Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.

Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?

Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.

Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.

Europe is developing P2P payment systems, and IIRC Brazil already has a very successful one.

PayPal used to be the way to pay for stuff on eBay, but it was terrible, and now thanks to Trump efforts to remove US processors from the loop are accelerating. It seems like the future for PayPal is uncertain at best.

The way it has worked for many years on Android is that even when you enable "install apps from any source", you still have to enable each app that wants to start an installation separately. So your would authorize the app store of your choice, and random .apk downloads in the browser (which Chrome and Firefox will shit a brick over anyway) are still blocked.

To be fair I don't think Google is being accused of using BitTorrent, that was Facebook/Meta. Google actually scanned a large number of books themselves, for the Google Books project. That was found to be legal, although that only covered scanning, searching, and making excerpts available, not AI training.

As for your Sleeping Beauty example, since that story dates back to the 1600s, and appears to be a based on an even older story going back to the 1300s, any copyright protection it may have enjoyed has long since expired.

I'm having difficulty finding good data, but what I did find suggests that the US has not been doing very well for a while now.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-s...

Well behind Europe and China, and especially Japan. Note that Japan has very difficult terrain, frequent extreme weather, earthquakes, and suffered the loss of all nuclear power in 2011, most of which was not back online in the time period covered by that data.

You can't really say it's bad code when nobody else has managed to do any better.

Ideally we should adjust clocks/schedules so that peak electricity demand lines up with peak solar output.

Beyond that, human beings need sunshine to stay healthy, so there are probably some limits on how much we adjust schedules relative to daylight.

It doesn't, they just turned AI on it for the first time.

Linux is going through the same thing, only with less good AI and more slowly.

By "calculate" you mean add one? To be honest, the mental burden isn't that great.

It has screens everywhere, but the primary interface is voice.

From OpenAI's perspective, developing the tech to format information for that screen would delay the release. ChatGPT often screws it up.

My phone and computers let me set the timezone to UTC. For interacting with everyone else I just remember the offset.

I'm working on a pirate low frequency time signal transmitter for my house. If that works out I may switch back, if I can be bothered to replace a couple of dumb clocks with radio controlled movements.

I keep all my clocks on UTC now. I can't be bothered to change them twice a year.

I'm just hoping that they abandon leap seconds as well. If another one comes I might switch to TAI.

They are probably thinking that they want to be like the computer on the Starship Enterprise. A kind of ambient AI device that you can have a natural conversation with anywhere, anytime.

That was Google's original goal too.

Funny how it apparently takes a communist to balance the budget, while still delivering on the socialist policies he promised.