Twyford and near Twyford

Or Tarvers Lock, as some people call it.

What counts as a CRT ‘move’

Two stops within two CRT assets, (a bridge and an overflow), meaning as CRT logs things, this counts as a ‘move’.

It’s less than a mile, and no doubt, if you spent a whole year doing short hops…, the powers that be would deem this to be against the spirit of the ‘Continuous Cruiser’ aspect of a licence.

Since this time last year, I’ve probably done 3-400 miles.

Nowadays, that makes little difference. If your movement gets ‘flagged’ by the computer, you’ll be getting a communication.

Moving more than one ‘asset’ means that you’ve ‘moved’.

I see boats here that have been here since I last visited in May last year.

That’s 12 months plus in EXACLTY the same spot.

Neither of these boats have residents. They’re just dumped here. Sometimes the owners visit. The second one, Rapscallion, I’ve had to secure myself before now because it’s come away, and drifted out into the canal. He’s also got his canoe and some other rubbish he’s decided to store around and about the place.

You see a lot of these abandoned boats around the network. A lot of the time they end up sinking, dumping their diesel and noxius battery chemicals into the cut for the fish and wildlife to partake of.

CRT is mostly toothless. They have the power to move or impound abandoned boats, but do nothing.

People know this. Some take advantage, to the detriment of others.

Out of sight, out of mind eh, good boater buddies….

Grant’s Lock

Is currently closed due to a bent paddle mechanism.

How you would go about bending a paddle like that is anyone’s guess.

It’s been like that for a number of days now whilst CRT bring their boats and vans , unload staff and sniff around.

It means there’s rather a large boat traffic jam on both sides of Grants Lock.

Probably better for Gary, who’s running this festival on a hill not half a mile away. Drag in a little custom, no doubt. You can hear the bass until about midnight, a nice backdrop whilst you play Yahtzee!, cards or whatever boater games they have stocked up on their hireboats. Bassbins gently lulling them to sleep…

Means that there’s basically 0 traffic where I am here, which is a nice touch!

Walking

Is nice around here.

I walk around the back of the village which is quite a long walk. Once you get up above the Cherwell Valley, it becomes very quite.

Sereen.

Different wildlife I’ve seen: Foxes, Badgers, Hare, Rabbits, Muntjack Deer, Owls, Partridge amongst the other country bird-fayre, earthworms, sheep and whatnot.

Programming

I’ve been spending my days programming, writing a web-application using AI to do the coding aspects.

It’s been nearly 2 months now.

Gemini went down yesterday, (Thursday 11th), basically stopped accepting any sort of prompt saying it was out of memory.

Gemini, Google’s LLM, has changed a lot in the last two weeks, and not for the better.

I tried to use it today and it was talking complete rubbish.

I may have to switch to a different model, (ChatGPT, Claude). In the last few days, it’s been worse than useless, hallucinating, forgetting mid conversation and giving actively incorrect information.

Something I’ll be keeping an eye on in the coming days and making changes to try and get this thing finished.

AI lies!

With AI, it’s difficult to identify what and where mistakes were made, what was the exact cause. A certain amount of error is to be expected. It may be due to a break-down in semantics, or not providing the correct information.

Unfortunately, lately, mistakes haven’t fallen into either of these camps. They’ve been the right prompts with the right information flow, they AI has actively discarded or not read the information supplied, then rowed back saying ‘I’m sorry, I should have read that more carefully’.

We all know we can trust our friends at Google.

We’ll have to see what happens on that front.

Until next time.