sevan

This week at work, my team reported a major system outage. There was a lengthy conference call to solve the outage and afterwards someone (not from my team) ran a transcript of the call through copilot to generate an executive summary and sent it up to top level leadership.

Copilot misunderstood the relevance of various comments (surprise!) and effectively reported that my team reported the outage almost an hour after we became aware of it. This caused us to get yelled at by senior leadership for failing to report a major issue in a timely manner. We then had to waste time proving that we had escalated the issue appropriately within minutes and listen to the call recording again to figure out where the incorrect reference came from and provide quotes from the transcript to explain why the summary was wrong.

So far there have been some very small use cases where I have found LLMs slightly useful but mostly they cause me more work than they save (by a lot). And yet, I keep hearing more and more from my company that they want "AI" to analyze things for us.

When I moved into my house last year, the garage entry door handles were reversed so the key hole was inside the house and the little bit you twist to lock and unlock the door was in the garage.

I agree with you on both points there. Skyrim NPCs are definitely a weak point and there was some good content in the side quests of the Witcher series.

Depends on what you like. I love Skyrim and hate the Witcher games. The thing that I hate the most about the Witcher games is that using a main character from books locks you into certain parts of the canon that kills my vibe from an RPG perspective. In particular, I don't care about Yennefer even a little bit but any time she shows up in the story, the main character throws away all prior decisions and chases after her. I prefer RPGs that let me imagine who my character is as much as possible.

I would say not all birds sing, mainly just song birds sing. Lots of other birds don't sing either like crows, woodpeckers, jays, pelicans, eagles, hawks, owls, etc.

Note: I'm not any kind of bird expert, so it is possible some of the birds that I listed have a song-like call that I'm unfamiliar with or am forgetting about.

Everywhere I've ever lived in the US you tell the electric and gas company what date you'll be moving in or out. The power and gas are normally already turned on and they just switch billing to whoever the new responsible party is.

In Georgia (USA) you have the illusion of choice in a "deregulated" market. In reality, there is a single gas provider and you get to pick which company provides billing service to you. Each company advertises a rate to "compete" with each other, this rate is added on top of the base rate that the actual gas provider charges and then they charge you a service charge on top of the that ($5-6 per month) that is not advertised.

The base rate is the same no matter who you choose. And the base rate plus admin fee make up most of your bill, so the advertised "competitive" rate is basically meaningless. Also, you have to sign a contract or you pay a variable rate instead of the advertised rate, which is MUCH higher. Also, there are big discounts for "new" customers (lower rate, monthly bill credit, cash back visa, etc.), so after the first contract period your price goes up quite a bit.

So you need to change providers every 6-24 months (depending on contract length) in the month before your contract expires. Otherwise your bill goes up because you either switched to the much higher variable price or lost your new customer discount. Or if you switch early, you pay an early cancellation charge.

Also, if you ever have any issues with your gas lines, you have to call the actual gas company to get assistance. The company that you pay doesn't actually have any technicians or anything and provides no other service than billing you and paying the real gas company their share of the bill.

I'm so glad I don't live in Georgia anymore for lots of reasons, including this.

Yes, this is the answer!

I would check to see what the process is for requesting workplace accommodations at your company and then see if you can get your doctor to provide the appropriate paperwork saying that you cannot participate in large group activities or that you need to be 100% remote.

I've been married to someone with severe depression for a very long time. It isn't necessarily a 24x7 experience. During the good times, she is an incredibly happy and fun person to be with. During the bad times, it is really hard on both of us. Medicine has helped, but isn't perfect. We do our best to get through the hard times and enjoy the rest.

As of today, I am completely unable to estimate or visualize metric values with the exception of the meter (because it is roughly the same as a yard). That said, I would prefer to switch to metric and get used to it rather than continue using our current measurements. It would be vastly preferable to me to use mm and cm over fractions of an inch (I hate fractions, I much prefer decimals).

For temperature, I still prefer F over C. As you said, F is much more metric-like with a 100 degree range that roughly spans the typical weather environments we live in. And considering that the boiling point of water is only 100 C at sea level, that fact is no more valuable than remember that water boils at 212 F at sea level. The reality is, I don't actually care what specific temperature water boils or freezes at (at any particular elevation). I happen to know what the values are in both C and F, but it doesn't matter in my life (except for when I was trying to bake when living in Colorado).

I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.

They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.

I'm not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.