Eh.

Some cultural features are neutral, e.g., what you do about shoes when entering a home. Do you take them off and leave them at the door because shoes are dirty? Do you keep your shoes on because you have guests and you don't want them to have to look at your feet because feet are disgusting? If you do take off the shoes, does it matter how you line them up, and which direction the toes point? This all depends how you were raised; it's neither good nor bad, it's just culture.

But some cultural features are actively good for society. Japanese culture has features that lead to a low crime rate, for instance, and that's a good thing. Many cultures value things like integrity (particularly, keeping your word) and hospitality, and these are good positive values, that are good for society. I think it follows that there can also be cultural features that are bad for society. To avoid offending foreigners, I'll pick on my own society for an example here: in American culture, it's normal for people to deliberately lie to their children about important ontological issues, for entertainment purposes. That's *evil* but almost everyone here does it. (One of the best examples of this phenomenon, is Santa Claus.)

Bringing it back around to the Persian example from the article, my question would be, why is it that humans native to the culture only get this right 80% of the time. AI getting it wrong most of the time doesn't bother me, that's the AI companies' problem, and phooey on them anyway, so what. But if humans native to the culture are missing it 20% of the time, to me, that makes it sound like it must be some kind of esoteric, highly-situational interaction that regular people wouldn't have to deal with on anything resembling a regular basis; but no, we're talking about a basic social interaction that people have to do every day. Something seems off about that. That's a lot of pressure to put on people, to undertake something that difficult, and be expected to get it right all the time, and then catastrophically fail one time out of five. I don't think I'd want to live under that kind of social pressure.

Eh, I kind of hope Hollywood goes all-in on AI generated content, tbh. They haven't produced much that's worth watching any time recently anyway, and if they go under, maybe it'll clear the way for better content creators to rise to prominence, maybe even someone who can figure out how to write a script from scratch, that is NOT the eighty-third sequel to a mediocre nineties action movie, or the twenty-seventh reboot of a superhero franchise.

On the one hand, yes, the job market *is* a bit down right now, and yes, getting a job, especially a decent one, has always been more difficult when you don't have any meaningful work experience yet.

But I don't think it's really significantly worse, at least here in the Midwest, than in past generations. The young people I know, generally have been able to find work that is commensurate with their qualifications, to an extent that is pretty comparable to what I've seen in the past, most of the time. Occasionally, somebody in a previous generation has gotten lucky and had an easier time and gotten snapped up for basically the first real job application they filled out, because the economy was up or whatever (my own experience getting an IT job in 2000 is an excellent example of this), but that has always been the exception rather than the rule. For most of history, getting your first really _good_ job has been difficult, and often required you to work a not-so-fantastic job for a few years first. (Heck, I worked fast food for several years, including a couple of years after getting my degree, before I lucked into that IT job. I've never regretted having that in my background, though I'm certainly pleased it didn't end up being my entire career.)

On the gripping hand, my experience with Gen Z is that in terms of employment opportunities, they aren't really any more entitled, on average, than Millennials were at the same age. Somewhat less so, if anything. If there's an aspect of their attitude that's worse, it's more social than professional and is related to how much they expect other people (especially casual acquaintances, like coworkers) to care about learning and accommodating all their personal idiosyncracies that aren't work-related. But this could be my Gen-X bias coming through: we were taught to only reveal personal stuff to people we're actually close to. We expected our phone numbers to be public knowledge, but we kept our personal feelings private. Gen Z is pretty much the reverse.

You think it is bad timing because it will increase the number of people leaving Disney services. But I think it will muddy the waters so no one will be able to definitively say why people left. Did they leave over Kimmel? Did they leave because the price went up? Who can say? This way, no one can be blamed for falling subscriber numbers.

It may be bad for the company, but it is good for executives who don't want to be blamed.

Of course, the most likely explanation is that this had been planned and the timing was just a coincidence. But that explanation is boring.

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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lucky 10,000!

Time to go down the Panspermia rabbit hole!

That the primary motivator towards forcing the sale wasn't the algorithm as such, it was the probability that the PRC would use TikTok as a propaganda tool.

So? Your point?

Considering that a geneticist can look at a DNA sample and determine the race of the person it came from, I'd call that a rather glaring deficiency in modern genetics. This has all the credibility of a physicist telling us gravity is a social construct.

Sciences that consistently "disprove" the crashingly obvious should be regarded with the utmost suspicion.

The Republicans aren't conservative in any sensible meaning of the word. They are radicals. The Democrats are far more conservative than the Republicans these days.

Robots.

Ok, so the specific formats are new, but Windows 98 supported animated wallpaper. No one actually wanted it or used it, but it was supported.

The way I read it, the 100k fee is an "investment" in bringing someone over.

You pay it when you get someone in, and it gets recovered over the 3 years that the H-1B is active. Don't know if you have to then fork over another 100k, or if the +3 rollover is covered under the original 100k. After 6 years, presumably the applicant is well on their way to applying for permanent residency, or they've had enough of living in the US and want to go home.

If amortized over 3 years, that's 34k/yr, if over 6 years, that's 17k/yr. Not peanuts, but not an obscene amount of money either.

This would basically be a tariff on foreign workers, I guess? And to your point, yes, it should be indexed to something that doesn't require endless political wrangling to keep at a reasonable market value. At least tie it to inflation, or maybe to a number reflective of the number of US workers attempting to find jobs in the given field...

https://www.theregister.com/20...

"The H-1B program was created in 1990, and presently allocates 85,000 spots annually for temporary non-immigrant workers to come to the US â" ostensibly to fill gaps in the American labor force. Counting other exemptions like those afforded academic institutions, the program awards about 130,000 visas per year to foreign workers, and renews about 300,000 previously awarded visas â" which typically last for three years and can be extended for another three.

The process works as follows: Eligible H-1B applicants, or companies representing them, register to enter the H-1B cap lottery. Some 20,000 advanced degree petitions and 65,000 general petitions get selected. For selected registrants, employers can submit H-1B petitions on behalf of prospective employees. USCIS then processes the selected petitions and those approved can then come and work in the US.

Previously, employers submitted completed H-1B petitions in March and USCIS conducted its H1-B cap lottery at the end of that month to determine which petitions would be processed for the 85,000 slots."

Lots of medical workers, especially in rural hospitals, are on H1-Bs.

I never stopped coming in to the office. Before that I worked in industrial automation, and that work couldn't be done remotely either.