> Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.
The ocean floor has plenty of stuff to dig into, pick up, and manipulate, along with un-anchored things like mats of seaweed.
> Land animals are more likely to develop hands.
I can easily imagine sea-creatures making the same kinds of assumptions in reverse: "Sir Blub-blub, while this hypothesis of 'land' animals is indeed intriguing, they would undoubtedly be primitive, far less likely to develop intelligent grabbers. After all, there will be nothing worth grabbing but hard 'dry' rocks! They wouldn't even be useful for propulsion, given the intangibility of this 'air'."
I don't think this is a great argument. Crabs and lobsters have claws which are almost hand like. And Octopus have tentacles, which can be highly manipulative. So those limbs must give those creatures an advantage even in water. It wouldn't be too much of a leap from those appendages to something as good as hands.
This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.
Is there any particular reason why an intelligent organism couldn't evolve to be able to grow and change its body into any arbitrary size and shape that it wanted to merely by thinking about it?
Perhaps aliens from another planet would consider our limitation as four limbed bipedal organisms to be absurd.
Why can't organisms chose to grow eight hands each with 16 opposable digits?
Joking aside, you're right. It's easy to imagine that Emacs has stagnated, but there are regular releases with improvements, some of them important fundamental improvements like native compilation.
I recently saw a Reddit post in a vim subreddit about using AI for coding, the response was "we don't do that here". I saw the same thing in the Emacs subreddit, and there's like 10 different packages for AI integrations, and, allegedly, Emacs is state-of-the-art when it comes to AI interactions through the editor (if only the user can configure it correctly). It's something I've been meaning to try.
I’m pretty sure that the answer you quoted was a joke, mainly because the topic of AI packages comes up all the time on that subreddit and people are starting to make fun of the same question that’s asked every other day.
Codecompanion (Zed-like experience), Avante (Cursor-like experience), and Copilot all exist and integrate well with the rest of the neovim ecosystem.
Vim is an editor with quite a good API for integration with other tools and I don't see how you can't build one for AI (and you can use python for the integration). Emacs will have it much easier as almost everything you need has a better interface there.
gptel.el is straightforward to configure and comfortable to use. It is indeed opinionated in ways that don't exactly match anything else out there, but if that sort of thing bothers you, you should not expect a comfortable time at first with Emacs. I like it a lot.
This undersells gptel.el, because IMHO it does a really good job of feeling emacs-native: you can read from the minibuffer or active region; send outputs to the message area, another buffer, or replace the marked region; use buffers or files as context sources; build "tools" out of elisp, ...
I'm not surprised I undersell it. I try to take a few months to a year's break from programming once a decade or so, when I can, both for the sake of coming back with fresh eyes and because anything gets miserable if you do it hard enough for long enough. This seemed like a good time. So though I've installed and set up gptel and chatted enough over some Elisp to see that it's functional with local models, I haven't as yet actually used it in a serious way.
On that note, I'm not much in the Emacs blog/creator scene or ecosystem this decade, either. Do you know any good topical resources that might fit well with time spent mostly away from keys? I realize I may be asking quite a lot.
I don't follow that scene much, either, but I do subscribe to https://www.masteringemacs.org/ which has good roundups when new major versions come out. I also have several open tabs from there about various libraries I need to fold into my own emacs configuration.
I'm an old person. I love emacs, no complaints here. Does this mean that when you are old, you will love emacs as well? Conclusion: in the long run, everyone loves emacs :-)
The President can only legally set tarrifs in an "emergency". Planning tarrifs 90 days out is really stretching the definition--I'm not holding my breath, but maybe the courts will uphold the constitution on this one?
Normally there are rules regarding how long an emergency can last. This is why, I kid you not, the Republican controlled Congress declared there are no more calendar days in this session of Congress. Every day is March 11. So they'll let him do it as long as he likes.
Notably, not the first time this legal fiction has been used, but I don’t really get what the previous uses were for. E.g., for the 2021–2022 Congress, section 7 of the War Powers Resolution[1], as well as House rules[2] XIII clause 7, XXII clause 7(c)(1), and XV clause 7 (all of which require something to be done within a prespecified number of either calendar or legislative days) were all suspended[3]
from 2021-01-03 to 2021-01-28 by HR 8 [4],
from 2021-03-13 to 2021-04-22 by HR 118,
from 2022-08-01 to 2022-09-30 by HR 1289,
from 2022-10-03 to 2022-11-11 by HR 1396,
from 2022-11-21 to 2022-11-28 by HR 1464,
from 2022-12-22 until the end by HR 1529,
which looks like vacations, campaigning and such? I’m not really sure, but it’s evident the formula had already been out there and was not a momentary fit of insanity and/or legislative genius (the Congress before that one used it too, for example), I’m just not sure what it was used for before.
> Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.
Referring to 50 U.S.C. 1622(c) [2]:
> (1) A joint resolution to terminate a national emergency declared by the President shall be referred to the appropriate committee of the House of Representatives or the Senate, as the case may be. One such joint resolution shall be reported out by such committee together with its recommendations within fifteen calendar days after the day on which such resolution is referred to such committee, unless such House shall otherwise determine by the yeas and nays.
> [and so on and so forth with fairly stringent time limits all the way through the legislature]
(As somebody who’s never been to the US—come on, am I the only one who finds legal questions like this to be basically irresistible RTFM bait?)
For the extended RTFM: IT's another country's laws and politics. Why am I expected to read their laws and logs of their whatever houses they have to understand something that would not even improve my life? Let alone when their own citizens would have trouble finding these an understanding the meaning down below?
I've seen my share of "well ackshually, this cool technical hack will circumvent the law and outsmart the judges", but thought judges wouldn't fall for such bullshit. Now, I'm not so sure. This is the stupidest thing I've seen in a long time.
This is not quite like the stereotypical case of that, as the legislature first said it wants something to happen one way, and then—later and with a different set of lawmakers, but still—the same institution effectively said that, on second thought, no, just in this case it wants it to work another way. Which seems like a simple case of the legislature changing its mind, something it should definitely be able to do as a matter of course?..
And I mean, both of the houses participated in the first part but only the lower house in the second (AFAICT), so maybe there’s something iffy about that for example. Then of course there are all the suggestions about how the statute these tariffs were ostensibly instituted under (the IEEPA) may not actually authorize tariffs; or that if it does authorize that, then it effectively amounts to the legislature delegating all of its power over tariffs to the executive, which does not entirely sound in tune with the Constitution.
But you see how this starts to look like something you’d want to consult an actual expert on constitutional law about, not dismiss out of hand or listen to random opinions on the Internet on. It’s not immediately clear what even a perfect court would decide here.
This is also how this shambling ghoul gets what any actual citizen of earth would consider a third term. It's already done! This is why he said "you'll won't have to vote again."
The president is only 50 days into his term forever; time is stopped. Hell upon us eternal.
Insiders could be trading and making a lot of money on these snap decisions. Judge for yourself whether such a thing would happen.
It would have been better if Trump gave advance notice before shaking everything up on a dime. I predict he'll reverse some terrifs without warning, thus creating another insider trade opportunity.
I've wondered if political biases are more about consistency than a right or left leaning.
For instance, if I train a LLM only on right-wing sources before 2024, and then that LLM says that a President weakening the US Dollar is bad, is the LLM showing a left-wing bias? How did my LLM trained on only right-wing sources end up having a left-wing bias?
If one party is more consistent than another, then the underlying logic that ends up encoded in the neural network weights will tend to focus on what is consistent, because that is how the training algorithm works.
I'm sure all political parties have their share of inconsistencies, but, most likely, some have more than others, because things like this are not naturally equal.
If I have 5000 documents about A, and 5000 documents about B, do we know whether it's better to train one large model on all 10,000 documents, or to train 2 different specialist models and then combine them as you describe?
well you don't. but the power of gradient descent if properly managed will split them up for you. But you might get more mileage out of like 200 specialist models.
If the US has a trade deficit, doesn't that mean the US is trading make-believe pieces of paper for real goods.
Like, if I scribble on a piece of paper and then trade you the piece of paper for an incredibly engineered brand new laptop, is that bad for me? Is this a sign of my weakness?
I know economics can be complicated, and probably "it depends", but why is a trade deficit bad? Why does the Trump administration want to eliminate trade deficits?
I bring couple reusable bags, that are more like foldable boxes than a bag. It makes bagging trivial because you just set your stuff in a box. It's organizing groceries in small and fragile plastic bags that's the hard part.
Exactly. I'm willing to believe some of these people were indeed "bad dudes", but literally 0 evidence was provided one way or the other. And these people weren't just deported back to their home countries - they were imprisoned in demonstrably brutal fashion.
Yeah, yeah, Godwin's Law and all that, but the similarities with mid-20th century fascism are undeniable here. The administration specifically started with targeting a small, well-defined minority (that is, people in the US illegally, or at least purported to be here illegally), and then extended to valid visa holders (what's the point of being on legal visa if it can be revoked at any moment with no judicial review and then you can be imprisoned for weeks/months) and now legal permanent residents. It's just classic creeping fascism.
Disconnecting most benefits from employment would be a good start, especially healthcare. Imagine if small companies could focus on their product and customers instead of on being the entire social safety net for their employees.
Building a rocket requires hands, and the type of intelligence that evolves only after having hands.
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