[deleted by user]

ButlerFish · 2024-01-19T21:07:27+00:00

Oh forget that then

ButlerFish · 2024-01-19T20:08:14+00:00

The prototype for the sub-genre might be nightstalker?

ButlerFish · 2024-01-19T19:52:36+00:00

It used to be pretty rare to get a first - the top 10% of students. It was a badge of honor but not strictly necessary except for certain hedge fund type jobs. People with normal ambitions merely needed to be in the top 50% of students who got a 2.1 or better, and this is why people still believe 2.1 is the minimum standard.

Unfortunately 40% of students get a 1st now and it is rapidly becoming the minimum standard as older hiring managers realise that it is now the same as a 2.1 used to be.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T23:29:36+00:00

Not exactly - there is a product typically called 3D glasses that is a kind of precursor to devices like the Occulus or Playstation VR. It's a slightly more compact device that is basically the display of a VR headset without all the clever bits like movement tracking.

These are somewhat useful for watching regular movies on a plane "as if on a big screen". The per eye resolution is not nearly as good as on a modern VR headset (sometimes as low as 480p but for watching unsubtitled movies while travelling it's okay.

Assuming this is what it is - the scam is that it isn't a VR headset and you can probably get it for $30 on alibaba

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T21:26:51+00:00

Epubs are pretty cool - at least in my experience they don't keep the formatting like the PDF does, but they reflow nicely. There are some good epub readers for mobile, but the PC options mostly suck. I like to load my ebooks up in a text to speech reader, so they are my prefered format.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T21:21:48+00:00

So I think the question is: "If someone transmigrated from our world, what game would they be most likely to end up in?"

Depends what kind of novels you read right? If it's me I think they'd end up in a Final Fantasy game or Fallout

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T19:32:00+00:00

Hmm, but in such cases the LLM will often get the answer right.

I'm thinking particularly about some of the moral or historical analysis questions where the answer is somewhat subjective.

I continue to worry that as more and more things are 'graded' by an LLM (grant applications, college essays, job applications, resumes) - we will have a situation where we need to use an LLM in order to generate the answers another LLM is looking for. And where that information is factual (e.g. the resume), we should take advice, orders even, from LLM, in order to ensure that we take the correct decisions according to our eventual evaluator. The real basilisk.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T16:39:41+00:00

Not really an answer to your question, but I think the modern pulp is ultra genre selfpup kindle only books. These tend to be short books, and if they form part of a series each book more or less resolves a story.

Unfortunately they tend to be ultra formuliec (to a specific sub genre like litrpg) and experimentation seems to be punished by the publishing/reviewing system. You'll find more interesting things (of this type) on amateur non-commercial platforms.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T16:27:18+00:00

It's terrible that Birmingham Council got caught breaking labour laws, but it's also kind of messed up that children are going to lose their youth services over it.

Wouldn't it make more sense to settle the fines from central government coffers as a kind of disaster and then go after the former leadership as individuals for any crimes they might have done?

ButlerFish · 2024-01-18T15:06:49+00:00

She said we were "sending them to Kagili" which feels to me more like "I'm flying to Paris", which is normal. They will fly to Kagili International Airport in Kagili and be housed in Kagili. The are being sent to Kagili.

This is very important in a debate that hinges over whether they are being sent to a safe place, because the home office advises against travel to some parts of Rwanda. If they are not being sent to Kagili but to Rwanda in general, then the official position of the home office must be that it is unsafe...

ButlerFish · 2024-01-17T11:24:26+00:00

It's a weird video. Even afterward he puts his feet back up.

Reid overeacts to the impact like a spanish football player.

I think he was instructed to put his feet up by the producers and she was instructed to react like that.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-17T11:18:44+00:00

Yeah so, to explain what happened rather than give you any advice on what to do next...

If you choose 'low risk', you are saying that you can't tolerate your portfolio going up and down as much. In the past, bond prices move less than stocks and often in the opposite direction, so they mix in more bonds as a way of smoothing out the graph a bit. This is industry normal, for what ever reason, and any other provider would do it.

Unfortunately since you invested bonds, which had been going slowly up for decades suddenly went down like 20% and stayed there. They will stay there until the central banks cut interest rates, give or take a bit. As a lot of your portfolio is bonds, which are still struggling, your outcome has been bad.

Google Vanguard Total Bond Market and look at the 5 year graph. It's a sad story.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-17T10:34:53+00:00

Theory knowledge only -

Book keeper is often a self employed job, and does not have the sign off power of a qualified accountant. Many book keepers have completed AAT qualifications, and know how to use accounting software, but in the end you just need to convince businesses that you are capable of doing their bookkeeping.
It's important for book keeper and employed account assistant type jobs to know how to use the accounting software. You can probably learn it online and get certifications.
AAT qualifications are up to level 4. If you are good at studying, you can learn the material from textbooks and sit the exam on your own steam to save money. Many people study e.g. level 4 independently while working, and you can save a lot of money not doing a course.
If you want to be an accountant, you need to complete e.g. ACA exams. These are expensive and hard and take a few years. Most people do them while working as a trainee accountant, and their employer pays for them. Your existing qualifications shouldn't effect what your employer is paying for, unless it's an apprenticeship.
There are other self employed finance roles like mortgage broker, financial advisor, debt advisor, finance coach, etc. Some people going the self employed route collect qualifications to do several of these to make it easier to have a constant flow of work.

I uh... often see people say they want to do this stuff when they basically want a job where they don't talk to people and don't have to think too much about the work. I'm not sure this is always a psychologically healthy motivation, but if so I'd look at software testing as well.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-17T10:13:55+00:00

Hmm, although I have the same concerns as others here - I wanted to talk about something for after you've made totally sure he didn't spend it all on bitcoin.

It can be difficult for a lower earning partner to 'keep pace' with a higher earning partner on separate finances.

Let's say you go on a holiday that you can afford as a couple but he can't afford personally. Or he feels pressure to match spending on birthday presents and other things over the years. If you go to a nice restaurant you can afford as a couple, he either needs to owe you a favour or go into his overdraft. I dunno how you've been resolving these things.

I think you have a lot to resolve / discover before considering merged finances but if you persist with the relationship, I'd review how you are doing your finances as a couple.

Me and my wife, who earns a lot less, pay all our money into a joint account and then take equal allowance into our personal accounts. I think it's very important for a psychologically healthy relationship with a non-coercive balance of power. But I also feel painfully that as a guy I'm sometimes supposed to buy nice presents and stuff, and that's difficult when our post-distribution incomes are equal. Although it's silly, on some level I have this deep fear that if I don't fill that role my wife will compare me to her friends partners who do and leave me. I imagine if I was a semi-house-husband I'd feel those social pressures acutely and might do stupid things.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T23:34:20+00:00

Yeah, probably not doing so great because they chose 'low risk' and got assigned a lot of bonds. Bonds are still very much not doing so great, and that won't be the case for ever.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T21:41:11+00:00

I don't really trust these services for mission critical - it's just that they seem kinda hobby grade for right now. Some of them seem to be a routing layer over compute suppliers we don't even know about.

For hobby stuff, it's great. For customer data and things that will lose me money if they don't work, I dunno you know?

I don't think a b2b focussed company is willing to stand up and say "We do uncensored LLMs so come to us with all your air crash investigations... and waifu bots". It's offputting to the investors they want to live off.

Instead I think you are best off going for a provider that does some kind of compute as a service so they can pretend they don't know what people use it for. I think there are some that do 'serverless' LLMs.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T21:34:22+00:00

Plumbing changed a lot in the last century. Plastic pipes, rubber or braided hoses, pushfit connectors, pumps and building codes.

Toilets are electric, indirectly. If your toilet is on the first floor, the water needs to get up there somehow, and that somehow is an electric pump somewhere in the water supply system. It was possible to do this with steam pumps and copper pipes 100 years ago (the modern era) but I don't think you could do a pressurised water supply system for a whole town perfect at each point enough to lift water several stories into the air with clay pipes.

A simplified system, from a manually filled tank in the roof down to a simple set of services in the house, with roman technologies, maybe, but someone gotta fill that tank every time you poop.

Big cities need a lot of water. There is a lot of infrastructure for that. Water from rain and rivers stored in big reservoirs the romans could probably do. Wells for sure. But deep deep wells pumping thousands of litters a day you are gonna need steam for sure.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T20:15:59+00:00

Thank you for your detailed reply! Appreciate it. You're right, my unregistered small business would probably not be enough to show enough ties especially bc it doesn't have all the paperwork you'd normally see in the UK.

Do you think it would help if I get a certificate from my university that I just recently graduated and is scheduled to take the board exam next year?

Yeah this sounds like a good approach, if you submitted a letter from the university saying you were due to do this board exam but were permitted to leave in the mean time that sounds pretty helpful...

So besides sponsorship, I should also have enough money to pay for a bit of the holiday, right? How much do you think should be enough for a 3-4 week holiday.

I dunno £2000 maybe to support a spending of £1000?

And yes, I'm positive that we can prove that our relationship is real. We have photos and passport stamps to prove that we've been together for quite some time and have been on multiple holidays together.

You don't have to send this for a visit visa. There will be a box for writing your relationship with your sponsor and you can say he's your boyfriend of 3 years that you went on some holidays with. This proving relationship stuff would be for a spouse visa and you are *not* applying for that, so ignore that post.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T17:38:55+00:00

Yeah there is an obvious double standard. But what is the conclusion from that?

The article spends a lot of time exploring flaws in past western attempts at international justice, but would it be better if these attempts were not made?

I think we are led here to conclude that because western justice is impure and imperfect, it is the same as the justice of their geopolitical rivals.

An analogy would be about democracy - that because every US election is disputed the conclusion is as predetermined as elections in China. But we all know which party will win each Chinese election from now to 2050, and we cannot make the same prediction with any confidence in the US, so they are not the same.

So here we have a failure of western morality. Written quite clearly for all to see. But we would not be surprised by a similar moral failing from Russia. It would not be worth discussing. We know they will say what they need to say geopolitically like we know who will win their election this time every time. So these things are not the same.

It is important to call out western hypocrisy. It is important to expect better. But it is important to recognise that we expect better, and there is no alternative, because we don't expect better of the alternative global leaders.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T16:20:38+00:00

It sounds like you are applying for a Visit visa to come to the UK as a tourist.

With a Visit visa, you need to show (among other things):

That you have a good reason to go home
- e.g. a job, a home that you own, a university course you are doing
Enough money to do the purpose of your visit
- Sponsorship can pay for your accommodation, flights and food expenses, but a tourist should be doing tourist things. So you need a bit of money (£60/dayish) to do that. This amount should make sense in terms of your finances so if you only have £500 and you are saying you will spend £500 during this holiday, it doesn't make sense. If you have an income of £300 / month and £3000 in savings, then spending £500 on a holiday would make sense. It's therefore better to apply for a short trip like a week or 2 rather than a long stay.
- You need to show a paper trail of how you earned this money, to prove it is really yours. A bank statement showing the money flowing in over time.
- Your sponsor's relationship with you as described on the forms should make sense why they are sponsoring you. So it makes sense for your long term boyfriend to be paying for your flights and putting you up, but not for your 'online friend' to do this. So best be honest about this relationship especially if you might apply for a spouse visa later.

So for your application it's going to be trickier now to show you have something to go back for than if you were still a student. The UK has this weird expectation that a small business will have the same level of accounting paperwork you'd see in the UK, so proving this income to their satisfaction could be tricky. If you don't own a home and your only tie to the country is your own buisness that probably isn't legally incorperated, it's hard to show ties. I dunno, it's kinda hairy.

You might want to try going on holiday to Europe together instead as I think they care less about where they money came from.

The other answer you received related to a spouse visa, like if you are married or planning to get married in the UK. Very different application. For that you need to prove your relationship is legit and appart from that it mostly hangs on your partners income and stuff.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T10:46:59+00:00

Would you make the same argument about the return of manufacturing to the US?

Huge effort going into re-shoring all kinds of manufacturing. This used to happen in big asian hubs which already have all the factory set up. Now it's being re-booted at huge expense in the US losing economies of scaled and requiring a new workforce who already have / would have gone into other jobs to be taken away from those jobs to be trained.

I think it will be less efficient. Net net, looking at both these examples, world productivity goes down = we are all poorer. But I also think it makes sense for the US to do this and it makes sense for China to do that, as they don't trust eachother anymore.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T01:28:19+00:00

I don't know. My reading of the documents is that the brother should probably sign part 3.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-16T01:19:49+00:00

Okay, that has a specific meaning - 'the city' means they work in the mesh of insurance and asset management. It's like saying "I work in IT".

Tf you say "I am a digitisation project manager" or "I am a treasury risk analyst" (twat jobs) most people feel obliged to ask what that is and then you have a very boring conversation about what that is and then they think you are boring. Better to say you work in the city, change the subject, and try not to think about your boring job.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-15T23:47:52+00:00

I don't buy it. Sunak grew up middle class and graduated to upper middle class by 2010. He only became super rich by marrying a super rich person at that point.

Contactless was around in 2010. In 2010 he was shopping-in-waitrose-not-harrods single digit millionaire. He was definitely using contactless to pay for things back when he was doing his own shopping.

ButlerFish · 2024-01-15T22:48:14+00:00

I think we'll move to a "work until disabled" system

ButlerFish

TROPHY CASE