Honestly, yes. I went in pretty skeptical because I don’t really like the 32nd century setting and find teenage drama tiresome. SFA is actually pretty good. I really liked this episode: classic Trek storytelling and excellent world-building. The teenage drama stuff is annoying (to me personally), but that’s kinda the price of having a show about cadets.

There are some great characters, too. Jay-den (the Klingon and focus of this episode) is great, and Lura Thok, the Cadet Master, is an absolute gem of a character.

the actual debate was always amongst the students. Vance was determined to convince the Klingons to accept asylum, but “compelling” them did not seem to be seriously on the table.

That was my read of it, too. The cadets were debating the course of action with various shades of compulsion in their arguments. I thought that the debate device was great for fleshing out the overriding question of forcing help on people.

I suppose it would be that the Klingons’ readiness to do this ritualistic faux combat shows some growth

This is a great point, and I hadn’t thought of that. I could definitely see 24th century Klingons demand real bloodshed. Though, perhaps the growth is born of a certain pragmatism that must develop when a species is near extinction; they simply do not have the luxury of losing any individuals.

Yep, I also have a directory for my programming projects on each of my machines, but mine is Programming. On my main desktop, I also have an ISOs folder to hold my OS ISOs for VMs and old CD-ROM game ISOs.

Yeah, I’ve found AI generated code to be hit or miss. It’s been fine to good for boilerplate stuff that I’m too lazy to do myself, but is super easy CS 101 type stuff. Anything that’s more specialized requires the LLM to be hand-held in the best case. More often than not, though, I just take the wheel and code the thing myself.

By the way, I think it’s cool that you use Old English characters in your writing. In school I used to do the same in my notes to write faster and smaller.

It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what Section 31 is supposed to be. Sloan wasn’t a good guy. 31 actively tried to commit genocide.

The idea behind them is that arguments of ends justifying the means and “getting dirty” to preserve higher ideals is morally, philosophically, and practically bankrupt. The Federation didn’t need 31 to win the war, and in fact, their methods would have made it much worse. Section 31 as a plot device exists to show us that there will always be those looking to use higher ideals to support terrible actions, and we must be constantly vigilant against them.

It truly pains me how that message has been twisted, and people think Section 31 are not only good guys but also cool.