misstuned

I couldn't unlock a shared city bike this morning on the Beryl system, probably the same outage.

I used to use Starling as my main and they were fine, until I started getting issues with random card declines due to "fraud prevention" and nobody to talk to. I switched to First Direct and like the peace of mind of having a human on the phone if needed (when I wanted to make a huge transfer for my house deposit it was nice to have!) and I still get perks like free foreign card transactions.

Similar, I've found that on most recent models I've tried, reasoning will cause it to spend quite a lot of time thinking about whether even the most wholesome fictional scenario is something it's allowed to write about, which in turn causes it to start hallucinating details. For creative writing I've found the minimum of thinking is the best way.

Genuine question - isn't legal stuff one of the things AI should in theory be very good at? Legalese is like code, in that every word is very strictly defined and there to do a specific job in the text. I feel like that's one of the things AI would be good at writing and interpreting.

I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.

A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.

I'm not saying it doesn't have any, just that it doesn't have as many. My YouTube is just so much more diverse in every way, I'm never going to get my favourite UK canal boat creators on Nebula for instance. Nebula is a narrow thing for a narrow audience that likes one specific type of online video.

My Nebula runs out at the end of the year and I'm not renewing, I'm not that fussed about seeing Jet Lag a week late, and none of the other stuff is really for me. I'll divvy up my £60 a year Nebula sub to a few creators I like.

I have both, and I find my YouTube home page way more diverse than Nebula. Nebula is an invite-only clique and they invite people who look like them. YouTube, for me, has a lot more British creators, a lot more people of colour, a lot more women creators, a bigger diversity of topics and subjects, a lot more deep technical stuff. Nebula is a lot of American guys discussing movies and politics, with only the very recent addition of Token Brit Tom Scott.

I'm yet another person who only got Nebula for week-early access to Jet Lag, and I think if that particular show ever went away or took an extended break, Nebula would be struggling. I find myself watching something on YouTube most evenings, I rarely find myself on Nebula when Jet Lag isn't on.

I only use X (via XCancel etc) to read the updates from things like the local train company that they only post on X. They aren't on Bluesky or Mastodon. When I tried Mastodon, I found it too politically extreme, it felt like walking into an angry students' union meeting. It never seemed to catch on in the UK, it surfed a couple of waves of dissatisfaction with X, but people quickly drifted away.

Imgur has been totally unusable in the UK for a couple of years - it's an irritant, because it's used for so many image embeds and I'm reluctant to fire up the VPN just so I can see someone's meme that they posted on a forum thread. Nobody has ever used Imgur as a destination site, it's a utility, and any attempts to make it a destination or an app you'd deliberately open are futile.

Reddit isn't so badly impacted, but there are still age-walls around some of the content where it's been deemed "adult" (which encompasses more than just graphic adult imagery).

It seems to differ by provider. When I was with Three it was an irritating process of having to either call up or visit a shop in person and say "I want to look at the naughty pages, please". Another provider (I can't remember which) had a method where you had to supply a credit card number.

I'm with "1p Mobile" now who are a virtual network on EE, and their adult content block is just a toggle in your online account, with no faffing around required - you can just hit the toggle. I presume the idea is that you don't give little Timmy the password to his own account portal, but I don't know what's to stop him getting his own SIM by himself.

With Three, I found the adult content block caused other problems with SSH connections dropping, various random stuff getting blocked and so on, which all went away as soon as I had it disabled, so it's worth doing even for non porn fans.

Meh. I live in a poorer area of the UK. We don't have indie bookstores any closer than a 45-minute drive away, and I'm lucky to have a car.

When the kind of people who run "indie bookstores" come and set up in areas like mine instead of staying in their twee suburbs and posh little towns, then I'll start using them and stop using Amazon. Until then, Amazon are the people democratising access to book shopping, delivering fair-priced books to people regardless of where they live, not to mention the convenience of Kindle.

I'm in Europe and had endless ads on my Xiaomi phone - normally for Xiaomi crap, like themes and games. I actively had to go in and turn off notifications for various Mi apps to stop them pestering me with notifications several times a day, but there are still full-screen ad interruptions in the stock apps like the file manager and notepad.

My Redmi Note 13 Pro Plus is nowhere near as good as my last Xiaomi - the ads seem to have increased, and the battery life has gone to shit after <1 year of usage. I won't get another.

I've found similar. I don't know if it was post-Covid, but I have completely asymptomatic high blood pressure. It's really scary to go to the doctor for an extremely routine health check expecting to be back at work in an hour, and then suddenly be told that your blood pressure is so high that you need to go to hospital immediately.

There's no obvious cause, I'm fit and healthy in all other ways, I've had multiple blood tests and ECGs, my cholesterol is normal, everything is normal, just the blood pressure. I also didn't know about this machine but I might get one. I have developed anxiety around having it taken (because of the experience of getting sent to hospital!) so it goes up when I take it, like extreme white-coat syndrome.

I'm definitely getting one of these gadgets so I can see what it really is, without the stress and pain (those things hurt!) of inflating cuffs.

The same goes for all services. I was able to sign up for an ISP service (in the UK) online very easily, with a few clicks and entries onto a form to enter my details, choose my installation date, choose my speed, etc. Fast forward a few years, I'm leaving that house and need to cancel the internet - snail mail letter needed.

I just started using and paying for Spotify, having been a diehard radio listener all my life (and, in a previous period of my career, worked in the sector). It was more of a reaction against radio rather than being in favour of Spotify, though. I was tired of my listening being characterised by inane commercials, constant depressing negative news, DJs telling us that it's some stranger's birthday, long interviews with some jerk I've never heard of, endless dreadful tracks that I wouldn't choose to listen to.

It got to the point where I couldn't figure out why on earth anyone would listen to radio when you can get all the music you like, with no ads, no news, and no Dave Doubledecks, for a few pounds a month. After a couple of weeks of using it, it started recommending music I'd never heard before, and really cool Scottish and Welsh folk music that the radio stations here would never touch, so I've discovered really cool stuff through it. I love that I can tell it never to show me certain artists - for instance, if I never heard Eminem again in my life it'd be too soon, so I've told it to never recommend any tracks by him, whereas local radio plays him incessantly.

You hear it in the UK on 160m, there are a couple of nets that deal in that kind of "non politically correct" stuff, I don't tune in.

Didn't Cities Skylines come out of a previous project by the same developer, a transport simulator called Cities in Motion? It's no wonder it has a heavy focus on transport management.

You can also pick "timecode" from the extensions menu in the KiwiSDR interface and actually decode the time signal live on the receiver.

How many people get it through work (like me) and how many actually pay for a subscription, though?

This is interesting - I hadn't noticed this, but my Chinese (Xiaomi) phone indeed has an IMEI starting with 86, which is China's dialling code. Perhaps a coincidence.

The ICCID starts 8944 - not sure of the significance of the 89, but 44 is the UK, where my SIM card (and me) comes from.

Let me guess, it had two 1s in its name...

There is, or was, a radio/TV company in Europe called Celador - I always wondered where the odd-sounding name came from.

How is it $25 per week but $12 per month?

Places with few jobs and a low quality-of-life. I live in a place like that now, a car-reliant northern England town where there's no transit service, it's not safe after 7pm and the locals will threaten to fight you if you look funny. Luckily I have a job, it's not as well paid as the same job in other areas but I'm employed and don't pay a huge housing cost. But I'm miserable, it's a horrible place to live (especially as a childless 30-something single person) and I'm looking to move somewhere that's nicer.

I'm really struggling to do that, because trading up in areas is difficult, I'm looking at a doubling of housing costs (plus all the other costs of moving) in exchange for ~20-30% more pay in a more affluent area. There are a lot of people like me, trapped in crappy areas with low housing costs and unable to trade up despite being full-time employed. I feel like I just exist here, weekends are my escape but I need to escape forever.