SimonD

Same here, I'm too far out of the game to know what's at the forefront. But I do know some people at the research end doing some fascinating work on the renewables side, which if implemented will be both much more environmentally friendly and provide more guaranteed output around the UK - but like all these things the struggle seems to be taking these things from research to implementation.

I'm all for renewables and a full supporter that we need and must go in that direction. I remember having coffee with a friend about 20 years ago while I was doing a post grad certificate in renewable engineering and technology, telling him that renewables are a no brainer - he thought I was a bit mad. However, like my earlier post, we've got to be very careful about how we measure and assess the environmental impacts of what we're doing. I, personally, have long been a critic of the singular approach using Carbon and rather prefer a measure that takes a much wider approach to consider overall environmental impact. Concrete unfortunately is one of those materials that is made up of non-renewable resources and the extraction of the sands and aggregates are causing widespread environmental damage right across the world - and we know the availability of the raw materials is in decline. What we need to be doing is finding alternative materials that are not single use, but also renewable in their own right, which we know concrete isn't at least not at the same level of 'value' - e.g. it can only be re-used for lower value purposes when recycled. This is a big problem, mostly overlooked. The argument about what is eco friendly is as all these things more complex and nuanced than oft portrayed. I wonder whether this is what @Gus Potter is referring to?

In the grand scheme of bureaucracies, the actually paperwork for MCS on each job, is probably not that bad, but it does take a few hours to complete. Most of it's done when doing a proper design. But the issue was more the actual process of gaining the MCS certification to begin with and the ongoing required QMS stuff - not designed for small businesses at all. Yes, looked at those. My issue is the permitted development limitations. I keep on getting conflicting information about this. We need to replace our south facing fence, which would give us a stretch of 16m of fence to mount the panels and would be ideal. Some say I need planning, some do not. And our local planning dept don't seem to know what they're talking about as I had one tell me heat pumps can't be installed in conservation areas!

OMG! 😁 My wife mentioned this in passing the other day - asking if I shouldn't start doing solar too. I reminded her of the pain of MSC certification for heat pumps, lets do one thing at a time, and she went quiet. But on a more serious note, I have done an initial design for the house which could solve the problem 😊

It's like most things. People walk past solar installs and just accept it's a solar installation. The integrated stuff for our metal standing seem roof simply wasn't available at the time I ordered the roof - I was lucky enough then to get some of the last coils in the UK as we were in the middle of COVID lockdown at the time. However, I've since learned some of these for metal roofs suffer from heat degradation as they're stuck to the metal roof.

It's a bit like the stream of people who want a heat pump and when you tell them there's an up front charge of a few hundred pounds for a proper heat loss and system design they balk at the idea. Well done you. We have a barrel shaped roof and nobody wants to touch it for solar! We're having to look at alternatives. The roof does look lovely mind 😉

I think generally this is the problem with all types of energy - there still isn't a consistent way to assess them on a like-for-like life-cycle basis. And each side tends to provide limited or incomplete information.

Yes, it's a rather huge and complex area right now, and even more so that when we saw similar patterns during the dotcom boom. The only difference being that a vast amount of money being ploughed in is from cash rich tech hegemonies. But I also see a play out of the worrying trends of laziness/sloppiness in development, which I think is perpetuated by poor implementation of project management approaches like Agile where they end up tacking crap onto existing crap foundations rather than re-think and rebuild. But also we see really poor UX/UI development nowadays and pushing system testing out onto users. This is exactly what's causing some of the issues you mention above. But in a slightly ironic way, the supply chain problems and costs associated with the large scale LLM implementations are perhaps making the industry think a bit harder about memory use, something that's largely been ignored for the last few decades. But I suppose the more insidious issue is that of control. I prefer to think about it as regulation rather than control, because despite all the negative talk out there, there's a huge amount of positives this technology can bring. It just needs to be reigned in a bit but also actually understood properly by those tasked with the regulation. I don't envy those having to look at it and make these decisions, particularly with the speed it's going. What I don't want to see is a bunch of knee jerk quick pieces of legislation to deal with isolated events which we seem to be seeing more and more of in politics more widely.

That's what I used to do too, but what is it about people picking up and using buckets? Our gardener did this the other day. I had 2 buckets outside the front door for plastering and then found one of them later in the day filled with crap from the gardening exercise. He used it even though it was stacked together with another bucket that had the plastering tools in it!

If you asked Grok, it'll probably tell you this year, just like the self-driving taxis for the last what 10 years? Personally I think the whole AGI thing depends on what you consider to be intelligence - if it's the kind of intelligence that's displayed by a large proportion of leaders in the tech world, then maybe. If it's considered to be merely acting at the level of concept & proposition, then perhaps also so, but as intelligence also encompasses navigation and manipulating one's physical environment, all the computing power of all data centres in the world combined couldn't manage it successfully. And this is where it all falls down because we actually don't possess the knowledge to build systems that are efficient enough to properly act in the real world and make necessary decisions to successfully navigate it without unimaginable computing power - and this problem resides in our basic understanding in neuroscience which is stuck in the world of computational analogy and dominance of a constructionist view of the brain - e.g. we 'construct' reality in our brains based upon meaningless stimulus and therefore the world we see isn't really the world.

You are going to gasp in horror, but this is my absolute favourite tool storage box (now bear in mind they're being used almost on a daily basis). It's something that does just work. https://hultafors.com/en-gb/products/tool-bucket It's been so popular, they now sell a tool organiser to go in the bucket. I have 6 of these buckets 😲 I've even had customer say what a good idea as their other trades are coming in and out with loads of boxes. For example, one of mine just has the drill/driver/screwdrivers with bit sets and a drill roll, the other with have the sds & multi-tool etc. While I'm working away I'll have an empty one where I throw bits of rubbish as I go, including pipe off cuts, old screws etc. and then it's brilliant for the odd emergency when I'm removing old pipework where I can grab the bucket to collect the always expected run out of water from said pipework.

Welcome to the club - you're embarking on a serious n+1 journey here. There will always be another tool you need, of course! Again, depending on exactly what you're going to end up doing, here's a list of priorities: 1. as you've already realised - drill/driver 18V 2. maybe an impact driver - I say this because I'm in the trade and despite doing lots of work with a wide variety of materials, I hardly ever touch my impact driver any more. This is for several reasons; a) noise, b) control when you want a good finish, c) a decent drill driver with a torque limiter will do 95% of what an impact driver will do. I currently just have a 10 year old cheap Erbauer impact driver that sits there for the odd thing - like driving in a bolt into concrete, or 5-6mm dia 150mm screws into timber. 3. if you're planning on lots of smaller jobs like building a kitchen and even driving plasterboard screws etc. a smaller 12v screwdriver - I use one of these for about 60% of all drill/driver work and have one with multiple heads for bits and drills and an angles driver bits for good reach into cupboards. 4. sds drill for masonry 5. multitool - these things are just the best and most versatile of tools, almost a must have (I have a particular 18v Bosch version which has the lowest vibration levels in the industry and so is a pleasure to use) After this you're looking at the various saws etc. but that's another story entirely. What I have are 2 18v Bosch professional drill/drivers, one of which is 12 years old still going strong as are the original batteries that still fit all the newer tools (always check backward compatibility with manufacturers and their battery systems) - one will have drill bits, the other hole saws and sometimes changed out for heavy duty screwdriver jobs. I then have a 12v Bosch professional one with the multi attachments but mostly used as a screwdriver. Then I have a big 18v Bosch professional sds drill and a Bosch Professional multi-tool. These are the ones that are always to hand. All of these are running on either 2ah or 5ah batteries that are now at least 6 years old up to more than 10 years old. The only problem I've had with any of these tools is when I was drilling a steel beam and some metal swarf got sucked into the motor of the older brushed drill/driver and it cut out a few time randomly and then it's fine again. For whatever reason some people seem to dislike Bosch but I've had Bosch Professional stuff for more than 25 years and never has one of their tools died on me or caused me a problem yet. Can't say the same for some Milwaukee tools I tried just 3 years ago except for the little mini disk cutter which has been absolutely fabulous.

https://www.travisperkins.co.uk/land-drain-and-ducting/wavincoil-land-drain-pipe-coil-100mm-x-25m/p/711879 or

First things first - what jobs are you looking for the drill to do?

Yes, there's definitely been some big changes over the last few months. It seems to have been exponential and the quality of output and reasoning is noticeable. Prompting though I still really key. I did a comparison last week with my son who'd put in a prompt and received some fairly generic stuff back. I sat down and wrote a prompt and he was taken aback by how long and detailed the prompt was compared to his. Then he was blown away by the output compared to what he had received. I actually ask the AI to create prompts for me or guide me in how best to structure prompt based on what I want and like @Pocster experiences, the output can be like night and day. Often just writing my prompts takes much longer than the thinking and generating the output.