The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant.

[Mrs Pingu]

What really fucks me off, looking back at the pictures of our very first house, is that in the process of adding the entirely pointless extension they totally fucked over the pleasant little garden we'd cultured with a grim chunk of paved over nothing.

That garden was ironically one of the key reasons we originally bought the place. That and we could afford it, because London.

I think the moral of this story might be, don't look back.

True enough, but it's a bit sad, it was a nice secluded green space that we'd enjoyed many a summer evening in, now reduced to a small square of dead paving.

I told a lie about the price, it was only £518k. Those photos tell biggly lies, nothing in that house was close to as big as it looks in those photos, ask our cat Lamb Chop (you will need a ouija board) who would have had strong opinions on being swung on any of those rooms. Even in the main bedroom, you had to move the bed to open the wardrobe. But it was ours.

Oh and those replacement uPVC windows. The absolute fuck of it.

That BBQ looks really sad.

[ian]

It does look like the saddest little BBQ. I presume they redid the place for sale, it doesn't look lived in.

I like the little fox on the bed though. That's the room Lamb Chop hid in for an entire week when we kidnapped her from West London.

Also giant school building. That wasn't there.

[Mrs Pingu]

Yes I had just come back to say I liked the fox.

[Paul]

Also, while I`m grumbling,
Yesterday the solicitor said we had an offer of £xk. (Valuation, and over the asking price). He reckoned it was to test the water and suggested he go back and ask for 5k more. I said we were happy with the offer as it stood given they were flexible with entry date. (I didn't see the point in rocking the boat for what might ultimately be negotiated to an extra 2 grand).

So why did I get an email this morning saying he'd been talking to the buyer's solicitor and they had agreed an extra whole £1000 on the initial offer?
Aren't you supposed to do what I instruct? Who told you it was alright to cook this up between you?
You've made me look like a greedy arsehole for the sake of a whole thousand pounds, which is frankly a drop in the ocean really isn't it.
If she'd turned round and said no, fuck you and fuck your property, how would that have gone?
Is that ethical?

No it’s not. And, more importantly, it’s a breach of the code of conduct.

[Pingu]

It does look like the saddest little BBQ. I presume they redid the place for sale, it doesn't look lived in.

I like the little fox on the bed though. That's the room Lamb Chop hid in for an entire week when we kidnapped her from West London.

Also giant school building. That wasn't there.

Yes I had just come back to say I liked the fox.

The fox is the best thing.

We retained squirrel and badger for photie taking of our place, but they didn't make the cut.

[FifeingEejit]

3 hrs sleep last night, up at 5am, almost 12hrs riding bike, can I sleep? CIF.

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[SoreTween]

True enough, but it's a bit sad, it was a nice secluded green space that we'd enjoyed many a summer evening in, now reduced to a small square of dead paving.

Good grief that's bleak.  Aimed for minimalist, overshot by a significant margin and landed slap on the border between featureless & depressing.

[Kim]

3 hrs sleep last night, up at 5am, almost 12hrs riding bike, can I sleep? CIF.

I've had about 4 hours sleep since Friday.  About 6 hours of driving, two hours of cycle racing, and assorted concentration-requiring tech wrangling.  If I don't get a good 8+ hours sleep tonight, I give up.

The bedroom temperature does not seem promising in this regard.

[Mr Larrington]

Dunno if our weather is heading towards Mordor but at this end of That London it's been tipping down.

[Kim]

Dunno if our weather is heading towards Mordor but at this end of That London it's been tipping down.

So that's where Preston's weather went...

[ian]

True enough, but it's a bit sad, it was a nice secluded green space that we'd enjoyed many a summer evening in, now reduced to a small square of dead paving.

Good grief that's bleak.  Aimed for minimalist, overshot by a significant margin and landed slap on the border between featureless & depressing.

I have never seen a small barbeque look, well, suicidal. I called The Samaritans but they don't, apparently, do barbeques.

[ian]

On further streetviewing, I'm impressed that our former next-door neighbours-but-one (who used to be a crazy gay Spanish couple and might still be) have used their parking space for a shed.

[nuttycyclist]

Sun's out, but sitting in garden office instead of sunlounger out of habit.  Doors and windows open.
Neighbours have the builders in and so nothing but chainsaw engines, thrown timber, loud radio, and chatting to drown out the birdsong.

They are of course allowed to do this, so I can't complain, but I miss the silence.   

[rafletcher]

This morning, as usual, I went out to my car, which is, like my neighbours, parked nose-in on the wide verge opposite the cottages. I’d put my bag in the boot, walked around to the side and opened the door. It was at this point I noticed the dog shit deposited equidistant between the cars, which I had, fortunately, managed not to step in, otherwise this would be a rant. Fucking selfish dog owner  . I messaged my wife once I got to work, and she kindly took a trowel to it and chucked it in the hedge.

[Beardy]

People who spend an hour on the phone to Dr Beardy (Mrs). whinging about how they have too much to do and not enough time to do. It’s had enough to show interest in her marking rants when she goes into excruciating detail about why she thought a dissertation was worth 64% when her colleague had only given it 60% without me having to feign interest it the minutiae of her colleagues work life balance. Especially when I think that some of those complaining take advantage of Dr Beardy’s organised and helpful nature. 

Ok, that might have turned into more of a rant than I intended. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

ASR is getting better, coping with a wider range of accents and voices, but it still can't cope with variants on its vocabulary. So it knows assure and insurance but not assurance, audit and non but can't cope with non-audit. It's getting a bit boring. Okay, the topic is boring but it's boringer. Also, it still can't differentiate reliably between speakers.

Ed: "data source" asr-ed to "dinosaurs". 

[nuttycyclist]

Sun's out, but sitting in garden office instead of sunlounger out of habit.  Doors and windows open.
Neighbours have the builders in and so nothing but chainsaw engines, thrown timber, loud radio, and chatting to drown out the birdsong.

They are of course allowed to do this, so I can't complain, but I miss the silence.

Good news - builders are silent.
Bad news - can now hear nothing but blackbird's alarm calls.  Of course the neighbour's ruddy cat is there you stupid bird, it has been for years.  SHUT UP!

[ian]

Try the eternal battle of Bad Cat versus the magpies, which has been going on since we moved here.

[nuttycyclist]

It's usually magpie v blackbird.  Magpie raided one nest last week, and the aerial battles have been a sight to watch.

I like blackbirds.  The nesting one in the last house was tame enough that I hand fed worms to save them getting off the nest.

Last few weeks have been nothing but CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP from dawn to dusk.

[Kim]

Remember the days when blackbirds did the Nokia Ring?

[ian]

Bad Cat sits there, usually on the balcony, and makes her array of strange noises, while the magpies fly around and squawk. Bad Cat is pretty useless and eventually retreats indoors and resumes her audio battle from the safe side of the bedroom window.

She bolted from dive bomb the other day straight into a bemused fox, which could have ended badly had they both not been so surprised by the sudden collision of felid and canid.

[Cudzoziemiec]

ASR is getting better, coping with a wider range of accents and voices, but it still can't cope with variants on its vocabulary. So it knows assure and insurance but not assurance, audit and non but can't cope with non-audit. It's getting a bit boring. Okay, the topic is boring but it's boringer. Also, it still can't differentiate reliably between speakers.

Ed: "data source" asr-ed to "dinosaurs". 

I'm wondering how it works. It seems it doesn't work by recognising sounds and mapping them to known words, because it uses variable spellings of the same word. So "modeled" and then "modelled" in the same sentence. It's supposed to be an American system, so you'd expect the first. Perhaps what it actually does is map sounds onto letter clusters? But that would probably result in meaningless strings of letters more often than not, at least in English. So maybe it's actually learnt "modeled" and "modelled" as two slightly different sounds. The speaker in this case is German, so falls somewhere between the two.

[Kim]

I believe the major late-90s innovation in speech-to-text was considering arbitrary chains of sounds, rather than looking at words individually.  Hence you tend to get coherent (if contextually wrong) phrases, rather than jumbles of homophones, and - just like a human listener - it tends to fail at key nouns that provide the context.

The more recent breakthrough has been deep-learning based, which is basically a black box of computational witchcraft.  I think at some point there was a shift from spelling out sounds and then correcting that with a language model to somehow (!) going straight from sounds to correctly spelled language, greatly reducing the memory requirements, which were getting unwieldy.

Also at some point we did away with the need for speaker-specific training.

I think I'm safe in assuming that however I suspect it might work, the reality is a lot more complicated than that.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The reality is also that it still produces a far less accurate result than transcription by human, although of course it's also far quicker and cheaper. And both processes still need human correction to produce something worth reading.

A further reality is that so much of it is not worth reading even when perfectly written, but that goes for so many activities.

[MattH]

Trying to remember the name of the British company that raised loads of money with it's automated service that took your mobile voicemail message and used speech recognition to transcribe to SMS. A bit like Orange's Wildfire, but better - mid 2000s at a guess.
They raised loads of venture capital, then it turned out that their speech to text engine wasn't particularly good, and they'd got an Indian call centre doing it manually whilst their techies tried desperately to improve it. Went bust in the end.

Edit - SpinVox - got sold for a fraction of the venture capital input, and call centres were South Africa and Phillipines rather than India.
I found it by remembering that Christina Domecq, one of the founders, had completed RAAM , so wasn't all bad.