It’s quite obviously := a.k.a ≔. Already used by Go and others.

… cause it’s true

Lived like that for a while (but with a working shower and not-so-fast internet). 10/10 would recommend. Will do again when I’m done with $CURRENT_LIFE_ISSUES.

Ok, sure, for low-level C/C++ code with memory management and such it takes a lot longer than 2h per 1000 lines. For business logic in higher-level programming languages it’s usually fine.

Also, assuming this kid gets weekends off, he would be writing 12k lines of code each day. I don’t think the average programmer could even review that number of lines in a day

I usually estimate that it takes 1-2 hours of highly focused work to review 1k lines of code well (this is not even considering that this is AI-generated mess that probably requires a lot more attention). A typical developer is capable of ~6 hours of focused work per day (8-10 with a lot of caffeine). So no, according to my estimates at least there’s no way in hell this gets any review at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The parties are not the same. One is an openly fascist party and the other is full of meek center-right neoliberals trying to keep the status quo for their wealthy donors. However neither is trying to “fix the damage” or “make it good again”, except perhaps for the top 0.001%. Most working-class people are shafted either way. If the republicans get their way, most non-whites will be deported on enslaved in prisons, women will be enslaved at home, and the remaining working-class white men will struggle to sustain themselves and their (non-working) wives and families under the christofascist dictatorship of the capital. If the democrats somehow claw back from that, there will be less abject racism and sexism but the working class will still struggle to survive in an increasingly monopolized dictatorship of the capital.

Ask yourself this question: which democrat policies from the last decade directly benefit the working class? I can name maybe 3 very compromised policies that are about 60 years behind most of the world.

To paraphrase an old meme, republicans want 100 rich white men to rule over the entire world with an iron fist; democrats want 30 of those people to be LGBTQ+ women of color.

Are democrats better? Sure, a bit better. But it’s not like just electing them will save you.

I’m sorry to say this, but your posts are not good agitprop. They are low-effort, not very convincing, sometimes misleading, and sometimes just wrong.

If you want to make good agitprop memes,

1. shit on ideas and arguments, not your target audience - do not alienate all liberals by portraying them as a soyjack
2. avoid logical fallacies or incorrect/outdated facts - we can make convincing arguments without lying or manipulation
3. educate people - give them new information or perspective that might otherwise be downplayed or ignored by media they consume

Hope this is useful.

It was surprisingly still ok - about +15 or so (this was early spring). After all I’ve read about deserts I expected to freeze to death but at the time of this photo I was in a T-shirt.

I’m glad to tell more people about it. It’s really quite amazing (I could write a somewhat complex algorithm and prove some properties about it in a couple afternoons, despite limited formal verification experience) and I’m sure that in 20 odd years the ideas behind it will make it into mainstream languages, just as with ML/Haskell.

I don’t think there’s much to codegolf. The “obvious” solution (even() (($1%2))) is both shorter and faster. Don’t think it can be optimized much more.

The difference is that (( is a “compound command”, similar to [[ (evaluate conditional expression), while $(( )) is “aritmetic expansion”. They behave in almost exactly the same way but are used in different contexts - the former uses “exit codes” while the latter returns a string, so the former would be used where you would expect a command, while the latter would be used where you expect an expression. A function definition expects a compound command, so that’s what we use. If we used $(( )) directly, it wouldn’t parse:

$ even() $((($1+1)&1))
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `$((($1+1)&1))'

We would have to do something like

even() { return $(($1&1)); }

(notice how this is inverted from the (( case - (( actually inverts 0 -> exit code 1 and any other result to exit code 0, so that it matches bash semantics of exit code 0 being “true” and any other exit code being “false” when used in a conditional)

But this is a bit easier to understand and as such wouldn’t cut it, as any seasoned bash expert will tell you. Can’t be irreplaceable if anyone on your team can read your code, right?

I can’t think of many use-cases for ((. I guess if you wanted to do some arithmetic in a conditional?

if (( $1&1 )); then echo "odd!"; else echo "even!"; fi

But this is pretty contrived. This is probably the reason you’ve never heard of it.

This (( vs. $(( )) thing is similar to how there is ( compound command (run in a subshell), and $( ) (command substitution). You can actually use the former to define a function too (as it’s a compound command):

real_exit() { exit 1; }
fake_exit() ( exit 1 )

Calling real_exit will exit from the shell, while calling fake_exit will do nothing as the exit 1 command is executed in a separate subshell. Notice how you can also do the same in a command substition (because it runs in a subshell too):

echo $(echo foo; exit 1)

Will run successfully and output foo.

(( being paired with $((, and ( with $(, is mostly just a syntactic rhyme rather than anything consistent. E.g. { and ${ do very different things, and $[[ just doesn’t exist.

Bash is awful. It’s funny but also sad that we’re stuck with it.

Yeah, I agree that Elixir is a fine language for some tasks. I personally find the readability somewhat average, but it’s very maintainable (due to how it enables clear program structure), the error handling is great, and the lightweight process system is amazing.

See: man bash, “Compound Commands” and “Shell Function Definitions”