A diverse and healthy movie scene is what's great for the theatre community, both exhibitors and movie lovers. I suspect economies of scale and consolidation of studios has resulted in larger scale productions, which tend to lean "safe" to protect investments (clearly that's a generalization, but there is definitely a growing sense of "meh" whenever a new movie comes out).

People want to be taken for a journey with an original and engaging story, not just more franchise installments. "Joker: Folie à Deux, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Transformers One, and Deadpool & Wolverine" All of those are sequels/franchise movies. It feels like movies as ART is dead and it's all sequels/entertainment. Basically, movies have turned into explody novellas.

Agreed. Of course it's expected to be "materially better", otherwise what's the point of releasing a new version? It's not like ChatGPT is MS Office, with incumbent accounts locked in and money to be made with new versions. This "news" isn't really news.

Maybe a technique like this could be used for overcoming very specific "air gap" scenarios, like in some James Bond movie.

As Gabe Newell said about piracy a decade ago: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

"Cancel culture" is just a vague bullshit distraction buzzword. YES, you should remove public hate speech that instigates violence or genocide or compromises public safety, like yelling "fire" in a crowded stadium for shits and giggles . NO, you should not try to stop other speech because that's called free speech. Finding and pushing to the foreground words like "cancel culture" is just another rightwing tactic to distract from the underlying reasoning and morality of policies, which is what matters.

Jon Stewart is not being removed because he's advocating hatespeech. He's being removed because the company is worried his criticism will compromise Apple's profit, either through limiting sales in China or (ultimately) forcing Apple to relocate manufacturing. Let's just talk about the reality underneath in clear terms, not in propaganda thought-stoppers like "cancel culture".

> NEEDS to accept China
These words really, really need to be unpacked.

> NEEDS
Apple can always relocate to other places, but yes it'll increase cost per unit.

> to accept China
"accept" is a horribly vague word to use here. There is doing business in China, and then there's betraying supposedly core corporate values to increase profits X%.

Hypothesis from that article:

> “Not all but some white dwarfs transition from being hydrogen- to helium-dominated on their surface,” Caiazzo said. “We might have possibly caught one such white dwarf in the act.”
> If so, the scientists believe that an asymmetric magnetic field could be causing the transition to occur in a lopsided way. “If the magnetic field is stronger on one side, it could be limiting convection [bubbling in the helium layer],” Caiazzo said. “On the other side, convection could be winning out and so the hydrogen layer has been lost.”

Not to mention, it'll likely be patchwork: the first massive chunk will be heavier and less efficient. Then technology will improve, and perhaps it'll be thinner and more efficient. Then it'll improve even more, etc. Not to mention, it need not be a total sphere at first. I don't think any of us can even fathom how or why humanity would need that much sheer mindboggling energy. It's like giving all the nuclear power in the world to an anthill at this point. By the time we can build a Dyson sphere, we'll probably have solved many of the problems we see now.

It's worth noting that China's average household income is much less than the US. And while there is urban sprawl everywhere in the world, China has much greater density overall so people may not need to drive so far or so fast.

Buy now, and get TWO free instances of batteries dying on your bluetooth headset midway through a Teams call where speakers would disturb others!

Lockdown and changes to society have resulted in much more insular, not only sedentary, lifestyles.

Is Adblock Browser, based on Chrome, any good?

I would imagine this newfound freedom will be a welcome change to some organisations too: less necessary investment in real estate, and they get to sell their work-at-home flexibility instead of increasing salaries.