Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

Same kind of dudes who write "NO RETURNS" in the title and description as if that somehow overrides eBays money-back guarantee.

 

I once bought a pair of sunglasses described as immaculate or pristine, something to that effect. They arrived with minor scratches and I returned them, at first he refused as his advert clearly stated "no refunds" but I informed him it doesn't work like that. He went off on a rant absolutely certain that I'd bought them to resell for a profit.

m8 you sold them at auction and got what they would have been worth.

 

Losing my ****ing rag lately at this job.

I spend more and more of my time trying to fix poorly-documented garbage; picking apart stuff that only “works” because no one’s had cause to change it in the six years since it was first written; trying to get my head around ridiculously overcomplicated builds and local development environments; constantly running head-first into brick walls because here’s yet another ****ing thing I don’t have permission for, even though I’m supposed to be a senior ****ing engineer and all the other senior ****ing engineers have this permission when I don’t. I’d say I spend less than 15-20% of any given week actually being productive and doing actual work.

We’re continuing to build on a house of damp and rotten cards because no one in our leadership team has the balls to stand up and say “no, you can’t keep giving us new stuff because we need to deal with this before everything breaks and you have no product to sell”. Their answer to the years of unmaintained cruft and bollocks is to throw AI at the problem, even though the engineering needed to make that even remotely feasible is just as complex, just as time consuming, and just as hard as fixing all the broken **** in the first ****ing place. We keep trying to chase shiny new toys, but spend most of our time dealing with all the problems that our crumbling and rotting infrastructure creates.

I’m getting pretty sick of it, and I’m starting to think that nothing is going to change without some serious housekeeping of technical leadership.

 

I bought a box of 35mm cameras described as "mostly all working." I figured that meant about 10 good ones, 10 fixable, and 10 destined for the bin — and I was fine with that. Instead, only one worked. The rest were just battery acid and grossness, with missing bits and pieces everywhere. Ofcourse opened the return stating item was not described accurately.

Divvy: "I bet you thought you'd sell these on, mate, and make a killing, eh!?"
Me: "Yes, that's exactly why I did this... and the whole point of your listing."
Divvy: "Well, you're scuppered then, aren't ya? No returns buddy."
Me: "It's literally just a matter of time. Even if you refuse, eBay will provide me with a return label and charge you extra for it. I'll send them back, you'll probably delay the refund hoping you can get away with it. Eventually, I'll ask eBay to step in, and they'll force the refund."
Divvy: "RANT RANT RANT RANT!"

 

5 time listing New Rocks boots on ebay, collection only, 3 auctions and people win then ask for delivery and say they didn't notice, 4th say happy to collect, that was last July and by September communication stopped from them, they even paid! Relisted, they sell again and I put more details about no intention to post, more messages (some quite passive aggressive), they sell, I message few days later asking when are they collecting......reply saying they didn't notice it was collection.

 

Started looking at houses to move and instantly potentially found something we love but is over initial budget and would really push things to the limit, and then also had the realisation that we should consider some more 'unusual' options if we're moving anyway and don't have kids etc yet so relatively flexible, so going full rural, or even moving to europe for example. However this means the number of options and things to try and work out has exploded and made an already potentially stressful (albeit exciting) period even more so

@Nexxo am I going mad or did you move to France? Any feedback on the process? (even after a quick 5 minutes look my wife has seen multiple older/farmhouse style houses which have jumped to the top of the interest list)

 

Thought I was selling my camera to someone at work... well, I was.

Went through all the rigmarole of arranging everything, and then they tried the hard sell:

"Given that it's got a lens I don't want, and the body has an 8K shutter count, I'll offer you this for the lot..."

Knowing the full details before, would you walk into a car dealership and offer significantly less than what was already a fair price because the car has higher mileage and you don't like the alloys? No, you'd just go look for a different car.

****ing joker.

 

Car buying is different, haggling is all part of the process. As for your prospective camera buyer, he needs a kick up the arse.

 

Yes, there's always margins to be played around with.

 

Having to field "Can we use AI to do that or AI..AI...AI" daily when my generic response has now become "use it to do what?". That normally leads into a blank expression as its clear the entire thought process was - see advert for AI McGuffin and automatically assume magic beans will just start sprouting solutions left right and center..

Had one this morning which was more in depth (which I don't mind) but ultimately ended with the same scenario. Yes we could look at using "AI" for certain process flows but you need to, you know, map the processes first.

The automatic assumption that things can just be implemented based on nothing but a "sales pitch" or "I saw something cool at a random external meeting" is infuriating (and this is just IT related).

 

We have one of the commercial guys dead set on AIing everything. His current thing is to see if AI can write customer contracts.

I'm sure that'll end well.

 

See… an LLM can have a stab at creating something that can (and I stress this) at first glance resemble what you’re looking for. But to do that you really need to either train/tune your own model, or you need to feed it a repository of your existing stuff - what they call “retrieval augmented generation”, or RAG. Setting up those RAG pipelines takes time and effort; sure you can throw it a document at a time, but if that document isn’t representative then you’re gonna get crap results. Oh, and you need pretty beefy infrastructure to run it all and do the inferencing; or you outsource to a massively unprofitable outfit like OpenAI, which allows them to covertly slurp any information you feed them for use in training & refining future models, meaning your trade secrets will eventually be spat back out to other OpenAI customers. The engineering effort involved in setting up these pipelines often far exceeds just solving the problem you were trying to solve in the first place.

And then you come back to that “at first glance” problem. Because when you peer beneath the skirts of the plausible-sounding garbage it’s fed you, you realise that it’s actually… garbage… So you go back to your tech people and tell them to do better, or if you’re the tech person then you go back and re-evaluate whatever you’ve just built and try again.

Meanwhile… if you’d just worked on the actual thing in the first place instead of trying to get “AI” to do it for you, you’d have been done a long time ago.

 

Just handed my notice in to work full time on a start up, I still have an income of 20k which is guaranteed anyway, but it just gives me more free-time, so let’s see how this goes!

 

Is this really a 'meh' thing?

Guaranteed £20k, free time and a new opportunity - sounds like a great place to be.

Good luck!

 

1. Received an email that Ripple Energy (who built the windfarm I "own" a chunk of) are declaring insolvency and appointing administrators.
2. Received a second email saying the co-op that runs said windfarm will keep operating as normal.

Item 2 is why this post is in this thread instead of the other one

 

I remember you buying into that a while back, how has it gone overall?

 

Pretty well, actually.
Every month, it's been taking a £12-£35 bite out of my electricity bill since it came online last summer.

 

just had a new mattress delivered which is much yay and w00t, along with plenty of cheesecake.. (it is this bit why this post is in here and not ruining despite the very much pi$$ed off tone of the next bit)

However, the removal and recycling of the old one appeared to not be on the order despite that being asked for at the time of purchase. We paid £150 at the time of order which was as I understood it to cover the delivery and recycling fees, not an amount that I was upset about at all, we drive a Mini so there was no way that I was going to eb able to take it to the tip, something that is all sorts of fun and games as it is (thanks, Nottingham City Council...).

So this now means that we still have the old king-sized mattress sitting in the hallway, something that the delivery drivers were not best pleased about as it meant a lot of awkwardness of trying to do a 180 with the mattress to get it upstairs. So now I have had to arrange bulky collection via the council, another thing that they now charge for... and the only days available for collection are days when I am working in the office.

Oh, it was Benson's for Beds that we ordered from, just in case anyone was curious. Apparently there is nothing that they can do about it now as the new one has been delivered and the order is all closed. I could have apparently added it to the order before delivery, but I was under the impression that it was already on there, hence no need to add it....

 

It'd be a shame if there was a fault with you mattress that required it being exchanged under warranty.

God damn I'm in a malicious mood today.

 

Round here for the bulky stuff you just have to have it outside your property by 7.30 for them to pick up, no human interaction required. Do they require you to be in to hand it over?