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.

All the more reason to use different user names and emails for various sites. If you are careful, no one will know you are a dog.

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.

One possibility is to compare scores of similarly located students and focus on those doing better than the average, even if their score is lower than others admitted. The assumption Is such. student overcame challenges and thus should succeed at Harvard. One challenge with taht approach is you are likely to have small populations to compare results, so average scores may be misleading since many students simply will not take teh SAT/ACT and thus you have a self selected set of data points that do not reflect what the average score would be.

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.

Apple apparently is taking a different route and paying for access to content:

Apple offers publishers millions to train AI on archives

Apple has apparently paid image, video and music database service Shutterstock to access its vast archive of files, all with the goal of taking the files and training AI systems. The deal is said to be worth between $25 million and $50 million, according to news source Reuters

No doubt there will be ways to bypass that but will make it harder and thus less attractive to may thieves.

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.

And since bribery is assured under the guise of "campaign contributions", that system is always going to be flawed.

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?