I am, frankly, amazed that the Tories have allowed the power of the Financial Services Ombudsman to continue, but they have, so it would be a glaring omission if I didn't at least try and use it to shove a red hot poker up EE's arse.
(specifically, them treating the finance agreement for the phone and network access as an indivisible unit makes their inflationary price increase effectively a punitive interest rate increase on the phone's finance rate).
I'm not at all sure the FSO will side with me here, but if you don't ask, you don't get.
Dear Phone Provider I haven't used as much data or made as many calls as I expected to, therefore I am reducing my monthly direct debit by 15%! I'm sure they'll be quoting the agreement you made when you signed the contract then.
EE just emailed me. They're putting my UK phone contract up by 15% because "inflation". Apparently it's got so much more expensive for cell towers to just ... sit there and stuff.
Oh, wait, no, it's because energy is more expensive because the price of wind and sunlight has gone up.
What we are seeing is not inflation. Companies are making record profits and just hoarding it, while simultaneously firing people in large numbers.
Not satisfied with hoarding nearly all the wealth, the billionaire class want ALL of it. They want an entire population of, well, serfs basically. They're trying to turn the whole of western civilisation into one huge company store, and the idea that there are still people who can afford to live comfortable lives is profoundly offensive to them.
Sooner or later there will be a reckoning. History tells us that there always is when the ruling classes think they can get away with this crap.
So here's the thing. I bought by phone through them. The price I'm paying each month therefore is part the cost of the phone, part the cost of the network.
There is no feasible world in which the price of the phone has gone up, but they're treating it as a single entity.
@Zoe O'Connell spotted this. Might be time to chat to the regulator.
@Keith Edkins🔶🇪🇺 🇺🇦🏳️🌈 Yup. This is exactly the argument I intend to make to the Financial Services Ombudsman. They even call my contract a finance agreement.
@geekylou :transgender_flag: @Zoe O'Connell So I've just asked them for an itemised bill of the financial agreement. They cannot provide one. I have raised a complaint. They have 8 weeks to respond to it. I have marked that in my calendar.
We shall see what happens, but I suspect the next step involves the financial services ombudsman.
that reminds me. Time to make my annual phone call to them, pretend I’m leaving and get my tariff lowered again (one reason I’m sim-only)
Recommend trying that if you’re not tied to a handset. You can usually haggle down a decent amount. Find a similar product with any other UK network and give ‘em a call.
By the way, when you say "Companies are making record profits and just hoarding it, while simultaneously firing people in large numbers" - this is true - but it still leads to inflation, at least as the central banks define it (and they're the ones raising rates in response). So-called "greedflation" is just as real as the wage-price spiral that everyone gets so worked up about. It's just that price increases are driven by corporate profits rather than higher wages.
Amazon doing its “you just bought this thing that is not a consumable and you will almost certainly never need to buy again, why not buy more?” thing again.
We really need to stop calling computers misusing probability “AI” and start calling it what it is: artificial stupidity.
I never saw Amazon doing anything even slightly related to AI.
Amazon is just a big American company selling stuff under the market value in order to bankrupt the existing webshops. We don't need Amazon on this side of the pond ...
Much as I loved to visit Spain, there was something intensely disappointing going on. They seem to be building US-style suburban sprawl as fast as they possibly can, having learned none of the very obvious lessons about why that’s a terrible idea.
And they are building vast amounts of new car infrastructure without EV charging, at all. Like, guys, it’s gonna be illegal to sell new internal combustion cars in just over six years. Read the room.
Driving through Andalusia was like driving through bits of the US southwest, and not in a flattering way.
It was a relief to cross the Guadiana back into Portugal; the misguided tribute act to Arizona was getting a bit much.
Have rather enjoyed my time in Malaga. Heading home in the morning. Gonna try and do it on a single charge stop. Had amazing gluten free tacos at a local cafe today. Nice place. Will visit again.
In wholly surprising news, a man who grew up benefiting from Apartheid has come to the support of someone who has just torpedoed his own life’s work by doing a massive racism.
Andalusia seems to have fallen into the trap of building US style sprawl. Half of southern Spain feels like it’s been eaten by trading estates, and that’s really sad.
This is the problem of the IT industry writ large: there are small numbers of people who understand the system and can work out problems, and then large numbers of people who are, for want of a better description, cargo cultists.
I’m not talking about googling specifics on Stack Overflow here, that’s fine as long as you still have the understanding and the results you get aren’t just treated as magic runes.
But too many people don’t want to go to the effort of just buying a goddam book and fucking reading it.
There are two types of #EV chargers: AC and DC. The DC ones are generally known as “rapid chargers” and are the EV equivalent of filling stations, delivering a lot of charge in a short time. You use these to extend range on a long trip.
The AC chargers are what everyone uses at home, overnight, to slowly charge their car at a much lower power level. These stress the battery a lot less and also, the power grid can cope with them easily, which is harder with the beefier DC rapid chargers.
But there are also public AC chargers. These are generally used if you’re staying somewhere for several hours, as is the case here where I left my car overnight in Malaga, or by plug in hybrid owners who, for some reason, have to show the world that they can go three more metres before their engine comes on after leaving the supermarket 🤷🏻♀️👍🏻
I know it's a bullshit fountain. If you want info, it will give you crap and sound really authoritative while doing it.
But I just felt like talking to someone about how I miss my mum. She died of cancer in December 2021, and it's the middle of the night now, so I talked to ChatGPT about her.
Cis people on social media say the stupidest shit about “sex and gender”.
My god, you’d think that people with opinions that poorly developed would have the sense to keep quiet about them, rather than show the world how little they’ve actually considered them while being confidently incorrect, but apparently not.
Dear god. After multiple posts with paragraph after paragraph of cherry picked bullshit about how I’m “really male”, random internet TERF who I will never meet says, “sex isn’t relevant to how I address people”.
The simple fact is this: if your classification system of sex results in you deciding that some women are not women, then the problem is your classification system, not reality.
SNP leadership manoeuvres serving as a wake up call to the “flee to Scotland to escape the anti LGBT atmosphere in England and Wales” strategy. The bigotry in high places is lurking, crocodile like, just below the surface throughout the whole wretched island.
Yeah. A lot of people have been saying that about the UK in general. It's frustrating that they continue to say it regardless of how many objectively bad things keep happening. :|
Looking for technical stuff about DHCP. Google was returning lots of junk and so, wary that ChatGPT is a bullshit fountain, I asked it anyway.
It gave me several concise and to the point answers addressing exactly what I asked.
They were all completely wrong. It just confidently spouted bullshit the same way a narcissist bluffing about a subject they know almost nothing about will.
However, the bullshit it gave me allowed me to frame some pertinent google searches to actually get the information I wanted.
So I guess that’s a usage model for it: to guide your google searches.
The issue is that Google will slowly fill up with the output of the bullshit fountains, at which point we won’t be able to check their answers anymore, because they’ll effectively be marking their own homework.
Weirdly it's possible to imagine a world where Wolfram Alpha is the sole survivor of the second search engine war because it's the only one that makes any attempt to trace the provenance of the elements of its inferences.
@esther it's very dated but this covers a lot of ground to help you get started to ask the right questions. Shame you need to know half the answer before you can do that. redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/gg2…
To be fair, this is a tried and true method of getting quick answers on Stack Overflow: stating a clearly wrong answer gets the right answer much more quickly than asking an honest question!
I wonder if the model behind ChatGPT could be adapted to make this feature more explicit. Let's say for a given query it can produce some amount of suggested topics and/or terms that might be relevant for you. Basically strip the "generate bullshit" step and directly expose the "this information is adjacent to what you asked" knowledge encoded in it.
I think that maybe Google delivered too well to start with. It never promised to give the best answer (truest?) simply the most relevant for the question (most popular?)
Maybe we are seeing things hitting their 'eternal September' much more quickly?
After all, "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
I am not a coffee drinker. Being cursed with supertaste, I have spent my life finding the stuff utterly undrinkable.
But now I'm nearly 50, many of my taste buds have died off and I have been slowly managing to acquire the taste.
The flat in Portugal came with an expensive coffee machine, which @Zoe O'Connell uses but I don't (it'll do hot water, but not hot enough for decent tea, so I reverted to the kettle very quickly).
But today I asked it to make me something called a "Latte Macchiato", which the picture shows in a glass.
And now I know why. The preparation is quite a show! The machine adds hot milk, then milk froth, then coffee. The coffee drops straight through the froth layer to form a new layer in the middle which then artfully diffuses into the milk below.
Tasted not offensive too. Actually almost pleasant.
But as a tea drinker, I have a very very low tolerance for caffeine and OH MY GOD ALL THE THINGS SOMEONE TURN THE WORLD DOWN!!!!!!!Eleven!!!!
What fresh hell is this? AI search engine, you.com allows you to search social media handles. Here's what it says about me, most of which (in fact, nearly all of it), is bullshit.
When I tell it it's almost completely wrong, it castigates me for giving it "incorrect information"!
Unconditional surrender to the mind means to let go of the ego and open one's mind to the possibilities and potential of what can be done. It means to surrender to the higher power of the subconscious, to surrender all preconceived notions, and to accept the potential of what can be accomplished. It is a surrendering of the sense of control and an allowing of the natural flow of life to take its course. It is a letting go of the need to be in control and a trusting of the process.
Adelle: Everybody tells me it's 'bout time that I moved on And I need to learn to lighten up and learn how to be young But my heart is a valley, it's so shallow and man made I'm scared to death if I let you in that you'll see I'm just a fake Sometimes I feel lonely in the arms of your touch But I know that's just me, 'cause nothing ever is enough When I was a child I grew up by the River Lea There was something in the water, now that something's in me
Me: Probably leptospirosis. If it doesn't clear up go see your GP.
They play this song a lot at Lee Valley Whitewater Centre, but that water’s chlorinated, albeit not enough to stop the occasional goose or seagull having a paddle in it without paying the entry fee.
I get the Tories deciding to make trans people A Thing because they have nothing left and this, they hope, will save a few of them at the next general election.
The utter indifference and cowardice in opposing the terrorising of thousands of people because it might lose them 12 votes in an election they’re going to fucking walk anyway from Labour, and the silent complicity from the Lib Dems is fucking unforgivable though. People are fucking terrified and they don’t give the first fucking shit.
I remember the SSM debate in the Lords. Exclamations and lamentations over how politicians had treated LGB people dreadfully over the years.
And they’re fucking doing it again, the Tories because it’s convenient, and the others because they simply do not give enough of a shit to do the right thing.
Dunno how much longer I will have a vote in UK elections, but I am fucking DONE with both Labour and the Lib Dems over this. What's the fucking point of either of them?
You're right of course. It is a vile mixture off cowardice and indifference. If the Greens don't get shot of Sharar Ali I won't be voting for them either.
File it under “arcane knowledge” along with not only knowing that control-a control-k clears any text dialogue in Mac OS, but also knowing WHY it does.
had a lovely conversation on the unix historical society list about terminal influences, like ADM-3a leading to vi’s hjkl movement. You all are my people.
I knew that, but had forgotten until your string reminded me. I don't think I've ever had to use it though, the VT220s I used had keyboard with Esc key.
You know what really pisses me off about sexual reassignment surgery?
It's that my surgeon (may he rest in peace: he died of Covid 😞) didn't come in afterwards and say, "congratulations, Mrs Brown, they weren't cancerous".
Fellow #Friendica instance admins. Is there any downside to turning off the Auto Discovered Contact Directory? I only ask because it's literally cooking my poor server once a week.
Best thing about driving an EV (Nissan Leaf): coming up to the autoestrada, single lane sliproad, 270º bend, some guy behind tailgating me because I refused to speed round the bend. A lot of people do this. I guess they see a family hatchback EV and decide it must be a "little old lady"-mobile, and they have a desperate need to show me how I'm holding their impressive petrol burner up.
Bend straightens out to join the main carriageway, and I just press the "tailgater begone" switch (the accelerator, all the way to the floor).
And then suddenly an obscenity of kilowatts is delivered to my wheels, and I'm just ... gone.
About a minute later, he does a spite overtake when he's finally got up to >120kph and caught me up.
But I know I'm living rent-free in his head for that 😊
@Bethan M. Jenkins Yeah. The torque is exactly it. Electric motors excel at it. No waiting for an engine to spin up, no having to drop a gear. Just raw power on tap, immediately.
That it's quite a lot of power is also nice 😉
Also the "whirrrrrrrr" noise of the electric motor when you do that is really satisfying.
there was once a time that I had seen a Leaf when they were showcasing them at a automobile fair, and no lies, it was the nicest car that I could see myself driving one day. Hybrids should be already the norm, no more petrol/gas only cars should be still manufactured 😬
I was leaving Linacre Water near Chesterfield, scenic dog-walker spot which has a narrow single-track lane back to the main road, and stopped at the end of the lane because I spotted a car coming the other way.
A dude in an Audi S4 Avant decided to overtake me in my PHEV Golf, and make a dash for the lane. He got alongside me before the oncoming car came around the corner, and had to reverse back behind me.
I enjoyed the next five minutes of 30 MPH driving through the next village. He didn’t get another opportunity to overtake me before I turned off for Sheffield.
I do get the same satisfaction from driving the Golf GTE. The GTE mode that runs the petrol engine and the electric motor at the same time for ridiculous throttle response is brilliant to catch show-offs out, but I’ve knocked it off lately because men do scarily dangerous things when they’ve been shown up.
We live in a world beset by people who live a sufficiently charmed life that they are able to spend their entire time “fucking around” without ever encountering the “and find out” stage.
Studies show that gen X, my generation, is the most rabidly right wing generation. The millennials are bucking the trend of turning conservative as they get older.
Many people attribute this to economic prospects.
But hear me out here, because there’s an alternate theory.
The romans used lead in plumbing. It was used continuously from then on until the 20th century in plumbing, building, paint, even makeup.
In the mid 20th century they added it to petrol, to improve car performance, filling the air with lead.
Until the advent of the Boomers, it was in paint and water. Slowly it was replaced, but added to the air we breathe. As traffic increased, lead poisoning in the developed world got worse and worse and worse. We know lead poisoning turns humans, well, nasty and unpleasant.
The concentrations peaked in the late 70s to early 80s when traffic levels got huge.
And then it was replaced. The plumbing became copper and plastic. We didn’t use it in paint. It was phased out and banned in petrol.
This happened around the point
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Studies show that gen X, my generation, is the most rabidly right wing generation. The millennials are bucking the trend of turning conservative as they get older.
Many people attribute this to economic prospects.
But hear me out here, because there’s an alternate theory.
The romans used lead in plumbing. It was used continuously from then on until the 20th century in plumbing, building, paint, even makeup.
In the mid 20th century they added it to petrol, to improve car performance, filling the air with lead.
Until the advent of the Boomers, it was in paint and water. Slowly it was replaced, but added to the air we breathe. As traffic increased, lead poisoning in the developed world got worse and worse and worse. We know lead poisoning turns humans, well, nasty and unpleasant.
The concentrations peaked in the late 70s to early 80s when traffic levels got huge.
And then it was replaced. The plumbing became copper and plastic. We didn’t use it in paint. It was phased out and banned in petrol.
This happened around the point the millennials were being born. They are the first generation in two thousand years without societal level lead poisoning.
What if humans are better than all this hateful right wing bollocks that is now peaking? What if it is not our natural state to be like this? What if we are just …broken by growing up in an environment in which this poison, which we know to cause violence, hatred, and all the worst qualities in humans, was utterly ubiquitous?
And what if, when my generation and those of us who came before die out in a few decades, and the damage from lead goes with us … what if things just get better?
@L dot Mastodon I didn’t avoid the worst of it. The reason I’m a left-liberal is because I know what I would do with absolute power, and it terrifies me.
Maybe I should start taking the lead hypothesis seriously. I first encountered it in the Freakonomics book, a book which I find dubious, but stopped clocks are a thing.
I was gonna go, because there was a recent big media push from the right to say that about Gen X in the US - as part of an attempt to woo GenX to the GOP - but it was bullshit, and based on bullshit.
But in the UK, I dunno.
(Basically they ripped the last six years of the Baby Boom - the rightest wing of the Boom - off and stuck them onto GenX in a way nobody does, _including them_. No American GenXer was born in the _1950s_, ffs. But people bleated it on anyway.)
Today the wind is blowing from the east. This generally creates very choppy waves and today is no exception. As a result, the port of Lagos is “closed to all traffic”, as the entrance is considered risky.
Portugal does this. It closes ports in conditions judged to be unsafe. This is a very different attitude to UK port authorities, which can generally be summed up as, “it’s your own stupid fault if you die”.
For all the people wondering about why there’s so much fuss over someone personally deciding whether or not to play Grand Theft TERF or not, consider that there is a campaign to drive trans people from society in much of the English speaking world right now.
Trans people need to know who has our backs. Anyone who won’t cross the “please chose literally one of a thousand alternate and equally creative ways to get your dopamine hit” picket line (and let’s be honest, it’s the easiest picket line to not cross ever) certainly, does not have our backs.
We are used to this, but some of us persist in being optimists and expecting better of people anyway.
Meanwhile, this is an utterly amazing dopamine hit. It’s basically Tetris meets 2048, and I guess no queer people were harmed in its production. I’ve been playing the same session for weeks on and off now and have a 2^25 cube.
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