing there for a SRE position, the round 2 and 3 interviews included coding challenges. They paid (IIRC) $75/hr based on the maximum time they wanted candidates to spend on each assignment. I ended up not getting the position, but they’re the only company I made it to the final decision step with that I didn’t feel was wasting my time.