Consdering how bumpy the past couple of weeks have been that's a great result. Fantastic to see Leonard and Markanday getting on the scoresheet. Venky's, please find a way, any way, to back this manager and please have more ambition than our CEO. Well done to Travis as well. Despite many of our own fans wanting him pushed out the door he was very good today.

If they wanted a disruptive midfielder in the mould of a (lesser) Savage or Mokoena that I guess it would make sense, but I don't think that's Russell Martin's style.

It's a bit frustrating because it feels like JDT's attempts to mould the team further into his image over the summer has been severely hampered by our cashflow issues, so what we're going to see is still only going to be a partial implementation of what he wants to achieve, especially in attack, as it has been since he arrived. Nonetheless, it is what it is. WBA aren't doing so great themselves so it's a fixture that gives us a chance, albeit I can only see us sneaking one goal, maybe two if we're lucky, so we'll need the defence to be rock solid today.

This situation with Moyes and transfers has been rumbling on since the end of June. Very odd situation there. With all of this being played out in public it makes the situation a win-win for Moyes regardless. If West Ham do better than expected he'll appear to have worked wonders despite all of the behind the scenes tension, if they do badly he's already got plenty of excuses to point to if he does get the sack at some point.

That's about as optimistic a take as you're going to see. Just need someone to come in and explain how we'll actually finish bottom without a win to our name so that we have a barometer on either side.

Wisdom of the crowds thread has a lot of people predicting around 50 goals, which probably won't see us finish much higher than 17th unless we have a very, very good defensive record. Think this could be a really difficult season if we don't sign a goalscorer. I fear for us somewhat, especially as Tomasson is likely ready to leave the moment he's offered something comparable. Don't think it'll quite end in disaster just yet, but shades of 15/16 in this window, and one season later we were sunk.

I don't really watch wrestling at the moment, but I remember being really impressed by LA Knight when he was Eli Drake in the early days of NWA Powerrr. You could instantly tell the guy just had that "it" factor. As usual Vince didn't get it and nearly ruined his WWE trajectory by attempting to turn him into a campy manager, but thankfully he's been revived by Triple H. It's obviously a shame it's taken him this long to get to the position he's in, but I hope he stays clear of injuries and has a great few years.

That is weird, your account definitely isn't showing as banned.

And yet next season they'll still somehow scrape 17th.

I don't think you'll see the same Mowbray at Sunderland that you saw here. He got an easy ride here from the owners, the CEO and the supporters. No pressure put onto him and it showed in his and the team's attitude. He benefited from a lack of ambition across all areas, achieved by years of the remaining fanbase being beaten into submission by those in charge. At the first hint of disgruntlement, a scattering of discontent - against Barnsley maybe? - he threw his toys out of the pram, such had his aura of invincibility grown - telling off the fans whilst flags bearing his face waved behind him in the background. Sunderland is going to be a completely different environment for him. I think he's a decent manager/coach when focused, accountable and kept on his toes. Next season will show whether that is the case or not.

Disrespect, hah. Short memories. Allardyce got it far worse on here and in the stands during his time here and long after he departed. This despite keeping us safely in the PL with barely two pennies to rub together. Fans booing whilst we were 3-0 up. Mowbray had it easy. People get very easily offended on his behalf for whatever reason. Lad had it good here, got paid well and barely a muttering from the stands despite some horrible spells of form and throwing away incredible chances to get into the playoffs two seasons in a row. You had certain people talking about building statues for him ffs. Meanwhile he was, by his own admission, advising the club's staff to move elsewhere. As far as Mowbray limiting Sunderland, we'll see. It might work out fine for him if he isn't in control of transfers and is actually accountable for results - something sorely lacking during his tenure here.

Hopefully next season we're less reliant on one person scoring the majority of our goals. Once BBD reverted to BB last season we lost all of our steam because nobody else was stepping up to score enough. That needs to change.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/66099981 Looks like we dodged a bullet with this one, if he was genuinely in contention for the job here.

Arma was able to score goals in Mowbray's system - not that it did us any good in terms of challenging for a promotion spot, which is ridiculous when you have a striker scoring 28 goals. Would he fit into Tomasson's style of play? I'm not sure. He doesn't seem to have improved since he left us, in fact it's possible that he's gone backwards. His confidence must be knocked, he hasn't been playing regularly and Southampton's system doesn't seem to have suited him very well. Entirely possible he could come back here, recapture his old form and be part of a team that has a genuine shot at getting out of the league this time around. Alternatively, it may not work out this time around as a lot has changed. He'd likely be asking for significantly more wages than before so it'd be a much bigger risk than the first time he signed. Ultimately it's all moot anyway as realistically we can't afford him, but I have to admit it'd be interesting to see what would happen if he did return. Considering he has good pedigree in this league you'd assume Southampton would want to utilise him though.

There's a lot of open source stuff around at the moment, but it's still a bit of a wild west in terms of commercial tools. At this point for every commercial tool that's available, there are open source alternatives which do the same job, even if it's slightly more difficult at first to get to grips with. I'm not sure there's a huge amount of useful commercial stuff out there right now (that doesn't have a similar quality open source alternative), but for open source AI products you basically just need a decent understanding of GIT/GIThub, a basic knowledge of how to install and put in commands for Python, and the concentration levels to watch 10-20 min YouTube tutorials explaining how to get going. I've got some incredibly impressive results using some open source art (Stable Diffusion) and music/voice cloning (Ultimate Vocal Remover/RVC-Beta) AI, and it didn't take very long to get going with any of them. Stable Diffusion needs some pretty big files to be downloaded though. None of these AI tools are likely to be useful for what I'm doing now or in the near future, but I think getting used to how tools like this operate is still worthwhile.

I don't think AI will replace roles in a singular sense, but I do think it will decrease the amount of highly skilled people required within teams - as lower-skilled people will be able to use AI for the more difficult stuff. I wear quite a few hats in my job, and every so often I have to do some coding. Sometimes in languages I either haven't used in ages, or have never used. Typically I'd get in touch with somebody a lot more experienced to help me out with parts that I can't get my head around. Recently ChatGPT has provided me with the answers I needed (obviously ensuring the questions and data presented is all vague and anonymous), meaning I didn't have to reach out for help. Granted at this point I'll still show the code to an experienced coder to ensure there's no serious errors there, but nonetheless it's not difficult to see where that kind of situation leads.

Well, the true impacts weren't really being widely shared until the 90s, so it would have been difficult for anyone to make a difference before then, and even the earlier predictions were flawed (as it turns out they were generally too optimistic) and the subject of major dispute. I don't think there's anything the average person could have done to prevent a lot of what's happened. The big companies and most powerful Governments knew what was going on, but turned a blind eye in favour of profits, so that's where the ire should be aimed, not at the general population. We all know about it now, and many people are trying to protest and take a stance, but it seems like it's all a bit 'after the horse has bolted'. Meanwhile Governments who continue to prioritise profits over everything else continue to get voted in, so, it seems a bit hopeless. Nonetheless, the point is the economy being trashed doesn't really have anything to do with people not working hard or utilising AI for their jobs - that's just rhetoric spouted by the upper classes designed to turn the working and middle-class against each other, when it's such a miniscule part of the problem that it isn't even worth focusing on.

That isn't the issue, the problem is how climate change impacts our way of life in the meantime. Water shortages, rising sea levels, the breakdown of biodiversity, heatwaves, wildfires, animal and insect extinction ... the Earth will go on, but that's not much solice to those living on an increasingly hostile and inhospitable planet.

The economy being in the toilet has nothing to do with AI or work ethic, just rampant, greed-filled capitalism and humanity's destruction of the Earth really starting to bite. The consequences of both will only continue to escalate going forward. No amount of work ethic from your average joe is going to change anything. Fortunately for the boomers they won't live to see the worst of it - their children and grandchildren will be the ones who suffer for those sins.

I wouldn't call streamlining a process lazy at all. I'd say lazy would be plodding along following the same process over and over again, whereas somebody with ingenuity will always be looking for new and better ways to do things that saves time and effort so that said time and effort can be redirected to something equally useful. The idea that you aren't learning isn't really accurate either. If you're literally just copying and pasting then yeah, sure, but if you're using the information you get to increase your knowledge then all it means is that you're learning things as a faster rate than if you'd have to trawl through google or technical manuals to find the one thing you actually need for the job you're doing.

Generally people are using it to help with tedious parts of the job that require a lot of time but little brainpower. By saving that time, it's then possible to allocate your resource to something more useful that an AI can't easily do. It's a bit like asking why Excel needs a SUM function when you can just add the numbers yourself. Repetitive tasks are ideally replaced so that there's more time to dedicate to complex tasks that aren't easily defined, rather than as an excuse to work less. The most recent AI I've been looking at is the voice cloning tools. I tried one called RVC-beta and it was surprisingly good. I was able to put a vocalist from one band onto another band's track, and whilst it wasn't completely perfect, it was still really good - so much so that I actually prefer the track with the cloned vocals. It probably took a couple of hours at most to get the necessary audio files ready, train the model, clone the voice and then insert the cloned vocals into the existing track (whilst removing the original vocals). Although once you have the model trained it's much quicker in future to go through the process, as you're skipping 70% of what you had to do initially. Most impressive was that this was with extreme metal vocals... genuinely did not think it would be very successful with that, but results were very good.

Not to mention the current issues with mortgages, rents, food and drink, petrol/diesel... well, practically everything being sky high in terms of prices at the moment. I doubt even the bank of mum and dad is being especially generous these days.

Sounds like it was just trolling you tbh. Maybe it's a Burnley fan. It was amusing for a while but I got bored of it pretty quickly. Mainly just using ChatGPT for coding queries now.

Well, it's a bit like when you start a game of FM and give yourself unlimited funds. You can win everything, but the sense of accomplishment is somewhat diminished. There isn't much to say about the achievement, because with the amount of resources available it was bound to happen at some point.

One of the plus points of a VR version is not getting battered, but because you aren't physically hitting anything yourself you end up wildly throwing haymakers until you're knackered, which doesn't take very long. I never learned to box smart, just a wild opening round or two followed by tiredly defending myself and hoping I could hit a lucky knock out punch in the proceeding rounds. With that said, it bloody hurts when you accidentally throw a right hook at the living room wall.