The problem with answering that, is that there’s no set standard for the appropriate amount of apathy so really however much there is, that’s how much there should be and not too little or too much, that’s just how apathetic humans are and there’s nothing to compare against for judging appropriate levels. Why are we as apathetic as we are? In my opinion it’s pretty similar to why climate change is so difficult to address, which makes sense as apathy is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to addressing it. In general, it’s more difficult to energise, co-ordinate and sustain collective human effort on a large scale for issues that don’t seem immediate, tangible, easily attributable, physically visible and where the solution and action to be taken isn’t simple to understand, or the improvement simple to observe and also reasonably short term (or at least promises to be). Long term, society wide projects usually require more than just an appeal to better nature. People caring, people wanting to help each other, people wanting fairness or kindness or just treatment, as innate desires does work to motivate, but I think tends to work on mostly on the smaller scale, when it’s for small in-groups, preferably people we’ve actually met and with immediate social pressures to reinforce these pro-social desires.

Human beings are capable of complex, difficult, awe-inspiring projects for “good” or “bad” but those tend to involve more diffuse motivations and more immediate rewards/incentives where those motivations are their most removed from the original instigators. Some few people involved might be motivated by altruism or something esoteric like an interest in science or a religious belief, but if their goals involve the masses it’s usually going to mean filtering their motivation down through stakeholders, to careerists, money makers and then on down to people looking for subsistence and in many cases down to people who are enslaved and don’t want to be killed or harmed and so work.

To top all that off there’s the more obvious problem of the difficulty in keeping more and more people in bigger and bigger projects all on the same page about what to do, how to do it, or if we even want to do it. If the important issue you’re thinking of is for example inequality, it’s going to be very hard to get agreement on what that actually is, if that’s even a good or bad thing, how we should deal with it or even if we should deal with it and many of the people in this debate will probably be passionate in their position. Complex “important” issues also tend to involve beneficiaries who would somewhat understandably not want to work against their own interests and so shape their environment to the best of their ability such that the easier thing to do is tolerate the issue making the near impossible mountain of getting human beings together for the greater good harder still by design. This theory maybe has some flaws, depending on how you frame the important issue. If for example the important issue were crime, you could argue that for the most part for most people it’s fairly easy to get them not to just murder strangers on a whim or for some petty gain, even racists probably walk through an average day surrounded by people of many ethnicities and cultures but don’t generally (with notable exceptions) need to be convinced or induced not to physically harm everyone they walk past and this tends to hold true on a larger scale not just the in-groups as I described, but as a rule of thumb, in my view I think this is basically how we operate. How much we care, how much we can muster courage, how much personal risk or resources or energy we can spare for manifesting ideals is usually proportional to the degree of direct impact they have upon us personally, how close we are to the people affected by an issue and how easy it is to identify and rectify the issue and also how long it will take and how often you’ll have to act. I think you could probably draw direct, inversely proportional lines on a scale of how much apathy is shown and a declining slope on any of those measures. I suspect this is from our nature and biological origins, but this is not an assertion I can back up rigorously.

Finally, depending on the issue, sometimes it really is rationally better to tolerate an issue where all the solutions are bad and could make things worse. Tends to be difficult to reach consensus on when we’re in such a situation.

Well if we’re here seeing the post and responding…guess

I had one once, here in Australia, in a house my family lived in for a few years. It was novelty as I’d never seen one before or since.I seem to recall thinking it was very useful but for some reason, even though there’s really no chance of it happening, I always had like intrusive thoughts of sticking my fingers in there. Also my grandpa stayed with us for a little while and he kept throwing nectarine cores in there which it really couldn’t handle even though we asked him not to. It also used to make a deafening noise like the awakening of Cthulhu at rhe best of times, hearing it sound like it was about to spectacularly break was really distressing. I don’t know how legal it was to have that thing, they just don’t seem to exist here in Australia so it was very odd that this place had it.

I’m from Australia, I haven’t seen them for a long time but around the mid 2000s to early 2010s we had products that were like set-top boxes that were variously referred to as PVRs (personal video recorder) and DVRs (digital video recorder). They had digital TV tuners in them and hard drives and would prebuffer paused TV up to a set amount of time allowing you to skip through ads and pause a show as you describe and they usually had more than one TV tuner in them so you could go through the Electronic Program Guide menu and set it to record another show while you watched or recorded a different one. My parents had one and it was great. I guess growing up with Free to Air TV, the novelty and unusualness of consuming media this way and not having to miss the show to get up for tea or not having to suffer the ads and just hitting fast forward still resonates with me even though now the idea of having to watch stuff on a schedule is becoming a weird and alien limitation that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Ironically though now you’d have a tougher time evading the ads in some contexts despite watching almost whatever you want whenever you want.

DVRs are great. I don’t think they’re really a thing much anymore, I guess because of the declining popularity of FTA TV. Is this a feature that’s built in to your TV or is it a separate DVR? How long have you had it?

They don’t sell that brand in my country so I can’t speak for the wrapper but I checked the Wikipedia page for the company and their website. The wiki page doesn’t really help with the claim but provides some helpful context for how the company was founded and about Tony himself who you could say did indeed go out and check in his capacity as a broadcaster, though prior to forming this company.

I think it’s probably more accurate to say that Tony’s puts high standards and systems in place in addition to external certification programs to make it more likely that when they’re assured that production in their supply chain doesn’t involve slavery, it’s more likely to be true. I guess we haven’t set a definition for what going out and checking vs taking someone’s word for it means here but to the extent that I wondered how exactly they were able to physically go and inspect without endangering themselves the answer seems mostly to be that they don’t actually send people from the company to go and check as far as I can see. I think it’s worth pointing out as well that they’re probably not best viewed as a good manufacturer in contrast to a Fairtrade certified manufacturer because they seem to think those certifications are good and credible and are themselves Fairtrade certified, it’s just that according to them that’s really only a baseline minimum to try to avoid slavery creeping in to the supply chain. The other steps they take seem to be more around fair practices and traceability to make slavery less likely to occurr and a lot of this depends on their careful selection of partners and the formation of co-ops.

The closest claim I could find that resembles my interpretation of the idea that they go out and check rather than just taking the word of a supplier or external certification body is something they have an article about on their page called Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System. CLMRS seems to be a set of practices that co-ops that Tony’s has partnered with are encouraged to adopt and relies upon volunteers from the community (unclear which community, is that the co-op or the physical area where most members are from?) to go out and inspect so that’s pretty close to what you say. Their description of this system is entirely focussed on “families” found to be employing child labour and child labour specifically as opposed to anything else. None of this is a critique of this approach I should say right now, but in terms of the claim of how they go about actively checking for themselves rather than taking the word of others, this approach seems a little more complicated than that and not entirely aligned with that description. It’s volunteers from a community not Tony’s representatives or employees, and they’re specifically focussing on a kind of slavery where such a form of inspection could reasonably be done with any safety where it’s household farmers likely using their own children for labour. Their approach to that specific situation is great I should add, and doesn’t just cut people loose likely making the problem worse and tries to work with them to eliminate the practice.

Great though they sound and certainly an option I’d consider if I could, I think from my initial research that the fact that the closest thing to your claim is CLMRS and that this is done by the co-op themselves, with verification done by unnoficial volunteers, not Tony’s themselves, and that adopting CLMRS seems not to actually be mandatory to become a Tony’s partner does I think put the idea that Tony’s checks rather than just accepting claims in to a different and more nuanced light.

I will express once more it sounds like to my non-expert ears that they are doing this right and I don’t criticise their approach, I’m just clarifying because based on what you said I was imagining people from Tony’s making random inspections of cocoa plantations that may have many types of slavery going on (not just child) and which may be run by more sophisticated criminal networks that might violently defend their interests rather than just family run farms.

How do they check this? Seems like a good way to get yourself shot trying to walk in to a covert slave operation to see if it’s really a covert slave operation.

Oh I forgot about those switches. I think that means I probably don’t really miss them, I mean, it’s not like putting something on it necessarily deletes what’s on there and it’s kind of hard to accidentally write to one.

I guess another problem is, larger instances are more likely to be reliably up, if you randomly signed people up to a smaller instance running in someone’s bedroom thant they switch off at night then that user’s experience is going to be terrible, but if you combat this by only having large instances in that pool then the large instances get larger and smaller instances will essentially freeze at their current size because the main way of signing up would become this portal that assigns you to instances rather than specifically joining an instance. It might encourage the fediverse to become considerably less federated and a lot more centralised.

I did learn of this difference many years later. To me the Ceylon kind is a nicer, though perhaps less strong a flavour and seemed more like whatever my brain has decided “cinnamony” should taste like, but cassia will give you a more obvious punch even if not quite as delicious. I wonder if at some point Masterfoods switched from Ceylon to Cassia.

Yeh it was Masterfoods ground cinnamon if I recall. It really defies intuition because things like nice aromatic spices should get progressively weaker flavoured over time. I feel compelled to say this may have been a freak occurrence and it’s probably unwise to seek out 25 year old spice.

In 2011 I was in an unfamiliar kitchen and had some porridge in the morning. I put some ground cinnamon on it that was in the cupboard and noticed that it was particularly good cinnamon, much more flavoursome than I was used to. I looked at the bottle again and it was the same brand I always use myself at home so I didn’t see why it should be so much better but I noticed that the although pretty similar the labelling seemed subtly different than I was used to. I looked at the expiry, it expired in 1986 and the label was different because they’d updated the design since. I don’t know why the 25 hear old cinnamon seemed to taste so extra good, I would have thought that if it wasn’t somehow rotten and sloiled it’d at least have lost basically all its potency but somehow it was super nice. I even had extra after this discovery.

At the video rental store, the customer that returned a DVD case reeking of cigarettes and full of cockroaches. I had seen the customer before and always read the notes about the latest gross ass thing they’d done that flashed up on screen when serving them because all the other staff hated them and would write these complaints. Despite that I didn’t really remember them particularly or have much of a run in with them.

I happened to be the one on shift when they were to discover they’d been banned though. They tried to pick up some movies to rent and I had to explain that I couldn’t rent to them because they were banned. They asked why and I told them that it says here you returned a DVD case full of cockroaches and they responded indignantly “What!? Is that IT!?” They definitely weren’t denying it and seemed very surprised this was a bannable offence.

This is the worst thing about it, they’re only offering subscriptions. Newspapers kind of faded away from popular use before I was really old enough to be likely to get them, but I did used to buy some print magazines, they were great. If I had some time to kill or knew I’d be on a flight I could choose to buy ONE issue for one article, and by virtue of my tastes the rest of the magazine would be stuff I’d want to read as well and could come back and read anytime. They often had ads in then even though I’d paid and other than the fact that a proportion of the pages I’d paid for didn’t have readable material, those were fine too, you just skipped past them. They were “relevant” in so far as they were paid for be advertisers who correctly presumed people who read this or that publication would probably be more interested in these products and services, but they didn’t have any ability to literally spy on me in ways that frankly would and should have been illegal using equivalent tools to have done so at the time.

I am not going to subscribe to your random website or online publication because I wanted to read about this one topic and I hate the damn ads that make reading it impossible and require deliberately allowing things that you should never allow on your device for the ads to work how the publisher wants them. This is difficult because it makes me part of the problem, as I’m blocking the ads and either bypassing paywalls or mentally deleting having even encountered the website that presented one to me and immediately closing the page.

To actually help fund the service I’m going to need a way to make ultra small payments of a few cents for individual articles, (probably wouldn’t work because of processing fees) or more likely something like a subscription but not to a publication, to a service that will allow access to a range of publications and doles out money to them based on which content I consumed over a time period. It’s just no longer realistic, if it ever was, to expect me to want to religiously consume media from one specific publisher. This idea kind of sucks for media companies who are currently getting squeezed by social media and search giants and who sit between them and their audience and suck up all the ad revenue for the content they didn’t even produce and now with my idea you’d have that and an additional third party sucking up subscription money they would have traditionally courted directly from the consumer but I don’t realistically see much of a choice.

I have a peacoat that I just really love, it’s super warm and comfy and it makes me feel like a ship’s captain. In fact, before I knew that sort of thing was called a peacoat I just referred to it as my captain’s jacket.

I’m confused exactly what you’re saying here. It does seem from your experiment that if you specifically ask it to, Chat GPT can reproduce selected pieces of copyrighted creative works verbatim, but what’s your point? You posted the screenshots underneath a quote about how AI systems extract patterns from works rather than copying them so I guess you want to show that it can at times in fact just copy things despite this seeming claim to the opposite, but the fact that you prompted the system to do it seems to kind of dilute this point a bit. In any case, it’s not just reproducing the work, it’s producing output that is relevant to your naturally phrased English language input, and selecting which particular passage in a way that is specifically relevant to the way your input was phrased and also adding additional output aside from the quoted passage which is also relevant and unique to the prompt.

The developers make the analogy of a person being influenced by works in the creation of their own and that that is considered acceptable. If you asked Bob Dylan to cite a passage from a work by Hemingway and he successfully remembered such a passage and in the correct context recited it to you verbatim, followed by an explanation for why it’s a good passage to have selected, you wouldn’t take from that exchange that this was proof that Bob Dylan was not really actually ‘influenced’ by anything but was instead just cobbling together the work of others when he produces his music. If anything, it’d likely be regarded as a mark of how well read Bob Dylan must be that he could remember the passage so accurately and choose a passage that so successfully fits the brief of your request. I don’t typically want to leap to the defence of these AI models that wholesale take in so much creative work and mechanistically re-assemble it without compensation nor input from the artist but I wouldn’t pretend that it’s not an issue with at least a little nuance to it and I can’t see what these screenshots prove.

Kind of, I haven’t had to buy a new tv to replace my dumb tv from 2014 but my understanding is that these awful smart TVs are at least cheaper because they’re subsidised by all the ads. If that’s the case, at least you didn’t actually fully pay for the hardware and can hopefully afford to put your own on there without being out of pocket by too extreme an amount.

Don’t listen to this guy he’s a liar, he says he lives in your computer but he’s really in my phone.

True though that may be, there’s no benefit to mentioning that in this situation.

I haven’t been to the states but I can compare Burger King UK to Burger King (Hungry Jacks) Australia and also Hungry Jacks to any other burger place that isn’t Mc Donald’s (because that’s just a tie). BK UK was significantly worse than the Aussie version but I nevertheless indulged quite a few times whilst there, ironically probably even more than here in Australia. Despite managing to be worse, it still occupies that very wide band between just under the threshold of good all the way down to just above actually inedible and usually if going for BK it’s definitely because “it’ll have to do” and it always does.

Hungry Jacks (BK) compared to an actual good burger joint here in Australia stands no chance but it does fulfill its promise of a consistent standard, even if it’s a low one and that’s a good thing since you can find some awful shit here like a local cafe’s burger or those Vietnamese lunch bars that have to offer a ‘burger’ on their otherwise nice menu. But of course the flipside is you can get good to great burgers easily as well as long as you go somewhere that’s actually a burger place not somewhere that just has a burger option.