In the south of Italy where families were very close to each others, children abundant, and passing the name of grandparents to first and second borns was expected people ended up with tons of namesakes. I have 6 people in my direct family who all share same name and last name.
Still find the Copilot transcripts orders of magnitude worse than something like Wispr Flow and they tend to allucinate constantly and do not adapt to a company's context (that Copilot has access too...). I am talking about acronyms of products / teams, names of people (even when they are in the call), etc.
Can anyone familiar with the technical details shed light on why this is so.
Is it because of a globally trained model (as opposed to trained[tweaked on] on context specific data) or because of using different classes of models.
Neither copilot nor flow can natively handle audio to my understanding, so there is already a transcription model converting it to text that then GPT tries to summarise.
It could be they simply use a mediocre transcription model. Wispr is amazing but would hurt their pride to use a competitor.
But i feel it's more likley the experience is; GPT didn't actually improve on the raw transcription, just made it worse. Especially as any miss-transcipted words may trip it up and make it misunderstand while making the summary.
if i can choose between a potentially confused and misunderstood summary, and a badly spellchecked (flipped words) raw transcription, i would trust the latter.
With Three UK I used gathered evidence over the course of 4 months to wiggle myself out of a £46/month 28-month 5G contract (had to pay £200 remaining on my iPhone 16 Pro) when I demonstrated that my phone was basically useless whenever in the postcode are where I live, even if I always had 1 bar 5G signal.
Not even phone calls would go through, let alone calls on Whatsapp et al, or loading websites using something heavier than just text.
Have raised a _formal_ complaint (they must report it to Ofcom), and after that it was just a matter of ensuring I lost enough phone calls to demonstrate how many ended up in my answering machine.
The fact that Wifi calling is also super buggy and almost never work, played also a big role.
My problem is, all other mobile providers in my area are even worse, showing LTE or 4G. So I just need to wait for them to strengthen signal, or move!
I'm a former Three user in central London. When I started it was good, then they advertised cheap unlimited data contracts which overloaded their system and they became close to unusable. You'd order an Uber, go down to meet it and be stuck because there was zero data. It wasn't a signal strength thing - it was a system overload thing.
I'm now on O2 which works kind of normally and also have a silent link esim which is a good backup. They cost like £8, never expire and let you use any UK network you choose if one isn't working. Or almost any network globally for that matter.
WiFi calling is the one of the most improperly implemented feature by carriers. Some just straight up deny WiFi calling if you're in airplane mode but connected to a WiFi.
Tutorials are all but spoon-feeding. Tutors are strongly encouraged not to give just solutions, but actually to teach the approach to solving problems and creating connections with adjacent topics where possible.
I used to teach tutorials at Keble college (Oxford). Not sure how they were run in Manchester.
Tutorials in Oxford are impressive for me for many reasons:
1. Those teaching were generally of a higher level beyond Ph.D., post docs or professors, all paid, all assessed against an NPS from students, and the performance of the students in exams 2. Tutors are generally teaching more adjacent topics (creating connections), students are challenged to think beyond the assignments (which are generally tough), 3. Tutorials are calibrated and personalised to students and made sure all students are challenged at the right level, I had tutorials where I had to teach 1:2 because the students were excellent and needed a higher level of complexity.
Let’s not forget another data point. South was richer before unification than the north.
The north regions regularly at war with France and Austria were pretty much debt fuelled, whilst the south was considered the bank of Italy, solvent and very rich due to flourishing economy.
After unification, Piedmont dumped its war debts on the whole country and drained the south’s cash reserves, using them to modernise the north while the south was left weakened.
Traditionally Limoncello is not done via distillation process. But infusion. Like many of the other Italian alcoholic beverages (various versions of amari, nocino, etc).
Just back from a 8500+km road trip (car, wife, and two kids 6 and 1) around Europe where we visited 9 countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece). For us as a family, France and UK had the safest and more relaxing roads. Italy was OK compared to the usual standard, Slovenia and Croatia had highways with too many slopes but people drive carefully. The ones where we struggled and developed high anxiety were (surprisingly!) Germany and Switzerland. In both latter countries we seriously struggled to relax as driving in any lane becomes a stressful experience. We have decided NOT to cross those countries anymore in our next trips sadly.
By death per km France, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia are more dangerous then Germany or Switzerland. German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing. Also, you seem to struggle with mountainous roads, which depends on the topography and not the country.
Agree, though an intensive one (8500km in 6 weeks) that is just subjective experience, which is why I caveated it mentioning that it was our own family personal experience.
I lived in a mountainous area of Italy (very narrow roads, full of ups and downs) so I am a fairly confident driver (probably why I was not too stressed driving in Italy) and drove in countries like India and Iran in the past (so very familiar and happy with slow, but very crowded and unpredictable traffic).
To clarify, the anxiety we had on Autobahn and Swiss' highways was not a reflection on the quality of the roads, and more a reflection on the driving 'style' combined with the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
Not complaining about not having yet another car on the roads here, but your conclusion goes directly against experience of literally every single person living here in Europe for their whole lives that I know. Especially Switzerland, apart from italian-speaking part of Ticino (which is more Italy than Switzerland), people drive well and way above Europe's average. Also Switzerland has 120kmh speed limit, making roads quite a bit safer also due to very frequent stationary radar placements.
But then again we have 0.1% of information to make a good picture of your situation, driving skills and habits, vehicle you moved around and so on. But there is for sure a good reason for such discrepancy, ie driving caravan super slow or similar tiny little detail.
Also you magically skipped few (pretty horrible to drive) countries if you had a road trip that covered Greece.
Have agreed in previous comments that this was subjective (as a family but also as a driver) experience.
Maybe one thing that amplified the effect was the high expectations we had for those highways, and maybe that's what made it more shocking for us.
Again, I consider myself a 'decently skilled' driver, having driven in many countries over the course of the years, and easily adapting to driving styles (US/Italy/France/Iran/UK/India/etc). Some of these styles are indeed chaotic, but they (generally) operate at slower speed, which allow for corrections and precautions. The thing that threw us off is the combination I have mentioned before:
> [...] the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
>German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing
The German situation seems vastly superior on the basis that whoever is the "odd one out" or violating the norms should be the one having a bad time. Basically incentivizing homogenous and/or predictable traffic flow, which is safer.
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