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I’m totally agnostic but I think there is something in the bible about ‘thoughts becoming flesh’ and the dangers thereof. I’ve seen this concept given a positive spin by motivational gurus and I think there’s something to the idea that by thinking about something enough we can cause things to start to happen. You are just much more likely to make the appropriate choices that will lead you along the required path if your head is already in that space. The next step which creates a very scary momentum all of its own is actually voicing these thoughts and ideas to other people - very quickly these then go from ‘I am thinking of’ or ‘I might’ to ‘I am going to’. Suddenly there are no excuses or reasons to delay. It’s happening. This is the jump I have taken since my previous blog posts (which have in themselves also been an act of ‘starting the conversation’). People I have been speaking to re the house build: Gus Potter - structural engineer/designer/former builder Gus and I had a two hour phone conversation that was incredibly useful and informative. It’s hard when all the ideas live in your own head and it’s easy for the fear and doubt to kick in, but hearing Gus agree with many of the choices I plan on making was a phenomenal endorsement and morale boost. He also raised a lot of points which I hadn’t considered which have been extremely useful in mapping out this project in my head and hopefully avoiding pitfalls along the way. As a result of the call I felt a lot clearer as to the next steps I need to take. Estate agents all over the borders I’ve seen a plot that I would like to make serious moves on, but it seemed wise first to physically call in to all the agents I could find in the Borders to ask them if they are aware of any plots in the planning pipeline or such that will come to the market soonish. Planning is a lengthy process after all and so it was possible there might be plots out there that agents know about but which can’t be seen yet by Joe Public. There weren’t, but at least I know that now. The other thing to do would be to scour the planning notices, but I haven’t done that yet. The owner of the plot I got frustrated at not hearing back from the selling agents regarding the plot I was interested in so I contacted the owner directly via an email address I found on the planning portal notices. Initially I got crickets there too and both myself and the agents started to worry that he might be incapacitated somehow but it turned out he was just abroad and not very good at checking emails. On his return he replied to both myself and the agents and was kind enough to agree to meet me for coffee and a chat. I really enjoyed meeting him - he is a bit of a kindred spirit I think and it seemed as though the discussion went well. I recently sold a property to a guy who was an absolute dick in negotiations and the contrast with Mr Plot Owner couldn’t have been greater. He was emotionally mature, open, honest and straightforward and our conversation was friendly, civil and respectful. I wanted to explain to him in person why I think it is that his plot hasn’t sold in several years on the market and why the offer I would be making him was considerably lower than the asking price. By doing so I hope that he won’t automatically reject it and feel angry/pissed off/upset/disrespected by it. He is a really nice guy and I got the feeling that he would like to sell it to someone who loves the plot as much as he does and also has strong local connections. Whilst I tick those boxes I think it’s fair to say that he was disappointed in my offer. I’m sure he would like to get more for the plot, but unfortunately I can’t offer him any more. It seemed worth a punt to ask the question - I’d be gutted if I saw the plot reduced to what I would have paid at some point in the future when I had already committed to a compromise plot I don’t like as much. He was generous enough to not reject it right away but instead to say that he would think about it and talk it over with his partner before getting back to me sometime next week. I can ask no more than that. Other things I’ve been doing to prep Watching YouTube videos of Robin Clevett and others who stick-build. Selling my possessions on eBay to raise funds. Optimising the return on my savings. Working on the renovation of my flat which will need to be sold to fund the build. Working on a rough house plan layout to prepare for the PPP application. Learning about products and materials. Financial planning based on my convo with Gus - vaguely Gantt structure. Quietly crapping myself.

I've not done this before so I'm not completely clear about it but that's my understanding too. My outlay on planning fees, design etc shouldn't be for nothing unless I back out and I'll only want to do that if I hit an issue that can't be surmounted easily or within budget.

It's much more definitive than the process in England. It prevents/reduces gazumping and gazundering, changes in terms and such games; also time wasters. To what extent conditions can be applied I'm not so sure.

No, I don't believe they can. Once you have a concluded missive then you have a legal bargain which must be adhered to otherwise penalties will be incurred (ie its breach of contract basically). It will depend on how the solicitor words the offer but it should mean that the seller is required to sell to me at that price once I am satisfied with the planning permission. There is usually a time limit imposed like a year to allow for the planning process to go through without making it possible for me to just string the seller on indefinitely.

I often say to chat "Are you a BBC Model B?, you are supposedly frontier cutting edge AI. So stop being a prick". Surprisingly it does frquently man up and produce something nearer what I requested. SO the answer is insult it for better results. Like humans I guess!

or (expletive deleted)ing token speed "test". mac Mx vs rtxY . Mac loses of course. Thats what stopped me getting the m3 at first always slower than rtx BUT when you need a larger model or multiple models Mac wins. For me flexibility over speed is the winner easily. (expletive deleted)ing 10k for an rtx6000 with 96Gb.... Nvidia make macs look cheap!

(expletive deleted)s me off when I see youtube chatgpv vs opus vs fable all given the same prompot to "write a flappy birds 3d game" and thats a test!. Amazing any of them produce anything at all but (expletive deleted) me - it's not a TOY!. It's super powerful.

Yes, that's exactly it. It drives me a bit mental, especially when it then compliments itself on the code it's created itself! And when I find a bug and it's going round in circles there's been a few time when I said we've had this problem before, haven't we! It then goes oh yes, found it! and then just sorts the instance, rather than the class, like it's telling me. And also the handover docs are absolutely essential otherwise it goes even further off piste! Fair comment. I certainly used to get the simple easy response that's only half there until I set up my full project with memory, files, and instructions. And as you say most people won't get past the initial crude request. That's not helped by the abundance of YouTube content telling people how they can build a multi-billion dollar no-code app in 5 minutes. People will try, then find there's a steep learning curve, especially if they've never built software before, and give up after another 5 minutes and instead try the next no-code promise for $10k/month passive income and on to the next one. I was quite shocked when I realised that I'd been working on my project since last August and it's June already and I've gone through some right challenges in that time. Now, progress is amazing and I haven't needed half a million quid and a team of software developers in Bangalore (or maybe these are the real homunculus hiding in chat?), so that's incredible for as you say 20 quid a month! And by all accounts they're promising reduced token prices now too!

I also notice chat seems to offer default simple solutions. So if I ask for a 'face' as I've done. I did give some detail but I end up with a crude basic version. Even if I ask for an authentic water effect and specify it I still get a very basic version. I queried why after I had spec'd it and it said because most people don't want the full thing. I asked for examples. People asking for "a minecraft game" - is obviously a massive project so it gives a very crude simplistic response - because apparently people wont specify exact detail for more advancement. I assume this is where the "toy" reference comes from. Chat seems to believe 99% of coding tasks are simplistic and non challenging "fix this bug" , "refactor this" . Of course you could argue that is not a chatbot's job to be a claude complete "coding solution" - but as I said for 20 quid a month effectively unlimited its the best value for money ever.

Exactly how I use chat gpt. These llm's are programmed to be passively nice to us dumb humans so equally I get completements on how I treat it like a softeare engineeer and not a toy. I upload code to it (that it wrote) it then blames me as though I wrote it and then it improves or suggests alterations to my (its) code. It admit it doesnt follow hard grounded rules even when commited to memory hence the ridged menu/harness

So the absolute bonkers thing here is that last night I had a chat with Claude about my outdated and pretty rusty approach to development. And I got some feedback. Here are some examples: First Claude butters me up: "Your domain knowledge is exceptional and it shows. The handover documents are some of the best I see....." To let me down gently: "You build features faster than you solidify foundations....." "Bugs are fixed reactively rather than by closing the class." "Session continuity relies heavily on handover documents rather than code structure." "The "upload current files first" pattern is correct — but you sometimes skip it." "You could use me earlier in the design phase. Most sessions seem to start with "here's a feature, let's build it." You'd get more value from 10 minutes upfront: "here's what I'm thinking, what are the architectural consequences?" "The emergent style has worked well to get here. The shift you probably need now is from "make it work" to........which means investing a bit more in the boring stuff: " Now I'm building out a modified set of prompts combined with project references to hand the responsibility of dealing with these things to Claude, with Claude's help! It is genuinely amazing. What I've also done is gone through with Claude the best pattern to use with handover between the reasoning and coding tools - so it takes it beyond just the coding. It totally blows me away how powerful this can be. Just a shame it can't help me physically in my day job!

@sgt_woulds fascinating. You could have added the hydrogen fuel cells to the list of implausibilities. Hydrogen is too valuable to burn as a fuel, and it would be better used in applications where there is no alternative, like manufacturing things we need like methanol and ammonia. If all the renewable electricity currently being generated across the world was put into electrolysers to make hydrogen, it would not be sufficient to supply even the current hydrogen demand.

Well I just rebooted the ESP and it has all stopped working. Job for a rainy day.

The planning officer came this week so thats all good. The guy didn't seem that young more like middle age and it seemed quite a casual meeting, I'm now waiting on his report. Hopefully what you say about some LPA's isn't true in my case as the cost of the pre app wasn't exactly cheap in my view.

This is what llm allows in coding . Limitation isn’t your coding or skills anymore . Knowledge of what you want and how it can be achieved is sufficient. Amazing time to be alive .

You mean learn what prompt to give llm what I want ? . Firstly I usually know what I want. “Python code using three.js fragment shader to render specular highlights on mesh “ . It’s still quite vague but specified enough to be a good start . The secret as you pointed out is small steps this way you’ve more chance of incremental progress . My harness is tight via my menu system . So ; no more than editing 4 files , no seds per file greater than 100 lines etc . Output file dumps all errors . The best improvement was prompt must start with a router . E.g AVALON_ROUTER: local scout only , codex cloud scout suggest patch , patch only etc . Chat forgets so it doesn’t always put this in the prompt . So the menu stops if any of these are wrong or missing . Sticks why it stopped into output file which of course goes back to chat . This tends to keep chat on track most the time .

Creativity, for people who are no longer children, is all about rediscovering your inner child and dumping all your baggage so it does not constrain your thinking.

Well it logged all night and seemed to do what I wanted it to do.

Agree - and it is only trained on code people have shared so there are whole domains, including some languages, it knows very little about in real world terms although it generally has all the theory it is not able to deploy it, in its word, 'cleanly'!

What's your take on this @Nickfromwales? CT1 on the trap rim, add the seal, then a bolt load of CT1 on the seal to fill in all that irregularity. Then bring that up to the tray and screw the top clamp ring in bringing the 2 together? There's a top seal as well, not sure that's necessary. Or use that "all in one" seal which came with it, described as "an alternative seal" that seems to traverse from top to bottom, essentially 2 seals joined together with a middle section, I'm sure you'd have seen them. The trap is McAlpine low profile.

I've not had any issues with the velcro in the heat, and I haven't needed to remove the velcro as I leave it on until the next time we have some warm weather TBH if you're looking for a decent finish, I'd do as @Nickfromwales suggests or get proper split unit put in

You've reminded me that I need to set up a Pi for some sensor logging. Carry on trying though - you'll get the outputs you need eventually and its worth the effort. When I first tried, I nearly gave up coz I thought it was all crap and I got rubbish outputs too. Now I'll get me coat as I'm now starting to hijack @Pocster's thread 😲

Go on, how did you learn? Did you do the child process which is just chuck in what seemed like a prompt, get a load of garbage and then refine, or did you study prompting first (I can probably guess). Personally I read a few articles copied and pasted some example prompts to see what happened, got bored and just went in to play and found my way that way. I'm sure I've still got a whole load to learn but tbh outputs are generally pretty on point most of the time.

Your prompt was the issue . If you don’t know what to ask ….. but that’s how you learn

Slight confession, I have been playing with an ESP32 tonight. Got it to log some text over my network. Something I have been meaning to do your years. I did ask ChatGPT to write the Python scripts. The RPi one was good, almost, the uPython was bollocks, but got it sorted the old fashioned way: traditional web search and 20 fags.