Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

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?

 

No, however I would rather be there just to make sure, we have had a few... "hiccups" with waste collection in the past with things being "too difficult" or not exactly in the right place.

 

If you sort of fold / roll a mattress up you can tie a rope round it and it'll form a bulky sort of shape that will go in a hatchback.

 

Having Windows 11 forced onto my works laptop sod 'em that it's struggling and stalling out, I get paid the same at the end of the day.

 

My dad bought into their upcoming solar farm - I wonder if that means his "investment" has gone walkies? Always a risk with this type of thing but it feels like going bust for a well established business model could be avoided wtih reasonable management.

Sounds fishy but could also just be over optimism on the part of Ripple mgmt and they've grown faster than they had cash flow to support.

 

Your dad should've received the same email. Here's the bit about the solar farm, which will hopefully reassure you both:-

Ripple Energy itself was the management agent for the projects. We just need a new agent (some other co-op members are hoping Octopus come sniffing around)

 

Initial reply from IONOS a few days ago along the lines of "We've opened an investigation"

A reply from some "Senior Solutions Manager" today with "Hello, our investigation found that the sales representative did explain the product and its features. We're sorry it didn’t meet your expectations... As a gesture of goodwill we'd like to offer an early termination"

Uhhh... but that's not my complaint though?. I agree the product was explained to me, hence why I signed up for it. What wasn't explained was the total cost, the 'promotional price,' and the fact that I was locked into paying £288 per year.

 

Yep - I disposed of an old mattress not too long ago using this exact method (except not using a rope, I used a couple of those ratcheting straps instead).