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.

Bizarrely, this is a feature of some home routers now. Your router will advertise a public wifi network that can be used by any customer of your ISP. It's not technically "your" wifi, so the legal risk does not apply. For Cox and Comcast this is an opt-out feature, i.e. enabled by default.

You should watch the video. It's insane that the TV stores as much as it does, including full text transcripts of all audio in its vicinity. It does this even when it's in standby. The videos from the leadership at LG Ad Solutions are absolutely blatant: "we own the glass" and "we own the living room".

Yes, of course AI can introduce code vulnerabilities; it's trained on publicly available code and - just like people - it makes mistakes... sometimes a lot of mistakes.

On the other hand, most code vulnerabilities are now discovered using frontier AI models. Just look at the number of fixes all the big software companies are pushing each month (or more often than that). Oracle patched 1,449 vulnerabilities in its July update against 309 in the same month last year. Microsoft’s July update fixed a record 622 flaws, and credited AI discovery for the surge.

You still need developers checking your code, but better yet would be to have a frontier model checking it as well as the developers, whether it was written by AI or not.

Also, using AI to help develop or even just vibe coding is not equivalent to slapping unchecked AI code into production. That's not an AI fault, that's a human fault.

The metaverse was hoped to be inevitable by the company that renamed itself to Meta, sank billions of dollars into its development, made the world's worst Second Life imitation and then, inevitably, ditched the whole thing and pivoted to AI. Almost nobody took the metaverse seriously outside of Meta. The pitch was "all the inequalities and inconveniences of real-life, you'll pay to access it and you'll own nothing, also we'll plaster advertising all over it". There was absolutely no benefit to potential users. It was a terrible idea then, it's a terrible idea now.

AI, on the other hand, has many demonstrable practical uses. When used correctly it can absolutely be a productivity booster. Once again, I remind everyone that AI is not limited to LLMs.