I feel sorry for non-Muslims assuming they will find united Muslims in mosques, striving for the better good.
How would you know from the outside that the local mosque is only there for a particular clan that lives on one side of the river in a village 6000 miles away, and can’t even accomodate the clan from the other side of the river, let alone outsiders?
I wish you well in your search for guidance.
Currently, our lad thinks he will work in construction. I’m not discouraging him.
An NVQ in bricklaying could be good for him. An apprenticeship in plumbing worthwhile.
Why not embrace an in-demand trade, unlikely to be made redundant by AI?
I can already see my own job being replaced by an algorithm within a decade.
So, too, project managers, accountants, editors, marketing, tech support, process engineers.
A few bodies will still be required to drive the AI, but not a lot.
While it’s probably true that some large construction firms will inevitably invest in robotic bricklaying machines, I don’t see that as a widespread threat in the UK.
Given the labour and skills shortage in the construction industry at a time of heightened demand, seeking to work in this sector would seem a sensible avenue to me.
But, of course, I must not encourage him too much, for he thinks he’s playing opposites. Whatever we think is a good idea, he must shun. Nothing worse than a parent embracing your rebellion!
We will lose our best people because we refuse to either promote them or pay a living wage.
Insult added to injury when they see they are doing far more work to a higher standard than those on higher grades.
And this too is true, for the skills deficit and reluctance to learn is a source of daily consternation.
But what can we do, for our hands are tied from above, by a board which refuses to fund any role, and has further cuts in its sights?
Who knows if any of us will survive the coming purge? Any but the disgruntled workers on the lowest bands doing more and more for less and less.
Why do I write so much? Because when I speak, I constantly get cut off before I can even finish my sentence. At least when I write, I can fully articulate my thoughts. Whether anyone is interested is another matter altogether.
Oh, marvellous progress! Oh, civil delight!
Behold where the viaduct pierces the light!
No Tudor, no timber, no mellow red brick—
Just weather-worn steel in a shade of old sick.
Farewell to the Chilterns, their valleys and streams,
Replaced by this marvel of high-speeding dreams.
A rust-coated ribbon, so brutal, so tall,
A triumph of function! A curse upon all.
No craftsman’s proud chiselling, no arching embrace,
No whisper of beauty to soften the place—
Just columns like tombstones that loom and decay,
While commuters speed soullessly, whizzing away.
Oh, Wendover weeps, but the planners proclaim:
“A landmark! A vision! You’ll soon love the frame!”
Yet up on the hillside, the red kites still cry,
As Corten steel mockery splits up the sky.
Our intelligence services lied? Whoever would have thought it!
As for the BBC: I’m sure they know of many agent provocateurs posing as extremists.
But, alas, we must kowtow to the thirty-year rule and play along.
Nothing to see here. Move on.
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
Running a B&B on the side of a mountain.
Momentarily, I convinced myself I could be someone.
Then reality intervened and reminded me no, no I couldn’t.
There I was, thinking I have leadership potential.
I know my stuff, I’m competent, I have influence.
Ah, but only from behind my keyboard, working quietly away in the background.
But to emerge and stand before a group? To speak up and make myself heard?
Reality reminds me I’m a joke, no different from that boy at school, forever derided.
Honestly, I feel completely deflated, crashing back down to earth with a thud.
I really should stop feeling intimidated by people who tell me how brilliant they are. Most of the time, they’re just bluffing. Which will become apparent when they need help. Take it easy.
I suppose I should just reconcile myself to my role in life being the eternal butt of the joke.
If only we could find a leader striving for peace in the world.
But, alas, all we have are competing megalomaniacs.
What I’ve mostly learned the last few days is how little I know, and how outdated my knowledge.
It turns out that not only do I not need to upgrade my own hardware, but even the notion of streaming a desktop is tenuous.
Sure, Vagon holds promise as a cloud hosted remote desktop with access to beefy GPUs, but even that doesn’t seem to be strictly necessary.
With services like LighteningAI you have cloud runtime capabilities baked right into your IDE without even worrying about infrastructure.
Obvious to some, no doubt, but to me a whole new revelation. A revolution, even. Well, not really.
All said, I’m getting too old for tinkering like this. I think I will park these ideas, and leave for youthful brains. I have enough on my plate without resurrecting the terminal in my private life. Need a better hobby.
The West does care about Gaza, actually. Not its residents, of course. But the untapped billions of barrels’ worth of oil beneath its territory? Yes, it really cares about that very much.
AI has promise, certainly, but a lot of it is just hype. Unfortunately, I learnt that the hard way.
Often, the latest and greatest model, touted as the one to kill all competition, turns out to be anything but stable.
You can get good results, but only after a great deal of experimentation and refinement. And there’s no guarantee that refinement will reap the same results next time.
To be sure, the images or videos companies use in their marketing material are not indicative of every-time results. They probably iterated hundreds or thousands of times to produce those.
Regrettably, I fell for that hype myself, despite being an arch cynic when it comes to tech. In my case, I was taken in by claims that a particular model was the greatest development in motion graphics.
Their website demoed nearly flawless clips supposedly the typical output of the tool. I watched countless YouTube videos and read all the reviews singing its praises.
But the reality? It was not capable of anything like that at all. After hundreds of attempts to achieve only a couple of reasonable results, I concluded the hype was about one thing alone: funding.
We, the easily hoodwinked, always enamoured by shortcuts, were beta testers at best, providing the revenue to enable developers to (perhaps) keep the lights on.
Far from the glowing reviews found online, many real users have already concluded this particular tool is largely a scam, generally incapable of producing anything but rubbish.
Is Generative-AI a threat to our jobs? Possibly, but not necessarily justifiably so. Leaders at the top of organisations will inevitably invest in it heavily, thinking it the panacea to all their woes. Sadly, leadership is often ill-informed when it comes to tech.
Many studios are already regretting investing in AI early, thinking it a shortcut to producing rapid results and a lower cost. In reality, they often ended up paying twice.
While AI may have an advantage in speed and cost, reliable quality or consistency just isn’t there yet. Where it offers promise is as an assistive tool. That’s all.
Government and big-business, throwing all their weight behind AI as the solution to all problems will have the same rude awakening soon enough.
Microsoft Copilot is just crap. I spend more time trying to get it to carry out tasks correctly than I would simply doing the task myself. Microsoft seems to have this knack of investing in other companies’ tech, and somehow making it worse.
