Netflix has an excellent international library, including German sci-fi gem Dark -- one of the best series on Netflix full stop. This adult animated anthology series spans a range of genres, with plenty of episodes hitting the Black Mirror comparison button. Robots in a post-apocalyptic city, farmers piloting mech suits and a space mission gone wrong all pop up in the first season. While the episodes can be hit and miss (some have been criticized for their treatment of women), you'll find plenty of thought-provoking and impressive animation. This apocalyptic sci-fi from Belgium will probably turn you off from flying any time soon.

The future has looked the same for almost four decades. A skyline of densely packed skyscrapers, corporate logos lighting the night sky, proclaiming ownership over the city below. At street level, a haze of neon shines down from the cluster of signs above and shimmers at your feet in the rain that runs down the filthy streets. Here, the have-nots, excluded from the safe, luxurious enclaves enjoyed by the super-rich, are preyed upon by hustlers dealing in illegal tech and street gangs composed of green-haired, leather-clad technopunks, decked out with cyborg enhancements and high on synthetic drugs. You've seen it a million times since it was first constructed in the 80s by the pioneers of cyberpunk, most notably William Gibson in Neuromancer and Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. Hollywood recently returned to it with Blade Runner 2049.

Late in an early episode of Castle Rock, the show chooses a humorless moment to poke a little fun at the audience. Henry Deaver (Andre Holland) sits in halting conversation with a mysterious young man (Bill Skarsgård), their bodies separated by glass and their voices joined by jailhouse phones. Or Deaver's voice, at least--the young man opposite him has whispered only a few words since first being freed from captivity underneath Shawshank Prison, and is utterly silent now. Deaver, an attorney, outlines what he imagines their legal strategy to be; "You understand?" he finishes. Then speaks, his voice creaking with disuse: "Has it begun?"

In this AI based Science article, we explore How Netflix adopted an Open Source Model to improve their Entertainment Recommender Systems. First, let us discuss in brief, what Machine Learning basically means. In simple terms, Machine Learning is a technique by which a computer can "learn" from data, without using a complex set of different rules. This approach is mainly based on training a model from datasets. The better the quality of the datasets, the better the accuracy of the Machine Learning Model.

The future belongs to those who can afford it. This may be virtually true in today's world, where surviving retirement can feel impossible, but it's also the literal premise of Altered Carbon, Netflix's new prestige sci-fi series. Based on Richard K. Morgan's novel of same name, the neo-noir is set several hundred years in the future, when human consciousness has been digitized into microchip-like "stacks" constantly being swapped into and out of various bodies, or "sleeves." This technology, along with innovations like human cloning and artificial intelligence, has given society a quantum leap, but it's also sent socioeconomic stratification into overdrive, creating dire new realities for the poor and incarcerated while simultaneously producing an elite upper-class. Called "Mets"--short for "Methuselahs"--the members of Altered Carbon's 0.001 percent have achieved virtual immortality thanks to vaults of their own cloned sleeves and cloud backups full of their stacks.

There are a lot of serious topics covered in Altered Carbon, a new science fiction series from Netflix. It delves into misogynistic power structures and the nature of identity. It touches on just how much of our morality is driven by the fact that we die and what might happen if death suddenly stopped being an endpoint and, instead, became a minor stopgap in an ultimately immortal life. But that is not what I'm here to talk to you about. Because while watching Altered Carbon -- even the stuff I didn't like all that much -- my primary critical reaction was, "This is so RAD!!!!" Imagine me sitting in the back of eighth-grade study hall, filling my notebook with scrawled images from this show (that my parents don't know I've seen, because if they did, my Netflix consumption would be seriously questioned), occasionally clicking over my four-color pen to red to write the word "rad" in all caps in the margins.

Altered Carbon, a maximalist cyberpunk series arriving on Netflix this Friday, is the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a half-Japanese, half-Slavic fighting machine who, after being unconscious for 250 years--more on the logistics shortly--is revived in the body of a white cop. This is a particularly complicated version of whitewashing, the Hollywood habit of casting white actors in historically nonwhite roles, insofar as Altered Carbon is based on a novel by Richard K. Morgan, in which an Asian man is stuck in the body of a white man and not happy about it. "I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me," Kovacs says in the book, after seeing his new visage for the first time. Altered Carbon is not Ghost in the Shell, the boondoggle of a film in which a (cybernetic) Asian character was played by Scarlett Johansson. In flashbacks, Kovacs is played by the Asian actor Will Yun Lee, and in future seasons the character may be played by a nonwhite actor.