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He doesn't have the patience to actually watch full episodes with rare exceptions, rather just watching selected scenes from: www.youtube.com/channel/UCdeIGY2DIjpGf0A2m9GSE3g, but still, it is interesting.

What appeals to Ciro in this series is how almost nothing is solved by violence, almost everything is decided in the bridge, at the "cerebral" level of the command structure. This reminds Ciro of a courtroom of law sometimes.

Maybe there's also a bit of 90's nostalgia involved too though, as this is something that would show on some random cable channels a bored young Ciro would have browsed during weekends, never really watching full episodes.

One crime of many episodes is being completely based on some stupid new scientific concept, which any character to back it up.

Another thing that hurt is that due to their obsession with the senior members of the crew, sometimes those senior members are sent in ridiculously risky operations, which is very unrealistic.

Episodes that Ciro watched fully and didn't regret:

s02e09 Measure of a man en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) see also physics and the illusion of life
s04e14 Clues en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clues_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
s04e15 First contact en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation). Although the premise that the aliens look so much like humans, and worse, that Decker could speak their language to the point of passing as one of their race is preposterous, the idea of inversion of first contact is just too cute.
s07e15 The Lower Decks en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Decks_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation), sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism near cynincism, yes please

Semi worth it:

s03e11 The Hunted memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hunted_(episode) if it weren't for the ending, maybe this would have been decent

Not worth it:

Cause and effect

TODO

s06e11 Chain of command

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List of animated television series by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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Futurama by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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The Simpsons by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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Video 1.

The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened by Super Eyepatch Wolf (2017)

Source. This interesting video essay makes the main point that the Simpsons used to be good because they mocked mainstream. But then they became mainstream, which basically defeated their purpose. Think different from Apple comes to mind.

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Eclipse (IDE) by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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Once upon a time (early 2010's), Eclipse dominated the IDE landscape and all was good. NetBeans was around too. And Java was still unmarred by Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc..

But then something happened.

For some reason, Eclipse started to decay.

And the project that had once been a vibrant community of awesomeness, started to become... a zombie of its former self.

Buggyness started increasing. And not even hard to fix bugs. One liners that affect every user immediately after startup.

Sometimes, to Eclipse's defense they weren't "bugs". Just features that it became evident with time every programmer expected from a modern IDE.

But somehow the Eclipse community had a deep problem. A cancer. It had completely lost touch with user experience.

Perhaps is was due to the increasing interest of the several corporations that had adopted Eclipse as the base IDE for the proprietary solutions?

Perhaps.

Many users stuck to the IDE.

Some heroic efforts were made as plugins that drastically improved certain defects. The Darkest Dark plugin comes to mind.

But all those efforts required configuration. A setup time that most users simply don't have. The core devteam had become dumb and dead, unable to incorporate such changes.

This greatly opened up the space for other competing IDEs to come along. The "semi feature complete but at least easy to use and not so buggy" Visual Studio Code and the proprietary JetBrains IDEs being some of the most notable ones.

Using Eclipse as of the early 2020's is such a mixed experience. If you spend enough time to configure out the key buggyness, there are moments where you can feel "OMG, this feature is amazing".

But the effort is just too great, and soon another bug or obvious missing feature hits you and brings you back to reality.

Every young person uses VS Code now. Eclipse is dead, and there is no way back, usage will just continue dropping.

RIP, Eclipse. It wasn't meant to be.

Bibliography:

Figure 1.
Eclipse. usage from 2012 to 2016 according to a JRebel survey
. Source.

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Crushbridge by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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It is good to see that top-universities is still keeping up with it's main purpose: spontaneous eugenics:

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Cumbridge by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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www.facebook.com/cumbridgepage/

The porn version of Crushbridge, died in 2020.

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University of Cambridge slang by

Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16

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 Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.

Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!

Video 1.

Intro to OurBigBook

. Source.

We have two killer features:

topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1.
Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
Video 2.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source.
local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
Figure 2.
You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
.
Figure 3.
Visual Studio Code extension installation
.
Figure 4.
Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
.
Figure 5.
Web editor
. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
Video 3.
Edit locally and publish demo
. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
Video 4.
OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
. Source.
Internal cross file references done right:
Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6.
Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
.
Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate
Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade