setopt

Taken literally, you’re claiming that only 80 people on Earth would notice. Maybe a tenth of that if we narrow down what is meant by «consumer». I assume you don’t really believe that?

> Hence the name (Eugene‘s Macros)

Interesting, do you have a source for this? I’ve always read that it stood for Editor MACros, are you saying this is a backronym?

> For a start it's either spelled "Emacs" or "EMACS", and definitely not "eMacs".

Everyone knows that, but iOS autocorrects Emacs -> eMacs because Apple used to sell a product called "eMac".

> and you understand the implications thereof

Isn’t lexical binding the default in more or less all other programming languages?

So for people who don’t understand the implications, and wrote their .el files recently, lexical binding is likely less surprising behavior than the alternative?

Probably no, because according to quantum mechanics, photons are indistinguishable in a way that affects experiments.

Sounds wonderful. I remove my shoes in the office as well, since not doing so has led to health issues in the past, but it’s not so hygienic when everyone from colleagues to cleaning staff visit your office with their shoes on.

(Where I live, this is the norm at home, but not at office or public places.)

I also don’t commit files by accident. Just don’t `git add *` as some people do, and check `git status` before committing, and then you’re good.

In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.

That sounds somewhat applicable to many tools. Like Vim/Emacs, for example. Or computers and smart phones in general.

Seems legitimate to me. Did you find any technical error?

Ah yes, indeed, the well-known point-cow approximation!

In some countries it is, to some extent. In Norway for example, it is illegal to broadcast ads for political parties, alcohol, tobacco, plus basically any ads specifically targeting children (though the last one is often violated).

More or less the same as social media but for agents, perhaps?

When I want to book an airline ticket in the future, I expect my LLM agent to contact the airline LLM agent, and the two to discuss options and negotiate a deal on my behalf.

Not yet, as far as I know, but perhaps someone will find a way to do that in the future. We're talking about the next two decades here, a lot can happen in that time.

DNA itself can be thought of as a language which describes proteins, and I personally don't know enough about the limits of LLMs as a technology to claim that it can never be adapted to, say, do reverse translation from desired protein shapes into DNA sequences.

I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.

EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.

> Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".

Apple also has this stupid thing where you sometimes have to type your iPhone pin on your Mac to verify your identity. I’m unable to recall it on a keyboard instead of a keypad.

> have learned them over the years

Well I guess that’s the difference? I personally change themes many times per day depending on my mood and the lighting conditions, and probably go through at least a few dozen themes in a year.

I don’t need to memorize colors either though, I look for differences in colors not absolute colors.

> I’ll stick with my local LLM that’s slow but handles my simple requests from time to time.

Sounds like a worthy partner.

The issue at hand isn’t people using AI to make some app that they and their mom will use. That’s awesome.

It’s people who insist that potentially millions of other people should be affected by their vibe-coded stuff too, by upstreaming it into Debian.

I vibe coded some simple things for the family myself, but I don’t expect or require anyone else to want or use it.

Are you using the 31 release or prerelease? The mode was changed to experimental right before release.

Just FYI, I think the comment you replied to is by the author of the mode and an upstream Emacs contributor, so I would assume their instructions are up to date for the 31 release.

Well, yeah. I also wouldn’t like to explain to my family why my emoji is more important than being set for life.

Given that most measures of intelligence follow nearly normal distributions (as long as you stay away from the tails), I think it doesn’t matter that much.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." — George Carlin

Sounds better to do postprocess filtering explicitly? For example, adding random noise with amplitude 1/255 (which should be as invisible as the watermark), followed by a smart blur that blurs more in directions where the colors are more similar (making the blur less obvious to humans).

But this is all moot really, if MS Paint is watermarking shit, it’s better to just use something else. Nothing from Microsoft is trustworthy.

So any mail to anyrandomstring@yourdomain.com is actually received? Sounds like something that works great when only you do it, but might quickly be abused if it catches on?

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

I do recall a couple of decades ago, when the Turing test was discussed as the big goal that seemed so far away. Then LLMs arguably did pass the test, and no one cared about the test anymore.

> instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.

In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.

> You generally can’t apply functions to dimensional units. The only thing units can do is be multiplied or divided together. So I can multiply a mass by a distance or divide a distance by a speed, and I can multiply the result by a scalar; but I can’t take the sine of a distance or the logarithm of a time or exponentiate a mass. Those are things I can only do to scalars.

I mostly agree with your explanation, but would like to emphasize that this is just a convention from mathematics which mostly carries over into physics and engineering. We like to define functions that are R -> R and similar, instead of defining special sets like R° = { r * 360° | r \in R }, corresponding to "real numbers with unit degrees", and then defining functions like sin: R° -> R. It’s just simpler to define and analyze most functions from R -> R and so we mostly do that.

But if you look up physics papers, it’s not uncommon to define functions that require unitful inputs as well. For example, the wave function in the Schrödinger equation maps a position r (3D vector with unit meter) and time t (scalar with unit seconds), to a probability amplitude (complex number with unit m^-3/2), so that \int |ψ(r,t)|^2 d3r becomes a scalar (a probability). Up wave function is still considered a function by all physicists.

Very exciting. Closed source was one of the main things making me not try it out yet.

Any good resources for getting started? And anything on doing NumPy/SciPy-like stuff in it?

There might be a market for a USB-C camera to take phone screen photos to immediately upload back into the phone.