Ligers or tigons are at least occasionally fertile. So the species are not completely separated. They're rare enough that the species are essentially separated, but it's a statistical argument, so there can still be gene flow.

N.B.: It's worth noting that fertile mules (or perhaps it was hinneys) are occasionally produced.

Species are only "completely separated" when the only gene flow between them is due to either human intervention or viral (or perhaps bacterial) infections. (FWIW, I've heard that the roots of the pea manufacture hemoglobin. If this is true it's probably an example of the viral transmission of genetic information.)

I'd been considering for a year or so whether I should get an Apple computer to supplement my Linux system. (Well, really to generate programs that could run on an IPad.)

This is so unpleasant that I'm even thinking MS might be a better choice...and I haven't dealt with MS since the turn of the century.

OTOH, what it's really going to turn on is which company comes up with a good voice controlled computers that can read novels to me with reasonable pacing and emphasis. But Apple seems to be lagging behind there, too. (With luck, something like that will show up for Linux.)

Let me know when you successfully crossbreed an ant and an earthworm.

Completion, here, means that the branches cannot ever produce fertile crossbreeds. In cases where there is geographic separation this often happens when an intermediate branch goes extinct.

But what constitutes a "species" isn't well defined. There are decent reasons for considering Cro-Magnon, Denisovian, and Neanderthal to be one species...but there are also decent reasons for considering them to be separate species. As long as two groups can interbreed if the happen to meet and be in the mood, you can't be sure they are separate species.

Speciation is really only visible when it's run to completion. And sometimes even then it's dubious. (Consider "ring species".)

You missed at least one finch that I've read of. Probably lots of others.

OTOH, species that carry tools around are a lot less common, and if you just quickly make a tool, use it, and then discard it, there's little benefit in refining it.

If you train it on the internet, it will be almost as reliable as the internet. (Almost. Not quite.) And if you train it to always give a responsive answer (and not say "I don't know") then it's going to generate hallucinations even when the internet doesn't lead it astray.

OK. Basically an AI can be trained to do anything that a person can do **IF THERE IS A WAY TO CHECK THE ANSWER**. If the AI can't get good feedback, it can't learn to handle the problem correctly.

This is why I think that AGI is going to require embodiment, and LOTS of sensors. And it still often won't reach the same conclusions people reach. (Consider the arguments that even men and women have, and their goals/sensoria/brains are extremely similar.)

The thing is, LLM is only one type of AI. All it does is try to handle language. Train it differently and it's not a LLM, but it can do quite well at, say, protein folding. (Note it's guessing how the protein would fold, but that used to be the domain of experts. After you get the guess, then you go and check, and the AI is doing as well, or possibly better, than the experts were doing.)

I normally find most of the check out lines unmanned. Perhaps it depends on the time of day.

But this was going to be LOTS of stories tall, so you'd still get quadratic scaling.

Do you mean the big island, or the state?

It's not really clear, because there are LOTS of "very special and limited applications". Consider what the automated check out stations at supermarkets did to the checkout clerks.

OTOH, it's also probably largely lies. But you can't scrap the "probably largely", and those are pretty vague.

It *could* come out of thin air, using solar cells or wind power. And it's inefficient enough (i.e. 1 gallon/day) that you might as well. It might be useful in a remote cabin with a motor/generator set that you rarely needed.