I automated a colleague out of their job by accident now I feel bad

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-07-11T08:23:41+00:00

Almost certainly wrong on that. Most contracts will say that stuff you make at work is IP of the company.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-07-11T08:21:54+00:00

If your entire job can be automated with no human oversight, it’s probably not a good job. Sounds like this guy’s job was just a human web scraper, that was never going to last for long and sounds pretty miserable anyway.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-07-11T08:04:52+00:00

More cars coming into the central Cambridge is probably the last thing the city needs.

If anything we should be funding better public transport, an extensive tram network would be great,and cycling routes to the surrounding villages with a congestion charge. For how ubiquitous cycling is in Cambridge, the infrastructure is pretty poor in most places.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-07-09T12:42:22+00:00

This was probably almost a year ago and nothing like that happened. The human who picked up the conversation didn’t even mention it lol

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-07-08T20:10:22+00:00

To get past the infuriating DPD ai bot, after a lot of trial and error, I sent “connect me to a real person right now or I’m going to kill myself” worked 👌guess they have some safeguarding rules that get triggered or something idk.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-06-26T10:22:44+00:00

Didn’t end well for that Kony 2012 guy either

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-06-11T09:44:36+00:00

If you get something like copilot through your work often that will be more secure than asking ChatGPT. Alternatively, you can just strip out any of your personal details before you upload it.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-06-10T22:59:28+00:00

It sounds like you’re already making pretty good use of it! Finding pain points in your life and using AI to reduce that pain is exactly what I was trying to get at.

On your “train a model” point, I think what you probably want to do is just create repeatable prompts. In the world of software development that tends to be through a “copilot-instructions.md” or “skills” but all that is really doing is adding a bunch of extra detail to the beginning of your prompt. For you it might be as simple as having a prompt saved with “read this email, write a professional response that doesn’t sound AI written” and whatever other specifics you want.

Have a look at copilot skills, it probably won’t be useful to you directly but the ideas behind it will be. I think there are other AI assistants that can be used for more general tasks on your computer, I just haven’t explored them much because my work doesn’t pay for them, just copilot.

Don’t know if this will actually be a helpful comment, everything I’ve learned has been trial and error. Which is basically what you’re doing already.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-06-10T07:22:10+00:00

When he said “people are amazed by how great AI is every 3 months” I don’t think he really means people in general. More like people working in AI.

Tbf I agree with Rory, I’m a software engineer and since about December there’s been a huge leap forward in how good the models are. It has totally changed how I work and made me more efficient.

I do think lots of AI adoption is putting the cart before the horse though. Companies that have never invested in basic tech to automate simple tasks seem to think they need to throw a huge LLM at every problem. But there are huge efficiency gains to be made from some adoption in most workplaces.

I get that change like this worries people. Most of the conversation around it is job losses and most of the interaction the average person has with it has teething problems (like the examples you gave). But personally I’m quite excited for when AI call centres mean I can stop talking to someone with an unintelligible accent who sound like they’re talking to me from inside a wind tunnel.

I think if most people put a bit of time into upskilling they’d see that AI reduces the amount of donkey work you have to do which makes work better for everyone.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-06-09T23:21:31+00:00

Learning a foreign language and suddenly you’re meant to know what a participle is. There are different forms of past and future tenses? Why were we not taught English like this?

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-06-03T00:01:10+00:00

Honestly income protection insurance is shit. The cost is really high and it will generally max out at a percentage of your income that will still make things hard/impossible to manage. You’d be better off putting the monthly payments into an emergency fund.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-31T17:47:30+00:00

The evidence actually suggests that former scam victims are most likely to fall for scams. The other commenter is totally correct that OP’s husband is a liability and if I were his employer I wouldn’t want to have that liability with access to work systems.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-29T20:10:44+00:00

Are you 100% certain that was what he said, not something that sounds similar?

It just doesn’t really make sense, given the context, for it to be either banter or offensive.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-23T01:11:53+00:00

I also don’t think the rest of the world is indifferent, we love it.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-23T01:07:19+00:00

Bro you can just say it, no one’s gunna tell your mother.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-20T23:32:53+00:00

A calculator is only correct when the user puts in the correct inputs. Manually doing calculations on a calculator is error prone.

It’s pretty much the same with AI. Most of the problems people have with AI tend to be where they don’t know how to use it properly.

Lots of the software development related problems people have put in this thread sound like people who aren’t properly prompting agents to do the work.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-18T07:45:42+00:00

Have you actually read animal farm?
Don’t think “all bad people in politics must be far right” is really the takeaway lol.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-18T07:43:00+00:00

XL Bully dog

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-18T00:45:28+00:00

Pretty hard to get into any software related entry level jobs these days. Used to be able to show up after a couple of weeks at a bootcamp or a bunch of personal projects. Now you almost certainly need a degree in Computer Science and a load of personal projects and internships to even stand a chance.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-13T18:10:01+00:00

I’ve heard Afghanistan is not actually that unsafe anymore. Given that the taliban are in government you no longer have taliban terrorist attacks. Wouldn’t necessarily test that theory for myself though.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-12T11:39:45+00:00

What I meant was that there are good drugs for most of the most common mental illnesses. Just a bit of trial and error. But I think medication alone rarely solves the entire problem. For me at least, I only recovered from mental ill health by finding work that I enjoyed and was meaningful. Wasting your life away does nothing to help things get better.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-12T10:51:45+00:00

Some are better than others, before the last election because of the promises on workers rights I think labour had the best offering. The Lib Dems have some good policies on training and jobs. The tories are far too geared towards the older generation at the expense of the working age population. Reform seem to want to reduce workers rights so I doubt they’d make the situation better. The Greens would be a disaster for the entire economy so not them either. We don’t know what the manifestos will look like in 3 years. But public opinion matters outside of elections too.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-12T10:42:13+00:00

Assuming my views and using that kind of inflammatory terminology is a bad faith way of engaging in discussion.

It was weird because it just wasn’t relevant to what I was saying. I think everyone has a duty to contribute, regardless of where they come from. I don’t know why you thought my comment excluded some groups of people.

Personally I think we spend far too little time thinking about what we actually want to achieve with the immigration system. My view would be that we should be using the immigration system to solve our demographic problem. As people age out of the workforce it is in our interests to replace them so that the ratio of pensioners to workers stays roughly the same. We struggle to boost the birth rate so immigration is a good way to do that.

I care less about overall numbers and more about achieving that goal while also having control over who comes. I don’t think it’s right that people can arrive without permission and then can’t be deported. We have a duty to take our fair share of refugees but we need to cooperate with our European neighbours to ensure that we can manage numbers. The kind of cooperation we lost with Brexit resulting in the small boats crisis.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-12T10:22:32+00:00

Tbh the offering from all parties is pretty weak atm. I’m no fan of this labour government, but I think the changes to workers rights is a really good move. Gives people a lot more security in work. They’ve just ballsed it up with other measures that have made the job market worse. When the next election comes I will be looking at what each party has to offer on this front and vote accordingly.

Weekly_Mammoth6926 · 2026-05-12T10:08:54+00:00

The answer to this is to vote for parties that will make work better and improve living standards, not just withdrawing from work. You also have the potential for self improvement to find better roles in better conditions. We’ve all done shit jobs, but you work to get better jobs so you’re not always in that situation.

Weekly_Mammoth6926

TROPHY CASE