You decrement the wish counter first, execute the action (which includes waiting those 5 days), and if it fails you increment the counter back. Something like this:

wishes = wishes - 1;
executeWish(wish).unwrap_or_else(|_| { wishes = wishes + 1; })?

This way if the action fails in the future, you get a wish back and can ask something else.

If there’s parallelism/async involved, then there definitely is an argument to decrement first, execute later. Otherwise you could make a wish for the genie to just wait for an hour and then make as many wishes as you want within that hour.

helix . modal text editor similar to vim, but with less configuration required

Not only less configuration required, but also semantic navigation (jump around the AST directly with simple keybindings). I can’t use a code editor without it now.

OMG how did I not know this… It just might be time to switch to nushell/elvish.

I don’t think that’s quite the right analogy. You’re not talking to humans to get your images. You are using a tool that’s designed to generate images from written language.

A better analogy would be an invention of a mechanical cook. While it will sometimes make edible food if you just give it regular language instructions, to get something truly tasty and interesting out of it you need to learn how it works and even understand its inner functioning. And while doing that may or may not make you “a cook”, it does give you the ability to produce new interesting food and share it with others, which is useful&cool in its own right.

Given how vague most definitions of “art” are, I feel like we can call some AI-generated stuff a form of art (but that’s not a strong opinion of mine). I don’t think we should gatekeep what “art” is - if it allows you to express your emotions and feelings and share it with others, I say why not call it “art”? It’s definitely not the same as painting or drawing or photography, but it can produce interesting and/or aesthetically pleasing results, and the results improve with skill.

What did you contribute to italian trains running on time?

Reading that email exchange alone, he’s clearly a right-wing nut at least. This needs to be called out at every mention of him, especially when he begs for money.

Ok, so infinite Yuan is a hyperbole, but for something so relatively cheap and so massively beneficial as rail, profitability really doesn’t matter. China has more than enough resources and influence to eat the cost now and reap the benefits for the next century.

I’d argue we didn’t fully understand the theory of electricity until we understood the atomic structures of metals and semiconductors, and that was properly developed in the early 20th century.

Thanks for confirming.

When was this written?

Given it has a (good quality) color photo attached to it, it was definitely published when we already understood the theory of electricity really well, so it doesn’t get a pass.

We don’t know what any of the fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) really are

I’d argue that for fundamental forces, “what they are” and “what they do” is the same, by definition.

And in any case, mains supply in your home is not just electromagnetic waves vibing around, it’s electrons engineered to move through wires in very specific ways, transferring power from a moving magnet or (increasingly) a photon falling on a semiconductor junction, to move another magnet, heat up some metal, or (increasingly) bounce around some electrons between some semiconductor junctions and then emit photons from other semiconductors junctions.

Finally, most of the text is bullshit even if you don’t think we know what fundamental forces “are”:

No one has ever felt it

You can easily feel electric discharge. Just rub your hair on some wool.

No one has ever heard it

Just be around a thunderstorm. Thunder is the sound of an electric discharge.

We cannot even say where electricity comes from

You can see where the energy that moved the electrons in your wires came from: https://app.electricitymaps.com/

It was written by a complete and utter buffoon, and it can’t be redeemed with any amount of handwaving or philosophizing over what it means to “know” or what things “are”. Either that or it’s satire (which might well be the case).

Isn’t this guy a right-wing nut/borderline fascist?

I think we need something smack in the middle between this and what the Freedom Flotilla are doing. Instead of dropping bottles in the ocean and hoping they land in Palestine, or sending yachts full of people which get apprehended by Israeli pirates before even reaching territorial waters, we might want to start making simple autonomous “water drones” like those used by Ukraine to almost halve the Russian black sea fleet, but with aid instead of explosives. They are cheap, all the hardware to make them can be found on Craigslist, and software is also mostly a solved problem. Send enough of them at once and no amount of israeli warships will be able to stop all of them. If at least a dozen land in Gaza, it can save hundreds of lives. Navigation may be a bit of an issue given all the GNSS jamming, but I firmly believe we can figure that out. Hell, launch the boats at night and use stars and a clock.

If they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it’s not needed

There’s no such thing as “HSR where it’s not needed”, especially in a country that’s building housing at an insane pace. Each HSR station will just get a city built around it (hopefully not a car-dependent hellhole) and people will flock there.

this means there’s gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.

Chinese government can print an infinite amount of Yuan out of thin air. They don’t care about internal debts, what they do care about is popularity among their people, and “build more HSR” is a really popular policy in China because it obviously and immediately improves quality of life for loads of people. While it definitely will not “pay itself off”, this is not the point of such projects.

Thinking about everything in terms of “profit motive” is exactly why the US is the way it is.

There are certainly reasons to dislike Chinese government. They are allowing overproduction of single-use plastics (which is horrible for the planet), they are building new coal plants in 2025 (which is horrible for the planet and the quality of air in China), and they are still sometimes building car-dependent hellholes for more affluent people. But it is still like the least bad government on this planet (or at least one of them), all things considered.

Ships, including ocean-going ships, were a thing long before 15th century. Europeans have travelled to North America in the 10th century. What happened around the 15th century was the creation of empires willing and able to colonize (plunder, steal, enslave) on a continental scale. The idea that the amerikas were somehow “the new world” rather than land stolen by massacring natives is imperialist propaganda. I think this is the reason why a lot of people fell for “colonize mars” bullshit - they subconsciously think that the land now occupied by the US was a barren wasteland which couldn’t support human life until brave europeans came and covered it in McMansions and fast food chains. From that mindset it makes sense that we can do the same again, but with mars.

Slower driving speeds enforced by road design will definitely help.

I propose a deal: cars are completely banned in cities, and are prohibited to have any sound isolation so that the occupants must hear all the immense noise they produce drivers are more aware of their surroundings. Then I will happily wear a hi-vis when walking along a road in the middle of nowhere.

After reading the first sentence I wasn’t sure if you were anti-AI “too lazy to learn how to paint” or pro-AI “too lazy to learn prompt engineering” :D

As for your actual comment, while I’m also generally against AI, I feel like a shift in perspective is inevitable and has already happened to an extent.

I think it makes sense to compare image genAI to photography. It also made it far easier for people without “artistic talent” to produce images. Same as with AI, it is technically a purely mechanical process, a machine designed to make images. Also similar to AI, most of those images were kind of trash. However, it soon became its own separate art form, with its own language and a set of rules for “what makes a picture good”. Would you say that photographers are not artists because they use a mechanical (or, nowadays, electronic) contraption for their art?

I feel like something similar is happening with AI. There are be certain kinds of AI-generated images that people like, and it will take increasing amounts of effort and skill to generate new, interesting ones. As time goes on and the hype wears off a bit, there will be a relatively small community of hardcore AI prompt engineers making something novel and interesting, while most people just use AI for practical purposes or just fun, similar to photography.

The main differences between photography and genAI are the insane amount of energy required for generating batches of images, and the fact that it steals from human artists to produce its results. This is the reason I’m opposed to the current AI hype, not just because it’s mechanical.

There are some stops where the bus always stops, and others where you have to signal the driver to stop (known as request stops). You will typically find the first kind in high density areas like cities, and the other in suburbs or in the countryside (there are even “stop areas” in some very rural places, where the driver officially must stop anywhere along it when asked).

The same applies to trains too, although request stops are not as common as they are for buses (and I don’t know of any stop areas for trains)

I think almost everywhere there are regular stops and request stops. How much each type is utilized, and how well they are differentiated, is what differs regionally.

Buses in Europe tend to be pretty good for this, there is an announcement that the next stop is a request stop and you have to press the stop button to disembark. (It is also explained on the information screen). Gets a bit annoying if you use the bus regularly, but makes it much better for new users.