[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!

[Maark Abbott]

Meeting with boss went positively, looks like we might have a solution sorted.

[QuickTidal]

Maark Abbott, on 15 March 2023 - 02:35 PM, said:

Meeting with boss went positively, looks like we might have a solution sorted.

That's great news. Glad to hear it!

[QuickTidal]

At this time tomorrow I'll be in Mexico. Have not had a trip since before COVID hit, so I hope it's a good one.

[Slow Ben]

Heading camping for a few days. It ain’t sunny Mexico, but it’ll do.

[QuickTidal]

Slow Ben, on 16 March 2023 - 01:54 PM, said:

Heading camping for a few days. It ain’t sunny Mexico, but it’ll do.

Any amount of "getting away" is always helpful for the spirit I find. Enjoy!

[Slow Ben]

Amen.

It’s supposed to rain the whole two days so we switched to a cabin. I told my friends, I don’t care if we stay at the Holiday Inn by the airport, we’re getting away for two days.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

This Affordable Device Will Let Anyone Connect Their Brain to a Computer

[...] researcher at Imperial College London [...]

[...] control robots and mechanical limbs with the power of thought, sleep control, meditation control, as a lie detector and many others,” [...]

“The popularity of machine learning and data science has made this area even more popular, since working with real biodata in real time to assess the state and intentions of a person is very exciting,” [...] “But despite all this, there are still no inexpensive devices for reading signals from the brain on the market, and as a rule, the devices sold are aimed at those who already have experience in neuroscience.”

[...] PiEEG is a low-cost, high-precision, and easy-to-maintain device. It's compatible with Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 models, which cost under $100. The shield itself will cost between $250 and $350[...]

[...] open source, as the main mission is to make neuroscience accessible to everyone with RaspberryPi and PiEEG.

This Affordable Device Will Let Anyone Connect Their Brain to a Computer

Of course 'affordable' is relative... obviously we'll have reached true equity when literally everyone has free access to mind-controlled killer robots. Take that gun nuts! We need a new amendment!

[Maark Abbott]

Musically, things are pretty good right now.

Balgurra DESTROYED Record Junkee last night, Ephemera have said they'd like to gig with us again and the promoter for the gig wants us back in about a month's time for a gig with Total Recall and Depravity, then we're in the recording studio mid-April to track drums for our album. The photoshoot yesterday went really good as well!

Aubzagl are playing Leeds Fenton on the 1st April as well, so I'll need to get my blasts ready for that.

[amphibian]

I'm back into dating and on an app. It's kind of a relief to know that among the failed connections that are just part of doing this, that there's some really cool people who think I'm also interesting, worth putting effort into, and attractive.

There's one I'm very very far down inside super excited about, but part of dating intentionally is seeing this for what stage we're at rather than writing that story out ahead of time and pretending reality is matching that story.

I'm going slow in terms of hopes and learning from my mistakes or failed connections. I'm having fun,
and it's been like getting back into shape regarding reading people in a dating sense - what's sparking connection and what's not. The first few overnights were quite ok.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 20 March 2023 - 12:17 PM

[Dolmen 2.0]

Daughter had a proper panic attack while I was working.

She was resting besides me and must have had a bad dream. She jumped up, eyes wide and hyperventilating. Her panic disappeared as soon as I touched her shoulder and told her 'you're ok, it's just a dream.' she held my hand and within a minute was back to sleep. That made me very happy. I recall my own dad doing that for me a zillion years ago. It felt good to pass on the sense of security my dad used to give me.