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Ironic then that [0] (the first hit when I search "emacs org mode tutorial") says:

    You can make words *bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~, and, if you must, +strike-through+.

[0]: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org4beginners.html


That seems to be a very old tutorial. It's indeed confusing that they host that on the official site.

The official manual states equals is used for =verbatim= quotes: https://orgmode.org/manual/Emphasis-and-Monospace.html


Me: tell me the current date please

Chatgpt.com 4o: Today's date is March 11, 2025.

Claud.ai 3.7 sonnet: The current date is Tuesday, March 11, 2025.

gemini.google.com 2.0 flash: The current date is Tuesday, March 11, 2025.

grok.com: The current date is March 10, 2025.

amazon nova pro: The current date, according to the system information available to me, is March 11, 2025.

Please keep in mind that my data and knowledge were last updated in October 2023, and I don't have access to real-time information.

chat.qwen.ai 2.5-max: I don't have access to real-time data, so I can't provide the current date. However, you can check the date and time on your device's clock or by searching online. Let me know if you need help with anything else!

chat.deepseek.com: Hi there! I suggest getting online to get real-time information. If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to let me know!

anthropic/claude35sonnetv2: Today's date cannot be [2024-11-23], as that is a future date. I can only verify that we are having this conversation today and cannot independently determine the current date. You may want to check your system clock for the accurate current date.

meta/llama32.90B: I don't have real-time access to the current date. However, based on our conversation history, I can tell you that my knowledge cutoff is December 2023, and you mentioned earlier that the conversation started after that. You can check your system clock for the accurate current date.

mistral/mistral-7b-instruct-v0: I'm unable to determine the current date, as I don't have real-time access or the ability to check your system clock. You should check your own system or a reliable online source for the current date.

google/gemini-2.0-flash-exp: I cannot give you the current date. I do not have access to real-time information.


Oh that's a great list!

Makes a lot of sense, thinking about it. I.e. the models that presumably have been given access to calling out to "live functions" can do stuff like that and/or have been specifically modified to answer such common questions correctly.

I also like it when they just tell you that they're a language model without such capabilities. That's totally fine and OK by me.

What I really don't like is the very confident answer with a specific date that is so obviously wrong. I guess the October 2023 thing is because I've been doing this with models where that's the end of training data and not others / retrained ones.


I like the idea of users being able to pick their 3-hour window and timezone, and maybe only can change your window setting once per day (or maybe only pick a new window that starts at least 24 hours in the future). But crucially, each such 3-hour window and time zone combination has entirely isolated and independent content, as if it is a different site.

So my community could be 7:02-10:02pm EST. And if I instead switch to say 6am-9am IST instead, I can check in with the folks who like to meet in the mornings in india, but I am temporarily gone from my own local community.


"This is completely wrong." Is it completely wrong? Or maybe "somewhat" wrong? Maybe just lacking nuance? I know nothing about the answer to this question, so this is an honest question.

Using just a plain old search engine, for things like "national drink of the netherlands" and simlar queries, I am directed to Wikipedia's Jenever page as the top hit, and Wikipedia's list of national drinks lists Jenever and Heineken as the entries for the Netherlands. Search engines also give page after page of travel guides and blog posts, most of which list Jenever at or near the top of of their listings. One travel guide calls it "the most famous Dutch spirit and most famous Amsterdam liquor, Jenever, also spelled Genever or simply Dutch gin."


Maybe also need to show that there are no other naturals between 1 and 7? And also that numbers greater than 7 can't be a divisor of 7?


The first one can be trivially proved with automatic decision procedures and the second one is also very easy to prove, I believe.


I have another fork that is still (mostly) maintained and used as well: https://github.com/kevinawalsh/logisim-evolution

The REDS-HEIG version you link to has more development activity, support for a wider variety of FPGAs, and a few other advanced features. My version has some neat features not found in REDS-HEIG fork, and usually aims to keep the interface more beginner-friendly and streamlined for use as student's first-contact with digital circuits.


What do you mean? All the inputs are continuous: light sensors, LIDAR, infra-red, inputs from mechanical sensors from the driver. Sure, the sensor package's hardware/firmware/software converts these to discrete inputs before it reaches the Driving AI, but all of the Buridan's Paradox results still apply to those sensor packages. They can't perform their tasks in a finite amount of time -- either they will sometimes fail to make a decision at all, or they will render an invalid output (e.g. rather than outputting voltage corresponding to logical 0 or 1, they will go into a meta-stable or astable output mode that is not a valid output voltage).


>rather than outputting voltage corresponding to logical 0 or 1, they will go into a meta-stable or astable output mode that is not a valid output voltage

It sounds like you could easily avoid this. You can use a microprocessor and lead in analog input on one pin and then set an output pin based off that. You will always output a valid voltage. Sensors have noise anyways so it's not a big deal if the output is slightly wrong.


The paper specifically details several situations in which humans are the ones making the decision, and the result is the same. There is no bounded-time decision procedure that can take continuous (i.e. physical) inputs and render a discrete decision.


The missing piece of "just choose to always go left" is that this is a degenerate and uninteresting case. No decision is being made.

The range must be discrete and at least 2 possible values.

There is nothing about optimality at all here. Even if both possible outputs are equally "optimal", there is no procedure to pick one in a finite amount of time.


I doubt the issue has anything to do with being interesting or not. Do you know this for a fact or can give me anything to follow up on what it means for a decision to be interesting? For example if a decision procedure required the choice of chocolate or vanilla depending on the current time of day (a continuous input resulting in a discrete output), and I present an algorithm that categorically chooses chocolate regardless of what time it is, I doubt you'd turn around and claim that my algorithm is not making a decision because it always chooses chocolate.

If an algorithm takes an input, continuous or discrete, discards that input and returns a constant value, that algorithm is just as "legitimate" as any other algorithm in so far as being an algorithm is concerned. It may not produce the optimal output for some given cost, but it is a formal and rigorous decision procedure that manages to output a discrete value given a continuous input in a bounded amount of time.

At any rate, reading the comments when this was last posted it looks like the issue has to do with producing the optimal output in a given time frame. If an optimal discrete decision must be made in the next T seconds on the basis of a continuous input X, then there always exists some value of X that requires more than T seconds to compute. This will be true for any value of T regardless of how large.


> Mandating vaccines (and now boosters) in young, healthy people who were already at small risk, including those who have already had the virus, is so absurd that I can't even characterize it as science. It is simply punitive behavior.

The idea that a vaccine is a punishment is disturbing. I'm glad to have been able to get it.


I said the mandate is punitive, not the vaccine.

If you feel more comfortable getting an unnecessary vaccination, nobody is stopping you. Other people should not be coerced into doing the same against their will.

College kids are currently being expelled for refusing boosters. Children are being refused classroom education. Prior infection is not taken into account, and risk/benefit is not a factor. There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior.


College kids were already required to get multiple vaccines to attend and I remember being lined up to take the swine flu nasal spray with no say in the matter if I was going to continue education.

> There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior

We coerce people constantly when they have bad behavior that affects society and others. I don’t know why people keep trotting out mandates as having aspects of coercion/authoritarianism is a mic drop moment explaining why they are bad. How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?


I think their point is that the data shows that previous infection provides good protection. If the goal is protection, then this should count for something, and should be factored in to the risk-benefit ratio. The risk-benefit ratio is not negligible for young, which is why the vaccine still hasn't been approved for the very young (and there's certainly not a step function in the risk-benefit ratio, by age). But, the risk-benefit ratio calculations being used don't seem to be including previous infection. This is not necessarily scientific.

For the other-than-COVID vaccines that are required for enrollment, there isn't existing protection in the majority of the population. Nobody has natural, effective, protection against measles.

I think the practical problem/reason is that there's infrastructure set up to track and share vaccination/booster status. There's no infrastructure set up to track, or even test, immunity status, which is the real metric of risk. So, for practical reasons, proof of vaccination status will always be favored and, almost certainly, held above the true, yet difficult to measure, immunity status, to drive policies. This is an easy out, that might cause harm, relative to an "ideal" policies that were based on immunity.


> College kids were already required to get multiple vaccines to attend and I remember being lined up to take the swine flu nasal spray with no say in the matter if I was going to continue education.

Saying it's happened in the past isn't an argument that it should continue in the future. I doubt your swine flu nasal spray had as intense of negative side effects as the COVID second shot and booster tend to in the young and healthy. Now that we're in booster territory and Delta is being phased out the shots are almost certainly more painful than the disease for some portion of the population.

> How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?

I can't recall any other health based requirement for attending an event or restaurant. I also don't understand why people continue to harp on how a personal COVID vaccination decision "affects society and others" at this point. The vaccine only marginally prevents infection at this stage, and the primary benefit of reduced severity should stop everyone who's vaccinated from worrying about what others around them may be doing. I get the flu shot so I don't get the flu, and I'm not sitting around telling others who haven't that they're putting me in danger.


When I worked in DoD intel in the past, I had to travel to multiple nations with extremely high rates of dangerous tropical disease. I took multiple vaccines for this purpose. At no point do I ever recall worrying about whether the local populations I was dealing with were vaccinated at all. Because that's how vaccines work. They make it so you don't have to worry about others not being vaccinated or giving you the disease. With diseases that are highly dangerous to children, this is a different case, because you can't vaccinate children when they're extremely young and therefore a person not being vaccinated can transmit the virus to them. With COVID it is the absolute opposite. Small children are at minuscule risk and are actually far more at risk from influenza due to the dynamics of the virus. This risk age gradient is actually unprecedented and a unique feature of COVID.

What's really happening here is people who have considered themselves progressive and tolerant their entire lives have decided that they want to impose policies that are tyrannical, but they have to desperately backfill this logic to make it feel okay. They aren't willing to let any form of data disrupt this because if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that they had a tyrannical impulse in the first place.

Notice how when he got the swine flu nasal spray he wasn't demanding that everyone else in every public place he went to also get it. Nothing about this makes sense unless you view it as people trying to psychologically justify tyrannical impulses.


> When I worked in DoD intel in the past, I had to travel to multiple nations with extremely high rates of dangerous tropical disease. I took multiple vaccines for this purpose. At no point do I ever recall worrying about whether the local populations I was dealing with were vaccinated at all.

Yeah the tropical diseases are an interesting parallel for me too. In a place where malaria or dengue are prevalent I don’t blame others for being vectors of the disease, I assess my own risk and behave accordingly. And the mere fact that they’re spread via mosquitoes instead of air/surfaces doesn’t change the necessity of congregating people to spread. But these diseases are not universally dangerous, so people should not be universally pressured to take any measure to avoid them.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the tyrannical impulse premise, but I’d subscribe more readily to a tribal “badge of honor” premise, which in this (and indeed most cases) happens to be tyrannical. I think generally the masses don’t intend tyranny, rather they virtue signal to coerce and thus become tyrannical as a result.


Marginal reduction in transmission can mean the difference in ending a pandemic or dragging it out for another year or two. There is a big difference in an R value of R1 and R0.9

And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.


> Marginal reduction in transmission can mean the difference in ending a pandemic or dragging it out for another year or two.

Sure, it’s great that we have the vaccines to do so. We should be focusing on making them available to everyone on earth rather than forcing them down the throats of those who don’t want them to get to the fastest “end.”

> And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.

Fair enough. My reply was in response to a status quo argument, but indeed this pandemic hasn’t been just that. In which case I think you have to assess the dangers to those who have been vaccinated, which is not much. Indeed with omicron the risk isn’t very high for a large portion of the population vaccinated or not. And the vaccines are available to anyone who wants to reduce their risk, thus the mandates make little sense.


There is a pre—existing vaccination mandate for enrollment at colleges in the US.


All the vaccines mandated by colleges have been around for decades. It’s not “just another vaccine” to add to the list; there is a difference.


Which brings it all back to a lack of trust in the vaccine/science. The current science is that the vaccines are safe and provide a greater degree of protection than prior infection alone. Outside of some very rare conditions that would make someone unfit for a vaccine, there's no reason not to get vaccinated. Refusing to get one only increases your chances of ending up in a hospital and for what? There's no advantage to giving yourself a disadvantage no matter how small you think the benefit a free vaccine would give you over the protection a natural infection has already given you.


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