Just be careful going forwards mate. I've just fallen down a Reddit rabbit hole reading a Scammer thread. One of the things they say is once someone has been responsive (especially if they pay) they'll keep trying again and again with different scams. Apparently most are based in Vietnam or Myanmar. I was selling a car a few years ago and someone tried the "oil rig" scam on me. Luckily I found a thread on exactly that and realised what was going on.
Once they move the chat to WhatsApp try video calling them. They generally hang up and after the forth or fifth call in a row they block you
You can probably get a white British Snapchat filter these days to be fair, still wouldn’t trust that
I used to get cold calls about my "interest in the financial markets". They were probably happening weekly for a couple of months, but died off after I stopped answering calls from unknown numbers. I assume they were a similar thing
I never answer the phone to a number I don’t know. If it’s important and genuine they’ll leave a message
I have voice mail turned off as well. Send me a message and if I know who you are, I'll get back to you.
I don't think blokes need much excuse to not answer the phone outside the work environment, do we. Being able to screen them is right up our street.
Can anyone who's into cryptocurrency explain the sharp rise in Gold & Silver? Is there a correlation to any dip on bitcoin?
No expert, but gold has always been seen as a safe asset through times of uncertainty in the market. Doubt it would be anything to do with crypto specifically. That's the standard answer. Then also, the obscenely rich continue to get rich at a great rate. They need to put their money somewhere. Property, land, stocks, commodities, pensions... they're hoovering them all up.
Rumblings in the global stock market especially about technology firms and AI https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5ej03p604o
Cheers, I get that, however the markets don't appear uncertain, they appear to be continuing on their bull run which is forecast to continue to Q2 2026, so I'm curious that investors have turned to gold instead of crypto not stocks and shares?
The Nasdaq has been on an insane bull run but reading the forecasts over the weekend it sounds like investors are only expecting a minor correction not a crash, therefore the gold rush seems unexplainable?
These warnings about AI sound right to me. As a software engineer, it just seems weird to look around and see how much hype there is about AI compared to how much tangible benefit there is to using it in a serious way. Every software company seems to be trying to be involved in it under orders from the top. Companies are putting huge amounts of time and money into trying to find ways to use AI technologies but they don't know what or how they actually want it to do. Everyone seems to be desperately trying to stay relevant with the hot current thing but nobody knows what they're trying to get out of it. Tech people are being pressured by bosses to use AI and so we all spend loads of time looking at it, and every so often someone comes up with something like "maybe an AI chatbot could filter our support tickets" which when you think about it isn't particularly impressive or futuristic at all, but it's often as good as you get, so people run with it and spend time on that. Every company-wide call we have someone enthusiastically talks about the exciting new AI stuff we've got coming up but there's never any concrete examples. There are undoubtedly very powerful things you can do with AI around specific things like spotting patterns, which can have massive benefits in things like study of disease; probably scientific research in general. But this big push for every consumer to use AI and every piece of software to incorporate it just seems out of touch with reality.
On another post I mentioned a friend who runs a game on Facebook and has done for many years. He's recently started having real issues with them, as his game has been running longer than people at FB seem to expect, and as a result it doesn't fit into their current advertising model and so every quarter he has to confirm some things otherwise he gets de-platformed. Unfortunately, this time there was an issue with him responding on time due to being on holiday, and now he's been trying to get in touch with a human, and it's nigh-on impossible as the entire support function is seemingly driven by AI and his situation is particularly niche, so AI doesn't know what to do, but doesn't divert to a human for review.
