In this specific example, this art is mimicking the artwork on the fronts of the Lord of the Rings novels. The imitation itself is what makes it evocative and nostalgic. Often people want more of the same. So this is precisely the kind of art that is a commodity. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
A lot of things used to be hand crafted. The care and raising of horses was a respected profession, each horse has a different personality, but we use cars instead now. That doesn’t mean nobody raises horses, if anything the profession has become more prestigious and less of a commodity because the only people raising horses are people who really want to raise horses. Regardless, I’m going to ride my bike (if I can), or drive my car to the store when I’m getting groceries. I’m not thinking about the horse breeders every time I use my cargo bike to get groceries.
Similarly, we’re all free to go out and spend $8,000 on artisanal resin river flow tabletop carved from a single old growth tree. They’re beautiful and I’ve certainly dreamed about it. But a very nice wooden IKEA kitchen table built to exacting specifications and fit for purpose is a mere $899. What we lose when commoditizing these things we gain in access and affordability. This is a good thing, even if there are fewer people making these things.
One last example, since it was one of the biggest catalysts of the Industrial Revolution, while we still have people making couture outfits for specifically for Kim Kardashian, but it’s a good thing that we all have access to textiles that would have been considered impossibly high quality (literally, the thread density and uniformity of the fabrics are so high) 300 years ago.
In retrospect these things are all pretty great, in my opinion.
I think that "art" and "graphics on a book meant to sell merchandise to a fanbase" are different things and we have to start making that distinction more clear these days.
I recommend to watch at least the last game of each list, that has the final game with the bots that play the best.
My takeaway:
Most chatbots know openings very well, the problem start when one of them makes an unexpected (legal or ilegal) move. Some models just copy moves from old games that make no sense in this game, and other models continue playing (almost) correctly. In particular ChatCPT was very bad in 2025 but very good in 2026.
(When a chatbot makes an ilegal move, most of the times he just follow the bot instructions. I think it's bad because it confuses the other chatbot that may interpret the incorrect move in a different way. Let's say if white moves the rook form a1 to a8 jumping over a pawn in a4, he may left the pawn in position but black may interpret that magically there is no pawn in a4. Anyway, he is in the show business, not in the let-s-get-a-nobel business, and weird games are more fun to cast.)
There's nothing "more direct" - the different APIs for different languages call into the same underlying library, and most of them are more accessible and easier to work with than C++.
Z3 is presumably written in C++ for performance, but without data I am very confident the vast majority of programs that use Z3 consume it via one of the other APIs.
The authors of a powerful solver package were solving a different problem than the users of a powerful solver package, and so different tools may be appropriate.
It might have more to do with the first release of Z3 being in 2012, with the first stable Rust release being in 2015. Rather than the authors of Z3 passing some kind of judgment on Rust…
The US does a terrible job trying to throw government cash at problems. See: Solyndra, PPP, the US’s inability to build ships, or most recently the debacle of Biden’s $7.5B rollout of EV chargers that only managed to build a few dozen stations in 3 years.
This is exactly how the opportunities were passed up. I am convinced its in no small part because of the unrealistic expectations of a very high success ratio with a small number of experiments. The US throws a lot of money at relatively few bets while China funds entire competitive markets at smaller scales and lets the ecosystem vet them.
There is also political alignment in funding next generation technologies even if it's disruptive of established industries. Lobbying of fossil fuel industry did not stop renewable factory investments in China. Whereas in the US any failure of a renewable investment was highlighted by fossil fuel lobbyists as a pretense to stop the investments
PPP was a ton of small bets, with rampant fraud and waste (and a stupid fundamental idea).
The EV chargers were supposed to fund hundreds of stations in each of the 50 states: only a few dozen were built in 4 years.
If the government focuses on one big project, like the SLS, it becomes rife with pork and clumsily slow.
But there’s hardly a better track record with splitting a program up among applicants or states (see SNAP, rampant fraud in “autism” services, PPP, or homelessness in California)
You are wrongly claiming that I said spent. The $7.5B is allocated, half the time of the program has elapsed, and a few dozen chargers were built. The program, by any modern standard, was a failure.
From your own article: By early this year, only four states — Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Hawaii — had opened stations funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, The Associated Press reported in March. A Washington Post article published the next day said this amounted to just seven stations.“
So yes, a $7B+ allocation managed to only open a handful of stations in 3 years.
Meanwhile, in a similar 3 year period, China built the Beijing–Shanghai high speed rail line: approx. 3.5 years for ~1,300 km.
Are you really going to claim that the EV charger program has been the successful, rapid deployment necessary to enable a pivot to EVs?
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