[Maark Abbott]

I gotta say the one positive about her having to go on grippy sock holiday is that it allowed us to really review our finances in depth - so when she's earning regularly again (soon) it will make things WAY easier to manage as we know when stuff is due, what's due, can reduce debt etc etc. Having a little supplemental income from streaming is helpful too, as usually I can pay for a week's worth of food from one payout.

[Mezla PigDog]

Algorithms make me laugh. They will also lead to the destruction of civilisation as we know it. But still. You know how google photos likes to give you "On this day in..." reminders? A peak of photo taking occurred around school closures as we had to send photos of my sons school work in to teachers. He also enjoyed taking photos at the time but would take the most banal pictures imaginable. So I keep getting what are meant to be heartwarming reminders of the living hell that was January to May 2021 pandemic home school interspersed with photos of the bins and the toilet and the stairs. Life is pathetic on a daily basis!

[bubba]

Road tripping with Amphibian tomorrow to go hang out with Ladybliss in Boston.

[worry]

Whoa! Have fun!

[Lady Bliss]

bubba, on 11 March 2023 - 04:18 AM, said:

Road tripping with Amphibian tomorrow to go hang out with Ladybliss in Boston.

It was lots of fun! We went to a museum and Amp introduced us to momo food which was delicious!

[Nicodimas]

So happy for these two..

—awesome scenes !

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[Maark Abbott]

Band is playing this absolute rager on Sunday. Not sure if we're opening or second on the bill but yeah, should be a banger. (band isn't on this poster so it's neither of these two btw)

[Mezla PigDog]

Lady Bliss, on 11 March 2023 - 11:46 PM, said:

bubba, on 11 March 2023 - 04:18 AM, said:

Road tripping with Amphibian tomorrow to go hang out with Ladybliss in Boston.

It was lots of fun! We went to a museum and Amp introduced us to momo food which was delicious!

Really nice to see Bliss feeling good. I hope things are looking up for you a little bit.

[Lady Bliss]

Mezla PigDog, on 13 March 2023 - 09:50 PM, said:

Lady Bliss, on 11 March 2023 - 11:46 PM, said:

bubba, on 11 March 2023 - 04:18 AM, said:

Road tripping with Amphibian tomorrow to go hang out with Ladybliss in Boston.

It was lots of fun! We went to a museum and Amp introduced us to momo food which was delicious!

Really nice to see Bliss feeling good. I hope things are looking up for you a little bit.

Thanks! I'm doing better but won't really recover till I can get my surgery.

So I am in a bit of a pickle on the career front and would appreciate any advice anyone can offer....

The Boston contract was a flop. The company that wanted me out there were a mess and I got no benefits as a contractor. Now we are down to two options. Companies always are more interested in hiring at the beginning of the year.

Option 1) Huge IT Service Management company that rhymes with Mapgemini. The role is a step down as I would not be a people manager, and I would be having to do Incident and Problem Management. Problem is fun, but Incident is chaotic and stressful. Doesn't pay quite as well as Option 2, but the benefits are excellent.

Option 2) Small (I'm talking about 20 employees and maybe some offshore to supplement) networking company called Nexgen Networks. They have been around about 15 years and have good growth potential. I would be over IT Operations there and making a bit more with maybe not as great of benefits, basically building out their processes and managing a team, as well as providing account management to their top clients. Much more interesting work to me, but I'm not sure if they are the most stable option.
Thoughts anyone?

[Mezla PigDog]

Having worked for small businesses and large businesses, if I was feeling insecure, I'd take the larger business offer and to hell with job satisfaction. Regular income is key. Job satisfaction comes later.


BUT - two solid job options means you have been right all along to back yourself. So you should feel confident that whatever decision you take and for whatever reason, it won't be the last of you.

[Lady Bliss]

Mezla PigDog, on 13 March 2023 - 10:11 PM, said:

Having worked for small businesses and large businesses, if I was feeling insecure, I'd take the larger business offer and to hell with job satisfaction. Regular income is key. Job satisfaction comes later.


BUT - two solid job options means you have been right all along to back yourself. So you should feel confident that whatever decision you take and for whatever reason, it won't be the last of you.

I think my main concern is stress at the moment. I’m honestly a better manager than an individual contributor because I’m better at managing the big picture than minute details.

[Mezla PigDog]

I say trust your gut, in that case. I also find difficult decisions make themselves if you take a break from thinking hard about themselves. And coming back so easily after I said Option 1 makes me think Option 2 must be the right one. You would have been happy with both options a few months back so is there any wrong decision here?

[Cause]

Lol, I got 2 dollars in the mail from Nielson ratings and an offer to become a tv rating reviewer. I found the whoke thing funny

[amphibian]

Lady Bliss, on 13 March 2023 - 10:04 PM, said:

Mezla PigDog, on 13 March 2023 - 09:50 PM, said:

Lady Bliss, on 11 March 2023 - 11:46 PM, said:

bubba, on 11 March 2023 - 04:18 AM, said:

Road tripping with Amphibian tomorrow to go hang out with Ladybliss in Boston.

It was lots of fun! We went to a museum and Amp introduced us to momo food which was delicious!

Really nice to see Bliss feeling good. I hope things are looking up for you a little bit.

Thanks! I'm doing better but won't really recover till I can get my surgery.

So I am in a bit of a pickle on the career front and would appreciate any advice anyone can offer....

The Boston contract was a flop. The company that wanted me out there were a mess and I got no benefits as a contractor. Now we are down to two options. Companies always are more interested in hiring at the beginning of the year.

Option 1) Huge IT Service Management company that rhymes with Mapgemini. The role is a step down as I would not be a people manager, and I would be having to do Incident and Problem Management. Problem is fun, but Incident is chaotic and stressful. Doesn't pay quite as well as Option 2, but the benefits are excellent.

Option 2) Small (I'm talking about 20 employees and maybe some offshore to supplement) networking company called Nexgen Networks. They have been around about 15 years and have good growth potential. I would be over IT Operations there and making a bit more with maybe not as great of benefits, basically building out their processes and managing a team, as well as providing account management to their top clients. Much more interesting work to me, but I'm not sure if they are the most stable option.
Thoughts anyone?

I take option 2 here. 15 years in existence means they're getting by decently and if you hate it or it goes belly up, having the job title plus pay bodes well for the next job. If they get bought, then maybe you'll be around long enough to benefit too.

Provided that immediate eligibility for healthcare is part of this and you can get what you need fixed.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 14 March 2023 - 02:59 AM

[Abyss]

Which company is more likely to turn out to be a front for a global secret organization dedicated to protecting the world from interdimensional threats and/or pursuing global domination?

Otherwise based on yours and other posts I go w option 2 due to benefits, long term CV experience usefulness, and that their name suggests a sideline in superhuman genetic manipulation.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

The World Will Change Next Week

Also:

Quote

Researchers at Google [...] released an AI model called PaLM-E this week that combines language and vision capabilities to control robots, allowing them to complete tasks autonomously in the real world—from getting a chip bag from a kitchen to sorting blocks by color into corners of a rectangle.

According to the researchers, this is the largest Visual Language Model (VLM) reported to date, with 562 billion parameters. This AI has a “wide array of capabilities” which includes math reasoning, multi-image reasoning, and chain-of-thought reasoning. [...] the AI uses multi-task training to transfer skills across tasks, rather than being trained on individual tasks. [...] the AI model when controlling robots even displays "emergent capabilities like multimodal chain of thought reasoning, and the ability to reason over multiple images, despite being trained on only single-image prompts."

PaLM-E is based on Google’s previous large language model called PaLM and the E in the name stands for “embodied,” and refers to the model’s interaction with physical objects and robotic control. [...]

The robot is able to generate its own plan of action in response to commands using the model. When the robot was asked to “bring me the rice chips from the drawer,” PaLM-E was able to guide it to go to the drawers, open the top drawer, take the rice chips out of the drawer, bring it to the user, and put it down. The robot was able to do this even with a human disturbance, with a researcher knocking the rice chips back into the drawer the first time the robot picked it up. PaLM-E is able to do this by analyzing data from its live camera.

[...] “This enables not only embodied reasoning but also question answering, as demonstrated in our experiments.”

[...] “Perhaps most exciting about PaLM-E is positive transfer: simultaneously training PaLM-E across several domains, including internet-scale general vision-language tasks, leads to significantly higher performance compared to single-task robot models.”

Big Tech Is Now Developing Powerful AI Brains for Real-World Robots

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Estate agents are coming round to do valuations next week!

It's still a month or so off going on the market because of external work that needs finishing before the photos are taken, but it's very exciting nonetheless. I'm really hoping it will be vindicating for Mr Not a Blacksmith - he bought the house as a project to do up, and it was a "gut every room and begin again" level of project. He's made a beautiful house doing most of it himself, and I'm beyond proud of him, but there's evident worry from him that he hasn't done a good enough job and that will be reflected in the value, not helped by the fact prices for similar houses in the area vary within a £100k bracket to the point that trying to predict a likely value is wild and futile.

Also means we're one step closer to buying our first home together

[Tiste Simeon]

As long as you're able to buy a place with a forge built in, nothing else is really that important, TRB.

[Tsundoku]

Don't forget the rooftop raptor digs. Roost? Rookery? Crib? Bachelor Pad?

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Tsundoku, on 15 March 2023 - 12:08 PM, said:

Don't forget the rooftop raptor digs. Roost? Rookery? Crib? Bachelor Pad?

Aviary and perish the thought!