I agree it's infuriating that Edge continually hijacks the PDF file association.

Oh the other hand, Adobe Reader (and tbh every Adobe application) is a slow, bloated, ad-ridden mess that should be the last choice when opening PDF files. 99.9% of the time if I want to open a PDF I want it to open in anything BUT Adobe Reader. Unfortunately, for the 0.01% of PDFs that require some feature that isn't implemented elsewhere, Adobe Reader is necessary.

Adobe Reader has recently been popping prompts to install some fucking Adobe Photo Express applications and users are clicking to dismiss the popup without reading it and then going "where did this shit come from?". Haven't checked, but wouldn't be surprised if this "free" application is actually siphoning photos to improve Adobe's image recognition AI.

Adobe can't die fast enough.

Are you sure? I thought this site ran on a dusty old 486 running FreeBSD under someone's desk?

Wait, sorry... I forgot: BSD is dead, NetCraft confirmed it.

I particularly like that the AP felt they had to qualify that the robot's mustache was fake.

Ah, but has grabthembythepus.si been registered yet?

I would argue a spreadsheet is the wrong tool for this kind of simulation, and you'd be better off building the model in R or something.

Which would be relevant, except N100 SBCs are unobtainium, and i5-1135G7 SBCs are hundreds of dollars. It's not a like-for-like comparison.

"Small government" always means "just big enough to plunder the population". When the federal government - or their lobbyist friends - want more money, you can be sure there will be a new, massively overreaching law to ensure they get it. If the citizens need protection, well, a new law would just be an unconscionable suppression of states' rights.

"Costmetic" was a typo (crappy laptop keyboard), but if I accidentally coined a neologism then... well, I'm going to have to credit my subconscious for that one.

True, but has anyone ever got laid because their character in a game had an extra shiny sword or a MARPAT skin on their gun?

People are weird. Discord has done this for years with their Nitro subscription. I imagine it makes the people who buy it feel special because they have access to features the free users cannot. Twitch has some similar features too, although I think there you're subscribing to the actual channels and Twitch themselves take a cut.

I mean, people pay for costmetic items in games just to look different from other players, so, yes, people will absolutely pay for this stuff. I imagine a lot of those people will be kids though, tbh.

But until you prompt the AI, it just sits there; you have to give it an objective. Humans come up with objectives on their own, conjured from a variety of sources - some basic bio functions like, get food, get shelter, get sex, etc - and others derived from a combination of societal and environmental conditions that build up over time. These are modulated by differences in brain structure that exist between individuals, meaning different people may reach different conclusions when presented with the same stimuli.

Could an AI agent be given a relatively open-ended task where success criteria are self-defined and evolve over time? Coz that's life, baby.

In other words, can we make it want things?

As it stands, I don't think so.

I suggest you watch the video, especially the comments from the LG Ad Services execs:

I imagine as soon as you do that, all the SmartTV features stop working. Which is fine if that's what you want.

Yeah that doesn't work. It doesn't identify by IP address. The device itself sends its fingerprint.

Calm down, Linus.