Posts by Lee D

My way of combating that is that I intend to be utility-independent by retirement.

I see no merit whatsoever in a electricity utility company any more, I can do it myself far better, thanks.

Yes, i'm the OP in the comment above and I was formerly a radio teleswitch customer of OVO - I've been asking for 2 years to move off it, knowing it was doomed, but they only changed it relatively recently.

The irony is - before, I couldn't change supplier. I was trapped with SSE/OVO because of that tariff.

Now I have a SMETSv2 smart meter - and could easily transfer to literally any other provider - NOW they are giving me ridiculous problems.

Please tell me how that would slip by any finance department of merit when their tallies don't tally, or they see ridiculous amounts just sucked out of their accounts, or customers phone up complaining about unreasonable direct debits.

They have a duty to make sure payments are accurate, accounted for, and tally in their bookkeeping systems. As such, before any run of DD's goes out... someone literally looks at the batch in a banking interface, finance software or even the raw CSV, to ensure it looks vaguely sane.

Which includes checking that that new DD instruction from the new customer is present in the file, that the bank details they modified for a supplier have pulled through correctly, and that the amounts are sane and match what they were expecting to bill those people.

How do you think the Direct Debits are managed on the backend to pull from customers accounts if not via the accounts department having details of the direct debits and bank details?

FYI most payroll / accounting software literally loads the sort code, account number and amount into a CSV or equivalent for upload to Barclays, HSBC, etc. (or whoever the company banks with).

Every month for the last 10 years, I had to help accounts upload a large (several million £'s) bunch of direct debits to the bank - often by fixing CSVs (which are uploaded to a secure portal using smart cards, at least) or the details are there directly in a web page that accounts have to change on a regular basis (i.e. every time someone changes bank account or new customers join or old customers leave).

https://ciiom.barclays.com/content/dam/overseas-barclays-com/documents/important-information/help/guides/wob-bulk-payments-user-guide.pdf

I got a smart meter two months ago.

I recently had to complain to OVO.

The meter is working. The numbers are accurate. It's reporting into OVO. They've put the readings on the Meter Reading page. They update all the time, and it correlates to the meter exactly. I have confirmed several times that they are receiving them (and, at their insistence, they then supply an accurate, up-to-date reading to check anyway).

Strangely, the last two months have consisted of entirely estimated bills some 3 x what my actual usage is, and 2 x what my estimated usage was before the installed the meter (which is working perfectly).

Basically - they just decided to make the numbers up DESPITE having the accurate, true numbers right there.

They're in full possession of the exact up-to-date data of how much I actually use (and thus I was hoping to stop the ridiculous estimates they were giving previously, which I would then "have to pay" and then refund the difference because they were wrong EVERY TIME... I took to using this inexcusable excess to buy solar panels etc. every month). And yet they make up a number not close to reality, not fitting any kind of trend of my historical energy usage with them, not even attempting to correct it when asked.

I'm on my third complaint with them. It's not a smart meter complaint. The smart meter is doing EVERYTHING it should do, has since day one, and is perfectly accurate. OVO seem to just want to make up numbers and ignore the actual, accurate, confirmed numbers entirely for billing, presumably to earn interest on the held funds until they're corrected? I'm not going to let that happen.

I don't think companies send out estimated bills because the system didn't get the data. I think they are able to profiteer from billing inaccurately if you spread them over millions of customers. It's why they don't care about your smart meter turning off. Even if you later correct it, they are "allocated" your money to cover your bill, and I reckon that means they can put that amount into investments and savings while it's being corrected and still earn interest. I bet there's some rules somewhere about it that they are playing.

My next steps (now being past the "it takes 8 weeks for us to properly bill new smart meters" period) are:

- Move company (which will involve them taking a final reading, refunding everything I've had to pay over my usage, and losing my custom without WEEKS of getting onto an accurate meter on a real, transferable tariff unlike the special one I was on before that nobody else supports).

- File a complaint against OVO with the ombudsman

Ironically, the only thing doing its job perfectly is the smart meter itself.

Re: apathy to AI services

As text:

Gavin is a central character in the BBC sitcom "The Good Life" (known as "Good Neighbors" in some regions). Here's a breakdown of his role:

He is Tom and Barbara Good's next-door neighbour. Along with his wife, Margo, Gavin is one half of the conventional, middle-class couple living in suburbia.

He is a successful executive in the plastics industry. Gavin represents the traditional values that Tom and Barbara have rejected. He drives a nice car, wears smart suits, and enjoys the trappings of success.

He is often perplexed and frustrated by the Goods' self-sufficient lifestyle. He and Margo find their neighbours' activities, from raising livestock in their garden to bartering for goods, both bizarre and disruptive to their quiet suburban life.

Gavin is generally portrayed as a well-meaning but rather pompous and insecure man. He often tries to maintain a facade of control and respectability, which is constantly challenged by the Goods' antics. He can be seen as somewhat of a snob, looking down on Tom and Barbara's choices, yet he secretly craves their unique life and is often envious of their apparent freedom and happiness.

He is fiercely loyal to Margo, despite her often controlling nature. While he may occasionally find her overbearing, he clearly loves and admires her.

He provides comedic contrast to Tom and Barbara's unconventional ways. Much of the humor of the show comes from the clashes between Gavin and the Goods, as he struggles to understand their choices and often tries to enforce conventional suburban norms on them.

In short, Gavin is the foil to Tom and Barbara in "The Good Life." He represents the suburban norms they've rejected, and his exasperation with their lifestyle is a key source of the show's comedy. He is a character who, while often exasperating, is ultimately likeable and relatable due to his insecurities and struggles to reconcile with the "Good Life" next door.

Re: apathy to AI services

*cough*

https://imgur.com/a/6gQZRJo

For your information, this is an entirely fresh prompt on Gemini 2.0 Flash (experimental) on a fresh account (I literally had to enable access in our Google Admin).

There is literally no character called Gavin in the entire series, and everything it says is made up by smushing together other character's traits.

At no point is this thing questioning, doubting, or hinting that it IS JUST MAKING STUFF UP.

*cough*

Re: apathy to AI services

Literally that kind of thing.

It was fabricating characters (e.g. "Gavin") and substituting details with other sitcom characters called Gavin.

It was making up names for the goat/pigs that are not in the show.

It was also doing things like providing a back-story for an invented character which randomly mixed and matched Tom and Jerry's character traits.

When it doesn't have a lot of reference material, it just makes stuff up, and even being mildly insistent with it will cause it to invent things to "please" you and then go on a strict denial that it invented them.

Re: apathy to AI services

I've been doing that to every new release from OpenAI as soon as there is any (even limited) interface I can get to it (there a few website that'll let you get a couple of queries in to the latest models for free if you dig around).

They all do it.

And if the AI "gives you what you want", including wrong answers, then what use is it and why would you ever publicly deploy it?

Sorry, but it's about as intelligent as my spam filter. i.e. it's not.

Re: apathy to AI services

AI in the form of LLMs like this are literally just statistical boxes deliberately biased to respond in a way that the creator considered favourable.

In essence, an LLM tells you what you want to hear, rather than the truth.

I have an entertaining half-hour every month of so when they release a new LLM that "fixes all the problems" where I try to get it to contradict itself.

It rarely takes more than a few minutes, and I can then have it running in circles between an obviously correct answer and the thing I'm telling it that "I want to hear".

Try it... it's quite revealing.

I usually try to pick something that it won't quite have a lot of details about in its training databases. One of them is to make up characters / actors in The Good Life (a 1970's sitcom, called Good Neighbors in the US). Within a few seconds, just by expressing frustration and denial with it, I can get it fabricating characters, actor's names, making up back stories, etc.

These things tell you what they've been trained you expect to hear from them. And there is zero intelligence in them.

It's a bit like a massive Google with an upvote button on it for each result. Within seconds you realise just what a terrible idea that is, for it to tell you what OTHER PEOPLE have told it you will want to hear.

Exactly.

If you can't stop because the guy behind you is right up your backside, then the guy behind you is at fault, and you should be slowing even more to prevent yourself become a collision-sandwich between whatever's in front and the idiot behind.

"I can have both the power and responsibility, or neither".

You can't mix and match.

And Tesla's "Full Self Driving" **** wants to have the power but none of the responsibility.

It's why my car is as dumb as a bag of rocks. It can't steer for me, it can't accelerate for me, it can't brake for me. The smartest thing it can do is call for help (using my phone, nothing internal) if the airbag deploys.

***** Not full, not self and barely driving, not legal to use in many countries, not taking any liability and there's no such thing as a recognised full self-driving car anywhere in the world.

Re: Passwords

I had something similar in a school.

I worked as a kind of roving technician/consultant for schools and ended up with dozens of them, working one each day or half-day every week.

Eventually, after many years, one loved me so much that they outbid all the other schools to have me full time (it is no exaggeration to say that they had to argue with a London Borough HR/Finance department in order to create a brand new payscale for the desired salary because no such payscale at that level existed at the time for support staff, and there were major ructions over it - until I witnessed the head basically say loudly and clearly down a phone line something along the lines of "I'm the head, you're just the Borough team in place to support me. I'm choosing to hire him, I don't see what that has to do with you and your systems being unable to cope with that, just resolve this"... I was put under NDA and apparently in that Borough was the only support staff on a special, unadvertised payscale that nobody else had... Anyway...).

I worked for them for a while but then the school changed and they employed lots of very daft teaching staff who didn't understand IT (and one who was given the title of IT Coordinator - which is basically the person on teaching staff who interfaces with the actual technical IT manager, etc. - who then tried to tell me my job while knowing absolutely nothing) and things began to get silly.

So I walked. It was a shame, but there you go. One of the governors was an IT guy in the city and we agreed it would be best if I handed over to him - at least in terms of knowledge - and then they could pass on anything to the next guy they found. So that's what I did, I made a CD-R with all the documentation of the network, and handed copies over officially to the head and to this governor.

A few months later, I was in another job. I got a phone call from that school. It was the IT Coordinator guy. He *demanded* the main network administration password. Never gonna happen. It lets you see salaries and HR notes and the like and there was no need for it (this was back when things were divided into "curriculum" and "admin" networks and he basically wanted the master passwords to everything). He was adamant and kept pushing and got quite angry on the phone.

I asked why he needed it.

Flashback 6 months prior when he'd just started. He demanded - without prior consultation, authorisation or notification - that the school must buy a bunch of portable MP3 recorders. Absolutely vital. Critical. More important than everything else on the entire network that was running the school. I refused to authorise it (not really my place to authorise academic IT anyway, but it wasn't coming out of my budget for sure, so he'd have to convince the head, not me). He got really quite shirty about it.

A month later, he comes to me grinning with a cardboard box full of brand-new "MP3" recorders. Smug as hell. I mean, I was expecting that, mate. It's not smug to have convinced the school to do exactly what I told you you would need to do. He demanded I make them work on the network computers. Yeah, I don't think you understand how they work because they have nothing to do with the computer, really, they just record the audio and then act like a storage device. But, yeah, sure. I take the box.

He then asked me for the administrator password. We don't give that out to teaching staff, no. He got shirty again. I asked why he needed it. Apparently he had bought, without authorisation again, a piece of software for the kids to bring in the audio and edit and save it. Okay. I mean, I don't know why you think you need the administrator password (I'll install it, thanks, it's my job) or why you had to go behind people's backs to buy that stuff (and I wouldn't have bought that software and was explaining why when he just stopped me mid-track and told me to "just do it" and walked off).

So I installed the software across the network (cue this massive all-staff email from him boasting about his new project and how everyone should start using it, etc.), and I tested one of the recorders. It did exactly what it was designed to do. So I authorised them and gave them back to him.

The first lesson with them, he came storming in. Turns out the "MP3" recorders only recorded in WMA copy-protected format. I mean, it literally said that on the box and the website description. And the software only accepted MP3 files. I mean, it's the kind of thing an IT manager would check before allowing you to purchase them and authorising such a purchase, but I was cut out of the loop on that one. He demanded that I fix it. Nope. He insisted that I give him the administrator password. Nope. Somehow he believed that would magically fix these things that ONLY recorded WMA and the software that ONLY opened MP3. Ensue a massive several-week-long argument between me and him about it.

In the end, I went as far as I was prepared to go (being the only IT guy on very good hourly rates, I was both extremely busy with actually important stuff, and not willing to waste my time on trivia like that, and the head was generally in agreement). I made a network folder. Any WMA saved in there would trigger some software I wrote, which would convert the audio to MP3 and a minute later it would magically appear in another folder on the network as an MP3. Literally Save it here from the recorder, then by the time you open the software, you can open it from over there in the right format.

Not. Good. Enough. I was told quite clearly, several times, loudly, by this guy.

I was months into having had enough of him (and he was one reason I left), so my support for this project ended there and I wasn't interested in the fuss he continued to make.

So now fast-forward to when I've left that school, am working elsewhere, and I'm being disturbed at my new employer by a long ranty phone call demanding the network administrator password. To get his MP3/WMA software magically talking to each other without having to save it in between (he just wanted the MP3 software to "see" the recorder and pick up the WMA's that it couldn't open, automatically). I told him no. He got extremely irate. I explained (again) that it wouldn't do anything, but also that I was absolutely not going to give him any password - I didn't work there any longer, it wasn't my responsibility and no way was I going to compromise the system.

He then insisted that the head at that school had ordered that I give him that password and that nobody knew it so the school must have it, and he'd been chosen to be the custodian of it. Highly doubtful, I knew that head and he's the one who'd championed my salary - he'd just call me if that was the case. I called him out on the lie. I said he'd have to ask the head for authorisation and I'd have to hear it from him, because I don't believe he'd authorised it. He screamed at me down the phone for some time and demanded how I "would ever possibly know" what the head had ordered or not.

"Well... for one, he already has that password. It was in my handover that he signed off on. For two, the governor also has a copy of that password, just to ensure that someone had it somewhere else. And three... the reason that you don't know this is that it was explicitly discussed on handover and I was told to never give *you* any access or password ever."

The governor, being an IT guy, had understood the "problem" with the MP3/WMA thing immediately and I'd warned him on handover. He was the one who said "Under no circumstances give him that password", and the head was present and agreed. We handed over knowing that it was never going to work, and that he was never going to be party to the privileged details because he just didn't know what he was talking about.

So the big long phone call which he'd made without the school's knowledge, to demand the network administrator's password, to get his embarrassing pet project that had never truly worked the way he intended to work properly, and claiming that the head had authorised it? I can only imagine that got him into big trouble. But he didn't get the password from me.

I checked the school website and their staff list about a year or so later - he was gone.

Re: Win10 will be the last OS from Microsoft I will ever use...

Allow themes.

Release an official Windows theme (i.e. the Windows look is nothing more than a customisable theme and there's nothing "hard-coded")

Release an official Windows XP theme, 2000 theme, etc.

Watch as everyone just has things as they like and almost nobody over the age of 20 cares about the default "modern" Windows theme whatsoever.

I would gladly theme all my Windows machines to 3.1 standards... so much easier to see, read, do things and also much fewer resources required.

Instead Windows has killed themes, then forced you all into the most flat, boring, non-descript, difficult to understand (because everything is so bland and samey) UI ever for no reason.

I want a scrollbar that I can SEE IS A SCROLLBAR and not just a thin panel of the same colour grey with absolutely no edges.

Same for office. Just make it themeable and bundle an Office 2000 theme with it. I would happily switch to that and continue using it (including disabling the ribbon and everything else and instead hiding those rarely-used functions behind a bunch of menus, a single toolbar and/or allow me to customise what I WANT TO SEE ON THEM).

We've given some UX designers millions to make the exact worst and most bland UI you can imagine, and they've infested every software company in the world.

Re: Dear Smart Meter Zealots: Explain why they all have a rem

There is a reason why - for every £ I have to get "refunded" because of an overpriced Direct Debit I'm forced to have in place that I will never approach on my bill - I put that money back into a solar power system of my own.

I intend to be rid of the electricity as a utility by retirement, and as rid of much of the water utility as I can too (atmospheric water generators, greywater systems, etc.).

Combined with something like Project Kuiper for Internet (NOT Starlink), I will happily be "off-grid" in a decade or so and then they can do what they like.

They don't save anything.

Nobody is sitting there deliberately burning through money for no reason, or through ignorance, if it matters to them.

The ones it doesn't matter to, it literally doesn't matter to. They'll continue to do that.

The ones it matters to have already taken all the reasonable steps, are perfectly aware of their energy usage, manage it, purchase accordingly, etc.

The smart meter rollout has nothing to do with customers saving money. It's to do with electricity companies not having to drive around in a van to read your meter any more (remember that happening regularly? Then you're old like me).

Since I had a smart electricity meter and a smart water meter fitted, all that happened is my USAGE stayed absolutely 100% the same (I have data, will travel) but their billing was forced to be far more accurate (the water bill was 10x more than my actual metered usage, the electricity 3x more than the previous resident that they were charging me on the basis of - I presume because of leaks, but also the "charge based on the size of the house", the previous guy had no care because someone else paid the electricity, etc.).

They lost a lot of money - 1st having to fund the smart meter installs in both cases, and the back-end to read them, but 2nd because they shouldn't be able to inaccurately bill me ever again once it's tied into their system properly. And they don't like that.

My bill for this month should be £65. They are trying to bill me nearer £200. And I will do nothing for this month (the account is in credit because their estimates are so atrociously bad even with me giving accurate readings just before the billing period) mostly because their own meter tells me I don't owe that, so that money will come back to me.

But next month if they expect me to pay more than I used, there will be runctions.

Smart metering is a nationalised function that's been privatised to a bunch of companies with an interest in not billing you accurately so they can earn interest off the surplus. That kind of thing should be illegal.

"in fact their dodgy practices have cost me quite a lot of money over the years rebuying content, so I think they're thoroughly in the wrong"

And yet you keep rewarding their efforts by a direct monetary contribution every time it affects you to the world's most profitable company.

In a way, that is an Apple defense, whether you can see that or not.