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.

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.

Anything that goes slow enough to be captured into an orbit will eventually spiral inwards.

Well, most of it (when we're talking matter not already in another black hole). Ordinary stuff orbiting near a black hole gets torn apart by the enormous tides and forms a disk-like structure similar to a gas giant's rings. Interactions among it and with the black hole's magnetic and gravitic fields can eject a bit of it in a pair of jets out along the axis of the disk, powered apparently by the rest of the stuff falling in.

These two black holes wouldn't stick to each other, but start swirling around each other and eventually merge together.

This is partly because of friction with and among other stuff in orbit around the black holes in their "accretion disks". (Black holes experience friction by eating the stuff in the other hole's disk of debris, with the momentum of the black-hole-plus-dinner thus being different from the black-hole-before-dinner.)

It's also partly because the rapid acceleration of things passing near a black hole or orbiting it causes the emission of gravity waves to be strong enough that it carries off substantial energy. (In less extreme environments, like suns and planets, the waves are not detectable by current instruments. In the case of two black holes,orbiting each other, they're detectable from across pretty much the whole universe.) This loss of energy amounts to "friction" that eventually causes co-orbiting pairs of black holes to spiral in and combine.

Perhaps, but the honeybee has the advantage of producing a second product, the honey, in quantities in excess of what the hive needs to survive. I don't know (literally, I don't - totally welcome to links to some details) if that's the same for the native species.

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.

LOL - far from it. Things are pretty fucked up in Europe, along many dimensions.

But Europeans are a lot less on the "EVERYTHING HAS TO BE THE BEST AND GREATEST EVER !!!!" train.

Nope.

The USA never does something. It always overdoes everything it does. Same here.

Elsewhere in the world, sports gambling is a small side-hustle for fans who like to spice things up a bit. In the USA, everyone is always for their personal ticket into the billionaire's club, the unicorn start-up or the license to print money.

"sane" is a word that's prohibited entry into the USA and shot at the border should it try. :-)