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 output, 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.

Imagine you’re the master race, confident and strong and then some people wear different clothes than you expected on TV and your whole world is just shattered lol.

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

I think an important related aspect is that the ‘unfortunate things’ that happen make it only “not quite as great” but are definitely destined to make it “the worst”. That way there’s a sense of urgency that you wouldn’t otherwise get from just “not quite as awesome as it could be, but still the best”

I still have to put up with it a little bit but I made it my life’s mission to avoid it as much as possible whilst still being part of mainstream society. I’m so glad that this meme indicates that FINALLY other people are not only not doing it but also denouncing it as much as I have. I’ve had to hold back on bitching about how stupid and irritating it is because it was always something everyone else seemed to have viewed as a mundane, at worst neutral and at best good aspect of everyday life that wasn’t that hard and gave you nice looking clothes. You can’t complain at length about something that is considered in those terms because you just come off as a boring crank. But now finally, if only for a moment I can still feel normal whilst embracing my abiding hatred of the pointless and time wasting practice.

FUCK ironing, and especially fuck whatever dipshit came up with it. Before this was invented wrinkled clothes would have to have been but a fact of life. I’m near certain whoever did come up with this was someone who knew they personally would never have had to do it. For centuries it would have been palmed off on the usual people that had to carry out the shitwork and now, in modern times, we didn’t jettison the practice along with the sexism and classism that forced some to have to do it and not others, we just made it so that now we all have to do it. It delivers no benefit, it’s so fucking stupid aaagghh! Because of the conventions and expectations that formed around it, I’m unfortunately forced to participate in it despite my misgivings, even if only on the bare minimum of occasions. If I have a job interview, or I’m going to a fancy event I have play in to this ridiculous farce that is noticeable only from its absence and help perpetuate it. I sincerely hope this generation really has managed to abolish it and it’s only the remnants of my own upbringing and peers that mean I still have to occasionally do it because the world will be objectively better off if no one ever does this again.

I’m going to put this in an update as well but, the insurer said it was fine, the only effect they could foresee it having was if they could somehow trace back something I claim for to events happening in the first country visited, for example, if you have a medical problem in the 1st country, obviously they won’t cover it, but if you have to pay for follow up medical services in country 2 for the same problem that started in country 1, they also won’t cover that either. Otherwise though, not a problem where you departed from as long as you bought the insurance before leaving your home country.

The thing is now, manipulative tactics are used to persuade people to choose one option over another either for representatives, or in some cases like Brexit, directly for specific policies. In that scenario one might argue that those that successfully made the case for one side of the referendum did so by knowingly presenting the outcome of choosing one policy differently from what they knew to be the reality hence “manipulating” people.

However, with this proposed idea of being able to delegate your vote to other people or organisations, I’m concerned people will be manipulated into giving up their ability to vote on something one way or the other they don’t even need to be convinced of the merits of something, just convinced to give it up. Seems like a small difference but I can imagine people being unknowingly disenfranchised thinking they’re giving up something else, or possibly having to give up their vote even though they do want to use it because if they’re offered some tangible immediate benefit in exchange, they might not be in a position to decline such an offer.

In these cases the distortion of the democratic ideal is worse than in the Brexit scenario for example, because at least in that situation one could say (however disingenuously) that that vote more or less reflected how convincing the case was for the leave campaign and argue that anyone saying that leave voters were manipulated is just being patronizing to such voters by denying their agency in the decision. Of course that’s a simplistic way to portray it, but there’s an element of truth there. At the very least that referendum does tell you what most people decided to vote for even if the details of how the cases were presented might be dishonest. Delegated votes would more accurately be described as a reflection of who successfully obtained votes through whatever means, not who prosecuted a case the most convincingly.

I’ve heard of that idea but frankly I’d be frightened by how many people would be parted from their votes by manipulative tactics or people finding ways to buy such votes (even if explicitly disallowed, they’d find an indirect way). That second point in particular would be a big concern because the people who have little else to sell but their own vote would be the ones most likely to sell it and organizations buying such votes would likely be those with a vested interest in keeping the poor, poor which would now be even easier.

Reminds me of the PS2 with it’s blue triangular stand.

OOTL