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I Thought I Loved Functional Programming, but It Was Zig All Along

  I have a bit of a history with functional programming. In fact, I wrote a functional programming library in C++ . Twice . The primary reason being that I was simultaneously fascinated with the intersection of functional programming which treats data as abstract values and the hard reality of how that code compiles into assembly and machine code. There are numerous reasons the concepts of functional programming are important to me. Functional code tends to be more terse, but the structure often does a better job of actually describing what the program does. Consider a program to print the numbers 0 through 10 inclusive with a newline between them in haskell. main = mapM_ (\x -> putStr (show x ++ "\n")) [0..10] In fairness to C++, I didn’t use print which automatically adds newline characters. Compare this to how you’d write this in C++, before the ranges library. For fairness, I’ll skip any boilerplate. for (size_t i = 0; i <= 10; ++i) {   Std::cout << i ...
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AI Does Not Make Art

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  AI Does Not Make Art Let’s not bury the lede. Everyone already knows that “AI art” is not art. Even strong advocates of it do not discuss it like art, they don’t treat the output like art, and no one would describe an AI robot as an artist. The point of this essay is to discuss the meaning of art and what makes this art or that not, and why the question of “what is art?” is fundamental to the process of making it. And how all this relates to why we call something which we know not to be art “art”. Probably the first thing I think of when I hear “art” is statues and paintings, but the term’s usage is actually quite broad. Well, whether videogames can be considered art might depend on whether the reader believes that art must be non-interactive, or art must be created by a singular auteur, or a number of other factors, What about “Modern Art”? Some people will look at its abstract shapes and see art, some will see just mess and chaos. Or postmodern art. “This is not a pipe.” Makes ...
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