Well there's the problem: they turned it from a gay wedding into a trans wedding and I'm guessing Chinese audiences are just not ready for that yet.

Although it was about a brain implant spewing ads the Common People episode initially required a 'plus' upgrade (so even the name was the same) to avoid ads until it too was not enough and you had to afford the 'lux' level. I'm beginning to wonder whether it is predicting the future or inspiring it by giving bad people bad ideas.

Is there anything worth pirating? I've rediscovered an old hobby... reading. I'm down to just Prime now because it has the most older British detective shows and period dramas (a bit of a favorite with my partner right now). If it was left to me, I'd simply cancel it all. My last Disney+ subscription went unused for a couple of months, save for my daughter and I watching watching Alien Romulus (what a sad waste that was).

So far as I'm concerned they can raise it to a million dollars a month.

Agreed but I think that the average adult is far less capable that you think. If you want a good scare look at the average level of education that people achieve, it is much lower than you think. This makes them more susceptible to charismatic individuals offering plausible (to them) sounding solutions. It's worth remembering that Hitler was democratically elected because people thought he could solve the serious problems that Germany was facing at the time.

You would need to add at least a couple of 0s for it to even begin to seem reasonable.

Blaming the people is a very dangerous, and frankly extremely undemocratic approach to take. If you look around the western democracies I think the problem is that voters are getting increasingly fed up with politicians who are not addressing the increasing problems that they are facing: salaries rising slower than inflation, house prices going through the roof, immigration out of control etc. Mainstream politicians on both the left and the right seem either incapable or unwilling to address these problems.

This has opened the door for more extremist politicians on either the right or left who promise to fix things by whatever means necessary and people are increasingly voting for them because it looks like they are the only ones who may be capable of actually addressing their problems. It's not that people are broken, it's that when you are drowning in problems you'll reach out to whomever is offering to help, regardless of who they may be.

So it was worse than falling asleep at the wheel - they bent the knee to him. That is what has largely amazed me seeing this play out as a non-American. For all the bluster about how free and democratic the US is, the courts, politicians, press and companies all seem to have just largely capitulated and accepted Trump's rule by proclamation and speech-suppression by firing/intimidation tactics.

How do you figure that? A human generally can't tell AI generated text from human generated text although I will admit that I'm getting a bit of an AI-vibe from your post.

How do you figure that? The fee is $100k _per year_ not just one off!

As someone with a PhD, although I arrived in the US with it, I left as soon as it was reasonable to do so and that was in the early 2000's. What I found interesting was that when I arrived most of the discussion amongst my fellow European immigrants was jobs in the US but within a few years it changed very much looking at jobs in Canada, Europe and elsewhere - far fewer were considering staying in the US and I suspect that number has now cratered given that I'm a member of an international collaboration where a lot of the European members are now not even willing to visit the US.

Could I have earned a bit more had I stayed in the US? Probably but the point of money is to make your life easier and more enjoyable and frankly being treated like crap (and I don't just mean as a foreigner - your government and many companies often treat even US citizens like crap too) undid for me any benefit of slightly more money. So for me it was an easy choice even back then, although even now I still enjoy visiting the US - but you could not pay me enough money to make me want to live there.

No, we use the J-1 visa, or at least we used to. H-1B is aimed at businesses, not research.

Indeed, I'm sure it will be so remote that it will not happen in the US at all.

It's not science, it's art. As a physics professor I can definitely say that a large number of new pedagogical methods are tested on students without much, if any, research backing them up. Even when an attempt at measuring objective outcomes is made it rarely, if ever uses a control group where two instructors teach two equivalent groups of students in two different ways. Instead it usually uses subjective interviews with students which are then analyzed in an attempt to extract some degree of mildly objective data.

Even when you have something that seems to have credible research backing it someone else can try the method only to find that it completely fails for them. The conclusion I have arrived at over the years is that education is far more of an art than it is a science. Indeed, I think a lot of it is based on your enthusiasm as a teacher for the method and subject matter. If you see or develop a cool new idea for teaching something then your enthusiasm is picked up by students who then enjoy the material more and generally learn more.

....unless you make education the primary and overriding goal of schools again. Schools today are seen and used more as day care and social welfare providers. We need to return them to being first and foremost educational establishments focused on providing different educational outcomes to different students...and that means being willing and able to fail students who don't make the required standards.

How accurate is this tool for modern text through? It claims it is 99.85% accurate on text generated before 2021 but styles and use of language change over time, especially in the sciences. As the article itself notes there may be a false positive rate that is increasing over time as our use of language diverges from what it was trained on. Also it cannot differentiate between passages written by AI vs. written by humans and edited by AI and the later is exactly how AI should be used.

Then there is the question as to why this is at all relevant. Decades ago papers were edited and typed by human secretaries with the scientists responsible for ensuring accuracy. How is use of LLMs any different from that? In science what matters is whether the paper is correct and reveals some new truth about our universe not how the text was generated. What would be useful is to know whether papers it flags with AI content have more retractions or errata than non-AI papers and whether the rate scales with the fraction of AI-edited or generated text - that would be a useful indication that people are misusing AI which would be good to know but simply using AI appropriately to edit and improve text is no different from using a spellchecker to fix spelling mistakes.