Early Risers.

[jamie92208]

Good moaning from the Charente.  I got our taxes done yesterday.  About 2 hours work. Most of that time was spent going through bank statements and setting up my spreadsheet that will work out the figures in 2025.  For various arcane reasons French tax is on the previous calendar year.. However because most of our income and rises are aligned with the British fiscal year  they allow me  to use that. Thus the figures that went in yesterday are for April 22 to April 23. I have most of my figures for next year's submission ready. The actual online tax form only took about 20 minutes. The main complication is that Virgin Money, actually Clydesdale bank, now pay a modest interest rate on our UK accounts.  A total of £39.98 but that had to be worked in.  Anyway it's done.  Today is more getting ready for visitors day.  Wine boxes to be refilled,shopping to be shopped then grass to be cut. 

 

Ttfn

 

Jamie

[Hroth]

4 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Along with the children that spun it in Blake's dark Satanic Mills.

 

Blakes "Dark Satanic Mills" were the Cathedrals and Parish Churches of the Established Church of England, echoing the mills of the Industrial Revolution.  He was a theist, hostile to the CofE...

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake

 

 

[Barry O]

Ey up!

Attended an umpires meeting last night. All was going well then I had to explain the concussion protocol. It's been in place for 2 years but few bothered about it. Now it has been restated.. the message is.."do exactly what the protocol says". Very easy you would think... nope any excuse not to do it was trotted out.. answer was the same "for legal reasons JDI" Eventually it was accepted..  boy didn't realise how stupid people can be.

 

Off to Headingley to umpire  two T20s shortly. The weather may reduce this to 1 T20 and a T10. Me? I'll umpire whatever the coaches ask me to do.

 

Have as good a day as you can!

 

Baz

[Compound2632]

15 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Of course the quality of the interaction is far superior with an in-person interview. But when the interview team is not co-located and a successful candidate would be relocated to the work location (frequently requiring air travel and an overnight stay for the interview), using virtual video interviews is a no-brainer.

 

I imagine that it is 'easier' to conduct traditional in-person interviews in the UK where distances are less, though the stories I hear here about rail transport make me wonder how practical that is these days.

 

The issue is really about avoiding unconscious bias (or indeed, conscious bias) in interviews. Ideally an interview should be conducted in such a way that the interviewers are unaware of the candidate's identity in terms of protected characteristics such as gender, age, race, etc.

[polybear]

12 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

I've got one already. I call it the wife 😂.

 

Dave

 

Rumour has it that certain models can be (a) very expensive, (b) temperamental, (c) liable to play up at a moment's notice - or indeed any combination of the above.  Sounds tricky to this Bear.

[BSW01]

Good morning everyone 

 

The weather has changed considerably, it’s now wet and grey, although the rain has stopped falling at the moment. It’s the usual Friday activities for me today, a walk to the butchers will take place shortly followed by a quick visit to the Trafford Centre for a few items that I can’t get locally. As for the afternoon, probably spent reading or something similar. 
 

At my consultation yesterday, we discussed my latest PSA result (up to 17.i from 14.76) and I was informed that no action will be taken at the moment. Once it hits 20 or more, then I’ll be put on extra medication which they hope will bring my PSA back down. My next appointment is booked for the 10 July. That’ll some come round! 
 

Back later. 
 

Brian

[polybear]

Bear here....

 

Well I climbed the little wooden hill at 9pm last night, with the full intention of going for a piddle in the pool today (requiring an 04-30am roll call).  But then at 02-something that bluddy Wee Wee Fairy paid Bear a visit - after which I couldn't get back to zeddyland.  Poo.  I did eventually manage it, only to wake again at 04-something with an achy back and an uncommon headache.  Double Poo.  Well they were the only excuses I needed so when Alexa did sound the Gong I cancelled it quickly and carried on fighting to get back to zeddyland ......

I guess it was 6am when I finally gave up - I'm now all Wallowed (though swimming a Km was kinda tricky in the Bear Castle Muddy Hollow) and I guess I'd better get dressed and make the Beary Pit soon; I've got numerous deliveries scheduled for today (mainly parts for Harry the Honda, as well as couple of new pairs of Strides from The Big River) so the chances of going for a Hilly Wander are looking kinda shaky at present.

Right, time to get a wriggle on - I think this morning's activities will focus on searching Bear Towers for various bits that belong to Harry the Honda - so that'll be Beamland, numerous Bedrooms, the Muddlin' room, the Front room (or Lounge if you're posh...).  I may be some time....

 

Bear gone.......

Edited April 19 by polybear

[Gwiwer]

12 hours ago, Coombe Barton said:

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. ...

Absolutely.

 

Dr. SWMBO had been in an AI workshop yesterday and demonstrated some of the capabilities to me last night.  She could not get the Pi app to recognise her voice nor to speak to her but it did respond to text and produced some credible output in response to her input.  Then there was another which "writes" music; she asked it for a "1980s power ballad theme song" including several key words.  Almost instantly out came something which sounded a lot like a Starship track and included not only the key words she asked for but key phrases she uses at work that were not included in the request.  

 

OK - there's some very clever programming behind all of this.  But ultimately it still takes a human or several to write all of that and to get these systems up and running.  Which, to my mind, means that those who are at the back-end sit in positions of potentially abusable power and can exert control over the rest of us passively or openly.  The specific phrases in the song generated would have been those somehow profiled from Dr. SWMBO's professional work; on the balance of probability they were not randomly generated and coincidental.  

 

So who is spying on whom and why?  "They" already know a great deal about us but that does not mean they have our consent to hold nor to use that information.  In the UK GDPR provisions apply.  You can bet these apps are not UK-based though they can in some circumstances be governed by UK law.  

 

Dr. SWMBO was fretting that she and her team have effectively been made redundant.  My response was that they are far from redundant because they still have to use the app and input their requests.  The machine cannot think for itself and say "Ah yes - I'll come up with a 1980s power ballad using text I know XXXX XXXX uses in her professional life and randomly spit it out to her".  It has to be asked first.  And it can only react, no pro-act.  It can churn out any amount of data and material randomly but it still requires a human to ask it first for the train timetable to Little Nuttingford or a novel featuring naked whales and a teaspoon.  

 

Humans are not being made redundant by AI.  

 

I am very wary of it.  I haven't knowingly given any information away specifically to any AI platform.  I feel AI sits firmly in the camp of "Just because we can doesn't always make it right".  

 

Happy Friday.  The weekend is upon us.  And it's POETS Day too.  

 

 

[iL Dottore]

On 18/04/2024 at 09:09, TheQ said:

I have turned down other posts, twice because of pathetic pay offers....

 

The UK is notorious for being a low wage/salary*, high tax environment,

 

Many years ago I applied for a position - senior to my then current position - at a biotech startup in London. I had thought that it would be a good career move and - in the days pre-dog - I would have had a pied-à-terre in London and then commuted back to Switzerland every other weekend.

 

The necessary experience and qualifications fitted, as did the interpersonal stuff, then they talked about salary: they were offering 80% of my then existing salary for a much more senior role. I asked if they were having a larf (actually I phrased it as "would this be the starting point for salary and bonus discussions?") and they said No, that was the maximum they were prepared to pay. I politely declined to go further (later I learned that the company went nowhere, fast. So I might have dodged a bullet there).

 

I am still occasionally contacted by UK headhunters - often for short term work - and always they offer insultingly low rates**. Usually when I get to "my minimum fee, as paid by my other clients, is CHF XXXXX" they find an excuse to hang up pretty toot sweet.

 

* outside of certain individuals of the media, banking, sport and law.

** I think that the rates that the customer they are working for is willing to pay would be in line with the "standard" fee structures for what I do - but it seems that they want to trouser at least half of those fees...

[Gwiwer]

28 minutes ago, polybear said:

12 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

I've got one already. I call it the wife 😂.

 

Dave

 

Rumour has it that certain models can be (a) very expensive, (b) temperamental, (c) liable to play up at a moment's notice - or indeed any combination of the above

Confused of Clapham here.  

 

Well not Clapham any more but hey.  

 

Models that are very expensive, play up and are temperamental can be of more than one species.  I jettisoned the good-looking one with curves, moods and an on-off love affair with anyone who might pay her some attention.  I retained the one which says "Lima" stamped on its bottom, looks good but has always been temperamental and liable to play up.  Just to avoid confusion the one with curves etc. did not have "Lima" stamped on her bottom although she did have a pretty picture stamped beneath the wrappers on the front and it wasn't tampo-printed! 

[New Haven Neil]

Morning, from a sunny rock that lies, it feels pretty chilly out there despite showing 10c.

 

@monkeysarefun there's no chance of anything being in Annette's luggage without getting severely flattened, beaten and destroyed, non-Australian or not! Think 'The fat broad' from the BC cartoons.  Lethal.  She also delivered a packet of Tim Tams, they just look like UK Penguin biscuits, but I haven't had a nibble of one yet.

 

Not sure what the day will bring, I'm a bit under the weather so won't be riding out to the Old Farts breakfast, but may go in the car. It's still too cold when you're not quite well.

[jjb1970]

The pay on offer for many UK based positions wouldn't be bad if tax was less and cost of living lower. And pay has been distorted by government benefits to subsidize industry by trying to top up people's income to something which is liveable. That doesn't just affect low pay, low skilled jobs, an awful lot of skilled and professional staff qualify for various benefits. The canard about people asking for lower annual pay rises to avoid crossing thresholds whereby they'd lose benefits isn't an urban myth, I had a few people quietly request it when I had people managing responsibilities.  Which is properly messed up in my view, not the individuals who were acting in a rational way but a screwed up system.

[Gwiwer]

2 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

On 18/04/2024 at 08:09, TheQ said:

pathetic pay offers....

 

The UK is notorious for being a low wage/salary*, high tax environment,

Even in my humble profession this has been true.  

 

One of the reasons we could not attract staff at Clapham was the rate of pay offered.  Never mind the conditions which of necessity required us to work outdoors in a customer-facing and often quite hostile environment at any hour of any day.  There was a pay freeze imposed by the Government post-Covid but ironically the same Government mandated minimum wage levels which enforced pay rises!  We were below the "London Living Wage" and pennies above the statutory minimum hourly rate.  For a safety-critical job which demanded all sorts of skills and knowledge, impinged on our private lives because of the shifts and zero-alcohol / illicit drugs requirements and we no longer had the one-time UK-wide free travel entitlement.  Though we did retain the right to privilege fares an all but the "Open Access" operators meaning the most we would pay was a quarter of the Anytime (walk-up) fare and usually a quarter of the Off-Peak fares.  

 

Quite frankly the only staff we could usually recruit were those even the supermarkets had rejected.  Because you could get at least £1 / hour more for filling shelves and you worked indoors.  OK you didn't get privilege travel but not everyone uses that anyway.  And so the railways have become the bucket employer; the carp which falls to the bottom and takes the job not because it's what they want but because it is the only job they can get.  

 

That might be worth remembering the next time you encounter surly staff who hide when things go wrong and seem to know nothing and care even less.  That does not excuse poor performance but it does help to explain it.  Honestly how many folk in the job market today would do that sort of work - and be asked to manage any and every situation including the traumatic ones - for just a few pence above the National Minimum Wage?  

 

There used to be pride in working for the railways and it was a career sought by many but to which only the lucky few were recruited.  You can always tell a career "Railwayman" from the pack, and there are still some around, by their attitude, approach and often their appearance.  No mobiles in hand, half-mast ties and trainers.  Always well-dressed and eyes-on-the-job.  

 

The railway has never been a well-paid career (driving grades excepted) but it was better-paid in Australia than it is in the UK.  Put bluntly I was expected to work half as hard for twice the money out there.  Had life not brought me back to home shores I would happily have continued there until retirement.  

[jjb1970]

I find this quite sad. Singapore is infamous for having a fiercely competitive view of the world and wanting to be first in stuff. I think a deep seated envy of Australia's global leadership in the field of dangerous wildlife with all those venomous spiders, boxing kangaroos, wild hogs etc has made Singapore try to join in. A sad sign of insecurity, surely the crocodiles or marauding gangs of homicidal macaques would be a better effort to try and look impressive.

[jjb1970]

Bak kut teh for dinner tonight, a hot and sour pork rib soup. To be honest it's not my favourite SE Asian dish but Mrs JJB is a great enthusiast of it and made it today.

Edited April 19 by jjb1970

[PhilJ W]

There are signs that the low pay/low tax mantra is beginning to unravel. To work it depended on a pool of unemployed but a combination of Brexit and covid* has made that disappear. The government has no control over what the private sector pays its staff but tries to put the squeeze on the public sector and those parts of the private sector over which it exercises some financial control such as the railways. So we now have the situation where supermarkets, who were once paying the lowest rates have been forced to raise wages whereas the railways cannot as they are being told by the government (who hold the purse strings) not to give and other staff drivers a raise. The drivers being a highly skilled sector gives them some leverage.

*Brexit has removed a lot of people from the workforce (mostly from Eastern Europe) who were willing to work for the minimum wage and covid has and still is having a debilitating effect on those particularly at the bottom of the workforce who were more likely to be unemployed.

[Grizz]

Morning All

 

Day off today. Yaaaaaaay. 
 

Might do some muddling. Suspect that I’ll end up doing some more mundane chores before that, although my mind is not on it really. 
 

It was wonderful to see friends who came over last Saturday night . We all laughed so hard about our yoof, with so many shared memories, both good and bad. 

They departed in the early hours and we finally stumbled up to bed. 
36 hours later one of our friends was on a ventilator being treated for an extremely aggressive bacterial pneumonia. She may have to put into a coma to help her recover. We are now three days further down the line and she is still very seriously ill and has sepsis. 
 

To say that we are stunned is a fracking massive understatement. How the frack does that happen so quickly.
She was fine on Saturday, absolutely no outward signs of illness, in fact she said how good she felt. 

Time for a cuppa…laters all

 

ATB Grizz
 

 

 

[woodenhead]

1 hour ago, Gwiwer said:

Absolutely.

 

Dr. SWMBO had been in an AI workshop yesterday and demonstrated some of the capabilities to me last night.  She could not get the Pi app to recognise her voice nor to speak to her but it did respond to text and produced some credible output in response to her input.  Then there was another which "writes" music; she asked it for a "1980s power ballad theme song" including several key words.  Almost instantly out came something which sounded a lot like a Starship track and included not only the key words she asked for but key phrases she uses at work that were not included in the request.  

 

So who is spying on whom and why?  "They" already know a great deal about us but that does not mean they have our consent to hold nor to use that information.  In the UK GDPR provisions apply.  You can bet these apps are not UK-based though they can in some circumstances be governed by UK law.  

 

Humans are not being made redundant by AI.  

 

I am very wary of it.  I haven't knowingly given any information away specifically to any AI platform.  I feel AI sits firmly in the camp of "Just because we can doesn't always make it right".  

 

 

 

 

Most companies are fully aware of the dangers of AI LLM using personal or sensitive data for training the models so take steps to obtain locked copies of the LLM that sit within firewalls so the main source LLM cannot train of it.  Companies who want to consume AI products want to be sure their data is safe and those selling reputable AI products who know that security of data is paramount and have to invest in locked LLM models that will not be training other LLMs using someone else's data.

 

In terms of redundancy, the scary bit is that most CEO and senior people think they can dispose of developers as the LLM will be able to do that job instead and make no bones about it, which is great for me listening to senior leaders in my company talking about this in front of me.  The talk is all about enriching everyone else's work experience not redundancy, but really it comes down to doing more with less people, they just don't talk about 'automation' in the same language anymore but it's still the same.

 

Microsoft is now promoting a product that will actually replace the developer, manna from heaven for any CEO, but the question then comes what happens when the LLM/AI develops it's own language to do stuff because it's more efficient and the few developers left cannot fathom how it does stuff - i.e. who fixes it when it breaks.

 

There are some good uses for LLM/AI, not going to deny it, but to make out it is going to do everything and our lives are going to be so enriched is typical bluster.  The one thing I learnt recently and this is from an LLM/AI guru - don't trust the output, you need to check everything, and how do you do that, you have to check that it's references are real because LLM/AI make things up to justify their findings - really it makes stuff up.  We are doomed!!!

[PhilJ W]

Morning all from Estuary-Land. Getting my stuff together for the hospital trip this afternoon. First of all I will have to book a taxi and specify an easy access as I have difficulty getting in and out of ordinary cars. First I will have to get the rollalong out of the car.

[PhilJ W]

Oops, nearly forgot. @polybear when you go to Lisbon you will have to take a ride on the trams while you are there

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Lisbon 

My understanding is on some routes they operate vintage trams, route 15 penetrates the older part of the city with narrow streets and steep inclines.

[Ohmisterporter]

We were on holiday in Tenerife when a company rep said how she disliked men referring to their spouse as "the wife". So I said I would never dream of calling our lass "the wife". I kept a straight face.

 

You may have to be northern to understand this.

[PhilJ W]

My success with the NY Times Wordl continues, 7th successive 'win' and this time on the third attempt.

[jamie92208]

44 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

Most companies are fully aware of the dangers of AI LLM using personal or sensitive data for training the models so take steps to obtain locked copies of the LLM that sit within firewalls so the main source LLM cannot train of it.  Companies who want to consume AI products want to be sure their data is safe and those selling reputable AI products who know that security of data is paramount and have to invest in locked LLM models that will not be training other LLMs using someone else's data.

 

In terms of redundancy, the scary bit is that most CEO and senior people think they can dispose of developers as the LLM will be able to do that job instead and make no bones about it, which is great for me listening to senior leaders in my company talking about this in front of me.  The talk is all about enriching everyone else's work experience not redundancy, but really it comes down to doing more with less people, they just don't talk about 'automation' in the same language anymore but it's still the same.

 

Microsoft is now promoting a product that will actually replace the developer, manna from heaven for any CEO, but the question then comes what happens when the LLM/AI develops it's own language to do stuff because it's more efficient and the few developers left cannot fathom how it does stuff - i.e. who fixes it when it breaks.

 

There are some good uses for LLM/AI, not going to deny it, but to make out it is going to do everything and our lives are going to be so enriched is typical bluster.  The one thing I learnt recently and this is from an LLM/AI guru - don't trust the output, you need to check everything, and how do you do that, you have to check that it's references are real because LLM/AI make things up to justify their findings - really it makes stuff up.  We are doomed!!!

What pray is LLM

 

Confused of Saleignes. 

 

Jamie

8 minutes ago, Ohmisterporter said:

We were on holiday in Tenerife when a company rep said how she disliked men referring to their spouse as "the wife". So I said I would never dream of calling our lass "the wife". I kept a straight face.

 

You may have to be northern to understand this.

That's a personal hate of the boss that I dare not use. 

 

Jamie

[polybear]

18 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

My success with the NY Times Wordl continues, 7th successive 'win' and this time on the third attempt.

 

Er, wot's a "Wordl".....?

@PupCam Puppeeeeeeerzzzzzz..........

 

 

 

[woodenhead]

12 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

What pray is LLM

 

Confused of Saleignes. 

 

 

Large Language Model - what AI is apparently. 

 

Actually it's not, it just a bloody clever guess the next word in the sequence model.

 

They call it AI so lay people think it is, but it isn't.  The LLM cannot think for itself, cannot decide for itself, it's all built on rules.  But what it does do is learn, it does guess the next word well and it can draw things, it can also find a needle in a haystack.

 

True AI is a self thinking machine that makes it's own decisions, so far we haven't been presented with any true AI, or at least we don't think we have.