Cinemas essentially killed themselves in the early 2000s, at least over here in Europe. There used to be local cinemas everywhere, with one or at most 2 main halls and 2-4 small ones. The main hall or halls showed the Hollywood blockbuster of the month and the smaller ones the other movies, the ones that didn't fill the main hall.

Then all of those local cinemas started disappearing and were replaced with the massive cinemas we have today, with 10+ main halls and no small ones (or "small" ones the size that the main hall of local cinemas used to be). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been there where these massive halls were filled to even somewhat near capacity. Most of the time you can pick wherever because there's 2-4 people per row. Make it 10% full if you want to be generous.

Of course that's not viable. They thought economy of scale. They thought they can have more efficiency than the local places by having fewer cashiers and popcorn sellers per customer. They thought on paper and not in the real world.

And to have even a chance to fill those halls, the only movies that they could show were blockbusters.

It seems pretty simple to me. If corporations are allowed to outsource our jobs to cheaper workers, we should be allowed to buy cheaper products from overseas.

spot on

I can recommend to everyone to have at least one non-geek good friend. I'll reset your understanding of how "easy" tech actually is.

Or a photo from 30 years ago that looks nothing like them today, but if asked they can truthfully say that yes, it's a photo of them.

I think Apple doesn't understand what it had with the big iMac.

I still have my 2017 one around. When it came out, it was revolutionary. A full 5K display with a reasonable CPU and GPU at a very reasonable price. Built-in webcam and speakers. The only necessary cable was power (if you went bluetooth keyboard and mouse). A wonderfully uncluttered desktop with a mean machine that also looks nice.

Why would I make many steps back from that?

I've done the math last year. I also thought Mac mini + Studio Display (it's not that much more expensive than a good 4K display) would do it, but it turns out that once you upgrade the Mac mini to something actually useable for desktop work, you're not that far from a Studio price-wise.

I really, really, really wish someone took a big fence post and hammered some sense into the idiots at Apple.

They have. I've seen such in several different offices.

So finally a new 27" or even 30" iMac with an M4 chip?

Come on Apple, wake up. People want an affordable desktop machine, not $4k+ for a Studio+Display combo.

(I'm going to start posting this now every time I see anything about facial recognition software, because people need to understand how dangerous this software is to implement and trust on a large scale.)

Let's pretend for a moment that facial recognition software is 99.9% accurate. It's not, but for sake of argument, let's go with it.

Now, pretend you walk into a store, the software flags you as a criminal who shoplifted from the store earlier, and you get arrested. If that store received 5,000 visitors that day, what are the odds you were a false positive, i.e. you were flagged as a criminal but weren't actually the one who committed the crime?

Answer: 80%.

Why? The average Joe wrongly assumes a 99.9% accuracy rate means 99.9% of the time it will identify a criminal correctly. But it does not mean this. What it means is that the system will correctly identify -anybody- 99.9% of the time; flagging a face as "not the criminal" counts to this accuracy score as equally as "is the criminal". So, out of 5,000 people, 0.1%, or five people, will be identified by the system as the criminal. This means that, if you are flagged as the criminal, and you are one out of 5,000 visitors, then there's a 4/5 chance, or 80%, that you are not the criminal.

But here's the kicker: Facial recognition software is being used to convict people. This is the real crime. This technology is an emperor wearing no clothes, but everyone from prosecutors to juries, pretends that it is authoritative. This technology is not 99.9% accurate; at best, it's about 99% accurate, as long as the individual is Caucasian and male. At worst, it's about 65% accurate. We would endanger the stability of society to take something this inaccurate and use it to convict people of crimes.

Reducing something to just over 1 % of its original planned size isn't "scaling down". That's an euphemism for "giving up, just finishing the stuff we've already largely built".

Converted to your typical house, it means instead of building the whole house you're building the tiny guest toilet and nothing else.

The pressures of capitalism can also work to force good quality for the money spent on education. Not everything in capitalism is about the lowest price. I know that cheap-cheap-cheap has become a kind of mantra, but that's not god-given.

It's the industrialisation of everything. Streamlining and defining processes for everything and then running the processes like a computer program not like a guideline for ordinary days.

I see a lot of that. It's bureaucracy, not capitalism.

Agreed.

What if he uses a tool to do that? Where is the line? wc to check if you satisfied the word count requirement? A spell-checker? An AI?

Assuming that the actual grading is still done by a human and AI is just one of several tools used in the process?

Don't understand the hate. This is actually AI being used in the right way. As an assistant. Not to replace a human, but to help with the repetitive ordinary tasks that are part of the job.

My own experience is similar. When I ask AI to generate some text for a purpose, the result is meh. But as a text critic or to get suggestions for improvements, as a proof reader, it's pretty good.

What should happen is that we don't take an AI output and just use it as-is, but use it as an input for a human who does the actual job. AI isn't magic, it's just a tool. Nobody complains that a lever enables us to excerpt more force than our muscles alone could.

In other words: Tennessee has just outlawed clouds.

They're chemicals (H2O is definitely a chemical) and they affect the intensity of sunlight.

(from the github link)

Bit much for my local setup, so we'll have to wait a bit before we can test this properly.

If this is an April Fool's Joke or a sincere attempt by Arizona to compete with Florida for dumbest state ever.