I’m thankful I don’t do software dev (I did two years as a working student, that was enough), but working in Data Engineering / Analytics* doesn’t make things better. I’ll overengineer the database, ETL and reporting, define a dozen measures I’ll never use, prepare a dozen ways to slice and view the data I’ll never look at and build a whole data warehouse I’ll never look at.

Eventually I remember that it exists, realise that I’ve answered all my questions by directly querying the database, except for “What am I running out of?”, which I answer by looking in the cabinet because I never update my inventory anyway.

*I don’t even know where the line is anymore and how much of my responsibilities is on either side of it

“6 for the beer, 9 for the longdrink, 4.20 for the water… That’s a total of 694.20 please.”

He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.

When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…

…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.

My new data structure:

Given a heuristic for determining data quality, it homogenises the quality of its contents. Data you write to it has pieces exchanged with other entries depending on its quality. The lower the quality, the higher the rate of exchange.

If you put only perfect data, nothing is exchanged. Put high quality, you’ll mostly get high quality too, but probably with some errors. Put in garbage, it starts poisoning the rest of the data. Garbage in, garbage out.

“Why would you want that”, you ask? Wrong question, buddy - how about “Do you want to be left behind when this new data quality management technology takes off?” And if that doesn’t convince you, let me dig around my buzzword budget to see if I can throw some “Make Investors Drool And Swoon”-skills your way to convince you I’ll turn your crap data into gold.

I think it’s a symptom of the age-old issue of missing QA: Without solid QA you have no figures on how often your human solutions get things wrong, how often your AI does and how it stacks up.

ActiveSheet? Please no

Pretty sure the Nazgûl use stabby weapons, where chainmail is less effective (not completely useless, but an unlucky thrust may split the rings).

For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

I like how Julius’ lines fit the pentameter, but Brittanus’ “What?” shits right past it.

Notably, his adopted child whose name he decided to change. It’s also not an actual child with actual feelings, just a platform.

I don’t think it makes a difference.

Musk isn’t concerned whether we think X is the same that Twitter was. His whole point was to usurp Twitter’s reach and pervert it to the cause of spewing toxic shit. The old Twitter means nothing to him, just the users do.

And for the most part, the users are the same ones as those of the late Twitter.

So I think calling it ex-twitter, xitter or anything else doesn’t have an impact on anything. My preference to call it Ex-Twitter is mostly just spite.

Honestly, I was never a fan of his music (his voice specifically), but I hella respect his grit.

I think you did good, I took no offense. I often get insecure about “Are they joking? I’ll give a serious reply in case they’re not, or in case someone else thinks they might be serious” myself, so I’m usually more concerned with the question “Is this clear enough as a joke?” than with blaming other people for not getting that.

I have an irrational aversion to suffixing my posts with tone markers like “(joke)” that I probably should do something about. It would certainly help with that confusion.

Either way, offering a serious take as a safety measure is a good thing, and I appreciate that you took the time.

May life be as kind to you as you are to others!

Re: your username
Filesystem check yourself before you filesystem wreck yourself

You are completely right.

I was trying to make a joke, piggybacking off the other guy’s joke, but I can see that was poorly communicated.

Why not make a podcast about gatekeeping and use this as your first example? There, you’ve got an objective.

Ah yeah, that seems to have Anticheat issues.

Still, I like to term it “System inertia” - moving systems is work, and unless something applies force, getting yourself to switch is hard.

Laziness most definitely is a thing. I didn’t switch until I had to.

What’s TOF? I’m only finding answers about flight instruments and cardiac issues

Only peanut butter