I think a lot of men avoid watching movies featuring women not because they don’t feel empathy for and identify with women, but because they do feel those things — and it scares them because that’s unmasculine.
Day: October 16, 2019, 4:04 PM
Let’s Excel
I just mashed a bunch of database dumps together at work and I just simply couldn't have done it "properly." I did it in Excel, and it was a pain in the ass, but I got the right data out of it. There's no reason Excel *isn't* the right tool except that it isn't trying to be.
— 🎃Utterly dispassionate documentary hog slaughte🎃 (@gravislizard) October 15, 2019
Agreed. Excel is often not the right tool for the job, but a lot of the Excel hate is just snobbery against a tool that allows people to do something they otherwise could not.
Doing something in code often take 100x as long as just doing it in Excel, and even that is going to have bugs. Sure, if it needs to be reproducible code is the way to go, no question. But recognize that path is going to take at least two orders of magnitude longer. And, Jill from accounting is never going to spend all the time slogging through C# or R so that she can spend years learning something that she can already do in Excel in 10 minutes.
Demo-lition
The ‘golden path,’ hidden Wi-Fi & cellular tricks behind the iPhone presentation ten years ago.
This isn’t some weird exception. This is how most corporate demos are, almost without exception. The reason is that generally products are demoed 12-24 months before they are anywhere near ready. Often, they aren’t even in alpha status yet. Good, bad, whatever — that’s just the way it is.
Apple’s iPhone demo actually had more working than a lot of product demos do. Many are little more than a simulation of what might work one day, while the iPhone demo had actual working hardware and software — it just wasn’t that stable.
Puzzling
I’m puzzled by the decisions of Mozilla (over many years) and Apple more recently to make their products substantially worse. I think in large part it is due to the fact that they actually do hate their users, at least a large percentage of them. That is, both organizations despise and disdain their users they perceive as using their products “wrong.”
Though I’m still flummoxed — even though I know the technical reasons — about how very poor Apple’s font rendering is now. And in Catalina, it’s even worse than it was before, when it was already terrible. Way to make a 5K monitor look like a 1280×1024 CRT from 1998. That takes some skills, right there. Apple has gone from far superior to the dumpster disaster that is Windows 10 to being slightly worse at fonts. Only utter gobshites could fail that hard.
Maybe they really are trying to simulate a tty from 1972 with this new font destruction initiative? You know it’s bad when even the normals are noticing, which seems to be happening.
Immi
On immigration, both the left and the right are just unbelievably, heinously delusional, believing (or at least virtue signaling in that direction) absurd ideas that don’t and never could work in the real world, that bear no resemblance at all to any possibly reality. At a first estimate I think the right is a great deal crueler, but how the left uses immigrants (the more “undocumented” the better) as mascots and such is also nearly as vile in some important ways. Also, the left is far more likely to ask, “But who will wipe nana’s bum?” when talking about immigration, which just makes me incandescently enraged.
The whole immigration debate causes me to despair of anyone caring about evidence or actual people rather than ticking the right ideological box in front of their peers.
Of the Dems
Of the Dems, I don’t really give a crap who wins the nom as long as it’s not Joe Biden. Damn that guy just makes me angry and has since the 1980s.
60-40
Bank of America declares ‘the end of the 60-40’ standard portfolio.
If you need Bank of America to tell you this, you’re years too late. I haven’t used a 60-40 portfolio, well, ever, but most investors should’ve stopped with this back in 2009 at least. If you didn’t, you’re out a load of money since then.