Constrained MDPs and the reward hypothesis

It's been a looong ago that I posted on this blog. But this should not mean the blog is dead. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Anyhow, I am back and today I want to write about constrained Markovian Decision Process (CMDPs). The post is prompted by a recent visit of Eugene Feinberg , a pioneer of CMDPs, of our department, and also by a growing interest in CMPDs in the RL community (see this , this , or this paper). For impatient readers, a CMDP is like an MDP except that there are multiple reward functions, one of which is used to set the optimization objective, while the others are used to restrict what policies can do. Now, it seems to me that more often than not the problems we want to solve are easiest to specify using multiple objectives (in fact, this is a borderline tautology!). An example, which given our current sad situation is hard to escape, is deciding what interventions a government should apply to limit the spread of a virus while maintaining economic ...

How to make Thunderbird delete temporary file

If you are using Thunderbird (TB) on Mac OSX, you might be annoyed by that when TB opens an attachment (like a pdf file) it creates the file on the Desktop and then leaves just it there! I have finally found a solution, which seems to work at least for me and assuming that you also have Firefox. The solution is here, but I duplicate it here to make sure the idea spreads:

Simply open Firefox, in the address bar type in about:config, then add a boolean variable browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit and set its value to true.

Now, this works to the extent that when you exit Firefox(!!) (after quitting Thunderbird), it will remove the cluttering files.

Enjoy!

Comments

  1. Sorry guys, the fix does not work for some reason. It has worked first, but now it stopped working.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,

    I know very little about Mac OS but this issue seemed to be interesting and then I read your comment that it didn't work after first try. The link that you have mentioned talks about one more setting for Thunderbird. It says:
    "For Thunderbird get to the config editor via Thunderbird > Preferences… > General > Config Editor… and add the same Boolean preference"
    You haven't mentioned this in your post. So I was just wondering if you have tried this trick too?

    --
    Girija

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Girija,
    Yes, I looked at that.
    In my Thunderbird (2.0.0.23, latest) there is no "Config Editor.." accessible from the preferences.
    - Csaba

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi,

    I have Thunderbird 2.0.0.22. I found this setting under Advanced tab of Preferences. You might want to check that once.

    --
    Girija

    ReplyDelete
  5. Girija,
    Thanks, this is great: I have found this setting there, too. And what is even better is that it works again!! Perfect! Wow, you made my day!
    Thanks,
    Csaba
    PS: I will update my post later to reflect to current state of the art.

    ReplyDelete
  6. :)
    Great to hear that! You are welcome!

    --
    Girija

    ReplyDelete
  7. thanks a lot !

    3 customers asked me to solve this !

    great tips !

    Sebastien

    ReplyDelete

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