u/anonymous_ZsP

maybe i'm thinking about this wrong but the problem for me isn't that Manus costs money.

good tools should cost money.

it's the uncertainty.

a clean run where it goes off, does the research, uses the tools and comes back with the thing? worth paying for.

the annoying part is when the first run goes sideways and now you're spending again to fix the thing you already spent credits making.

so i'm not even looking for a “cheaper Manus clone” anymore. i'm starting to split the jobs.

Claude for stuff that is basically thinking/writing.

Manus when the job genuinely needs an agent running around doing things.

and for business-output stuff I've been looking harder at Runable. site, deck, video, report type work where I mostly care about getting the actual thing at the end without bouncing through 4 apps.

I don't really need Runable to replace Manus at everything for that to be useful.

curious how everyone else is doing this now.

what work have you actually stopped giving Manus?

not “what's better than Manus overall”. specific jobs.

Hi, fellow parents! Looking for reviews of the Comfyer no wifi baby monitor. Im interested in it, but there's barely any feedback online. Has anyone tried it before? It is worth buying?

Was browsing bonds on Stable Money and opened this one:

Kosamattam Finance Limited (KFL)

10.00% coupon

IND A/Stable by India Ratings

Senior secured NCD

Monthly interest

Matures December 31, 2027

ISIN: INE403Q07FQ6 

On the bond card it looked fairly simple.

12%. A-. Secured.

Then I opened the rating documents and realised the A- badge was probably the least useful part of the page.

Vedika is an NBFC-MFI. Basically lending to small borrowers, including microfinance and individual business-loan customers, mainly across eastern India.

The good part first.

AUM went from around ₹1,452 crore in FY25 to ₹1,781 crore in FY26.

PAT increased from ₹30.78 crore to ₹35.53 crore.

GNPA improved from 2.06% to 1.33%. Net NPA was reported as nil because of provisions.

The company has been operating in microfinance since 2007, has 178 branches across seven states and a six-member board with three independent directors.

All decent.

Then the less comfortable part.

Debt increased from around ₹980 crore to ₹1,481 crore in one year.

Gearing went from 3.45x to 4.65x.

Capital adequacy dropped from 29.66% to 24.57%.

Still above the regulatory minimum, but the direction matters when your borrowers are people with limited ability to absorb income shocks.

West Bengal and Bihar together are more than half the portfolio. Around 63% of owned AUM is individual loans.

So the real bet is not “12% secured bond”.

The bet is that collections remain healthy, credit costs stay controlled, equity keeps coming in and leverage does not run away while the company grows.

Liquidity also looks very theoretical.

The bond is listed, but exchange data showed three trades worth roughly ₹9 lakh on July 20 and one ₹1 lakh trade on July 21.

That is not the kind of liquidity I would want to discover after needing an urgent exit.

One more thing I nearly mixed up:

Acuité currently rates some newer Vedika NCD facilities A with a DSRA and structured payment mechanism.

This specific ISIN is A- by Infomerics.

I don’t think it is correct to casually transfer the credit enhancement or rating of one facility to every Vedika bond. Same issuer does not mean same instrument structure.

The exact thing I still cannot find clearly enough for this ISIN is the security cover.

“Senior secured” tells me the ranking.

It does not tell me:

- what exact receivables are charged

- the cover ratio

- whether another lender has a prior charge

- how often the cover is tested

- what happens when receivables become overdue

- how quickly the trustee can actually enforce anything

Stable Money was genuinely useful as the discovery layer here. Their filtering and credit-committee process saves a retail investor from starting with 5,000 random securities.

But I’m treating that as the first filter, not outsourced due diligence or a guarantee.

My current read:

Probably reasonable only as a small, diversified credit allocation for someone who understands NBFC-MFI risk and can hold till maturity.

Not emergency money.

Not an FD replacement for someone with zero tolerance for delayed principal.

I’m not at buy or avoid yet.

The unanswered question for me is: what exactly is securing this ISIN, and is the protection meaningful after collection stress and enforcement costs?

Took RiiFFS Taif outside in proper afternoon heat today.

Opening was sharp iced ginger, lemon and bergamot. Almost like cold ginger ale sprayed straight from the fridge.

Once it warmed up, rose, tuberose and orange blossom became much clearer, with clean musk underneath.

Surprisingly refreshing and definitely not another basic citrus freshie. But there were a few moments where the citrus + white florals came dangerously close to expensive cleaner.

Then mall AC made the cold ginger pop again.

Taif owners, what wins in UAE weather for you: ginger ale, white flowers or cleaner?

https://preview.redd.it/j6la0tsuxhjh1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=88f12403f692213265062f1ad4a10170b370c6a9

drop prices, I need instant rubox

Wrote this up because when I started building this six months ago there was almost nothing useful online about Indian-language voice agents specifically. Everything was US-centric. So here's the real postmortem.

Context: voice agent for a fintech, handles payment reminders, KYC follow-ups, basic account queries. Hindi-English, because that's how our users actually speak. Not metro English, not shuddh Hindi, the real mix.

What I assumed would be hard: the LLM understanding Hinglish intent.
 What was actually hard: making the agent speak back in a way that didn't sound broken.

Things that broke, roughly in order of how much pain they caused:

1. Numbers, numbers, numbers. This is fintech so every single call involves reading back an amount, a date, an account reference, an OTP-style number. Early on the agent would say "aapka due amount hai one thousand four hundred ninety nine rupees" in this jarring full-English chunk in the middle of a Hindi sentence, or worse, read a reference number as a giant single number instead of digit by digit. This alone tanked our first pilot. Customers found it confusing and slightly untrustworthy, which in fintech is fatal.

2. The language-switch stutter. A lot of TTS visibly pauses or shifts accent at the Hindi↔English boundary. On a call about someone's money, any weirdness reads as "this is a scammy robot" and people hang up.

3. Latency, but specifically under call-window load. We batch outbound reminders into windows when people actually answer. Single-call latency looked fine on every provider. Then we'd hit real concurrency and one provider started spiking to 800ms+ and the calls felt dead. Measure at YOUR real concurrency, the demo number is a lie.

4. Compliance, obviously. Fintech. RBI-adjacent scrutiny, data residency questions, SOC 2 from our enterprise partners. A couple of otherwise-good options were just disqualified.

What actually fixed it: honestly, switching to a TTS that treated Indian code-mixing and number normalization as first-class instead of an afterthought, and testing everything through the actual telephony pipe at real concurrency instead of in a browser tab. The moment the number readback got clean ("aapka payment 15 tarikh tak, 2,340 rupees, reference number 4 8 2 9 1") the pilot numbers completely changed. Trust went up, call completion went up.

I won't turn this into a product ad, happy to share specifics in comments if people want. But the meta-lesson: for Indian voice agents, stop evaluating on "which voice sounds nicest" and start evaluating on "can it correctly say an amount, a date, and a reference number inside a Hindi-English sentence, through a phone line, at scale." That's the actual job.

Ask me anything, this took way too long to figure out and I'd rather you skip the pain.

I'll be moving from the US to Verona later this year, and I'm hoping to keep using my vivo X300 Ultra instead of replacing it.

I'm a freelance photographer, and I recently switched to it. I've been really impressed with it so far: The autofocus is incredibly reliable, I love the built-in Zeiss filters, and it's been amazing for landscape photography. It's also very portable for outdoor shooting.

Now I need to consider the eSIM card for my US number, carrier information, and some limiting features, etc.

If possible, I don't want to change phones, so thank you so much for sharing your experiences here!

There's an easter egg hidden in one of the fund screeners I use. I'm not saying where, it took a bit of poking to find and there are three or four bits in it that are a delight the moment you spot them, so go look.

On the surface it's very similar to the chrome dino game. The bit that makes it more than a reskin: the ground you're running on is the fund's actual daily price history, and the date in the corner ticks through real calendar time as you go. So every ticker is a different course, generated by whatever that fund actually did.

And the whole time, it's running a second player next to you: $10,000 that bought at the start and then did absolutely nothing. Every jump you're out of the market and it docks you for it.

The one real thing I took from it, and this comes from the price history rather than my dismal performance: watching Aug 2021 → Jan 2023 pass under my feet at running pace made me realise I'd been picturing that period wrong. In my head it was a crash; a sharp event, over quickly. It isn't. It's a long, grinding, fourteen-month slope with several convincing rallies inside it, each of which felt like the bottom at the time. 

Which is a slightly better argument for setting your allocation in advance than any volatility number I've been shown. 

What's the longest drawdown any of you actually sat through without touching anything? Not the deepest, the longest. I suspect that's the more useful number and nobody reports it.

Starting UCD this September and still waiting on residence.

I found a private student room through UniAcco. It’s more expensive, the commute to Belfield isn’t ideal, but at least I’d know I have somewhere to live.

They got the property’s cancellation deadline in writing for me, which helped, but it still feels like gambling.

Wait for UCD and maybe get a cheaper room on campus with an actual student life.

Or pay the private deposit now for certainty, then potentially regret it if UCD offers me something later.

I know UniAcco can’t do anything about the UCD waitlist and the private refund depends on that building’s own terms. I’m just terrified of waiting until August and ending up paying for an Airbnb while desperately messaging strangers on Daft.

People who waited for UCD accommodation, did it actually work out?

Or did you eventually panic-book something private anyway?

I currently have an iPad 6th Gen (32GB), but I've really noticed how slow it has gotten lately. I wanted to use it for college-related stuff (reading, notes, etc.), but the lag is getting pretty frustrating.

Should I just sell this or keep trying to use it? The catch is that I don't really have the budget to buy a newer version right now if I do sell it.

Has anyone else found a way to make this model run smoother for schoolwork, or is it time to let it go? Any advice would be appreciated!

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post