Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
There’s a park close to our co-working space that’s surrounded by a wall. Right in the middle of that wall, there’s a patch of 10-ish meters of barbed wire. I’ve been to the other side a few times, nothing but trees. Makes me wonder why and how?
And a local resident:
Very friendly.
This is a photo from my neighborhood. This is the dark, northern side of the buildings.
And this is a sidewalk, the legal way to cross the highway. Of course, there are other ways further away. I call this sidewalk “The middle path” because it’s medium inconvenience, and in my opinion, holds the highest risk for the pedestrians. Zoom in and you’ll see the leftovers of a flying car that somehow fell off the bridge without damaging the guard rails. Not an isolated accident. I’ve seen a flying car in the opposite part of the cloverleaf interchange.
This question has one simple answer, that’s likely also wrong. “Infinite wishes” – you actually only need one, and you’re good.
However, if we dig deeper, we don’t want anything to do with the genie. The genie has a way of twisting everything. So meeting that genie means you better run.
“Hello, brave traveler! I will grant you three wishes” – the Genie said
“I wish to live forever.” – the human responded
“Granted.”
“Wow! I’ll never die?”
The genie replies, “You won’t die… but you might wish you could.”
Endless wishes can easily be twisted: the genie might end your life before you even use them, limit you to one wish per century and claim the first wish is already gone. Or they can grant your wishes while corrupting your mind so all you wish for is absurd. To survive a scenario like this, you’d need to wish for something extremely simple, precise, and un-twistable. Even then, it’s far from easy.
Ask for a million bucks, and suddenly you’re buried under a million deer. Try again, specifying dollars, and it’s a million Zimbabwean dollars. Try one more time, insisting on a million USD in cash, and watch the crushing weight of coins flatten you. And whatever you do, don’t wish for world peace. One poof and you’re on Venus, where war has never existed… but life sure hasn’t either. Or Earth is now Venus.
We have in our folklore some stories about the golden fish, granting wishes. The golden fish is a bit nicer than the genie and would sometimes grant them to a very clever asker, although most stories still have unpleasant plot twists. We also have the golden shark, which grants wishes in a bloody and immediate way, but at least the shark is honest and won’t end the world.
Maybe you wish for the genie to implement your other two modest wishes with a good intent and no awful twists.
Scary monster on the other side!
This is a nice statue from the socialist period. It’s named Victory to be politically correct but we can rename it to Dancing in the Rain – after all, it rains and she looks like dancing.
I’m not sure I encountered much today but I surely soaked wet. Didn’t want to walk with an umbrella. My thinking in the morning was that I will get wet anyway but without the umbrella, I will at least not hold my hand up for 2-3 hours.
Water finds its way in and if you try keeping it out too hard, it starts building up from the inside as well. I think it was okay. The shoes held up.
Veselin.blog 