But you can park. You just can’t park reasonably, so you’ll take up two spaces and half the driveway, but you can park.

By building a people powered movement through solidarity, establishing workers co-operatives, industrial unionization, pro-revolutionary social spaces and through direct action.

Do you have concrete suggestions for what I personally could do? I often read these things online, but it feels like buzzwords and technical terms thrown around in the expectation that they should mean something to the audience, but I’m not sure they do.

What I mostly do so far is try to sprinkle offhand comments into conversations to (hopefully) sow seeds of class consciousness without actually getting preachy and pushing people away. I don’t know how much that helps.

Vitally, learn about anarchism, and how it presents a solution to our deeply, fundamentally broken society.

I’ve had the anarchist FAQ tab open in my browser since forever, but I find it hard to read and work (by design) often leaves me too tired to meaningfully engage with it.

This circles back into the issue of not knowing what to do: dedicated articles tend to be heavy on quotes, arguments why it’s important and general principles. I don’t need convincing, I need direction.

And how would you go about that revolution?

Voter frustration is a more powerful support than voter apathy. Not voting leaves you with no target to be pissed at; having your vote betrayed provides your anger with direction.

Voting may not be the solution, but it’s a tool for communicating and establishing public sentiment, and public sentiment is what separates revolution from a coup.

The balance to be struck is the golden zone between overcoddling and undersupporting. Kids need help getting “close enough” to figure out the rest on their own, gradually less so as their abilities expand.

In some ways, I was coddled and never learned how to do stuff. In others, I was neglected and had no idea where to begin to solve things, so I just didn’t. Neither is great.

as I don’t have any kids.

You don’t need to have kids to engage with the topic of how best to deal with them. It’s a valuable skill to have when dealing with children, whether your own or someone else’s. In fact, some parents probably should have engaged with the topic more before they squeezed one out. That shit is complicated and I wouldn’t want to just figure it out on the fly.

This stupid, evil piece of shit. There are people all over the place trying to combat voter apathy and get them to the ballot to at least try to staunch the worst, and there she goes pouring more oil on the fires of defeatism.

As a former kid struggling with social skills, I think that would’ve done me some good. It’s easy and convenient to fall into avoidance behaviour, but overcoddling did me no favours.

My school made open source a requirement. The funny part was having to argue with the people we were developing this for about opening the source. They were planning to make it a commercial app and were concerned that this would hamstring their monetisation.

One of them also somehow expected an app developed by students to have innovative value that would need to be kept closed source because otherwise people would steal it. In particular, he threw out the idea that he was hoping to eventually include an AI – long before the LLM hype – to help people, and that would obvioisly be such a technical achievement that it needed to be protected.

I needed the project, otherwise I’d have told him in no uncertain terms why I think leaving people alone with an AI assistant instead of forcing them to consult a specialist is a really dumb idea in healthcare.

There’s an art to diplomacy, and sometimes it involves omitting truths or carefully framing it, even when dealing with awful people, and compromising or postponing grand strategic goals for short-term gains.

I feel like many young men are being alienated by people pissed off with the status quo that fail at or refuse to engage with them diplomatically. I get it, I don’t want to compromise or negotiate on basic human rights and dignity either. I don’t want to wait for things to get better. I don’t want to coddle the sensitive pride of chauvinistic dickheads.

But reactionary grift thrives on the (negative) reaction to being told your way of life, your habits, your norms are bad and wrong, and particularly to the (exaggerated) impression that you are bad and wrong for reasons beyond you control (like being born with a dick) or that you are irrelevant.

We need to find a way to communicate issues more diplomatically and include these men in the conversation and solution rather than making them “the other”.

And we also need to reign in the hardcore misandrists who genuinely do want to turn this into us vs. them.

I can’t say I’m too keen on funding Ladybird, given the shit the lead developer is getting up to (to save you a click: defending white supremacy and transphobia).

I hope you enjoy not being in a car!

I’ll be honest: while I like not having to drive, our rail / metro services aren’t exactly paragons of punctuality, reliability, cleanliness or comfort. When you’re standing in a train packed with school kids, commuters, the occasional morning-drunk and the people who wanted to take the previous train (which was cancelled) as someone who’s claustrophobic, sensitive to noise and grumpy in the morning, being in a car by myself sure sounds a lot more pleasant.

I still think commuting by train and metro is better. I don’t have to find a parking spot, I don’t have to worry about gas, I don’t have worry about collisions in the hell that is our inner city traffic, the pricing is affordable (no thanks to certain lobbies bent on fucking up a good thing) and the environmental impact needs no mention.

But I can’t say that it scores high on enjoyability.

If the argument is that the car is both faster and can haul more things than on foot, then the middle ground is a bike. I use panniers and/or a bike trailer for big trips at the grocery store.

My wife generally does a weekly haul on the way back from an appointment that genuinely can’t be reached on foot. It’s more the “we realise at 10pm that we’ve run out of bread” type of small trips, particularly if it’s cold or rainy, where she’ll offer driving me. But by the time we’ve embarked, gotten there, parked in the narrow lot chronically full of idiots that wouldn’t know road etiquette if it smacked them in the face with an ID… yeah, the time-save there and back comes out to ten minutes, which really isn’t worth the stress and risk of accident to me.

When I listen to them telling me I can’t go to the corner store on foot, I feel like some sort of superhuman because somehow I can walk more than a km. “You walked all the way from the train station to here?!” they ask incredulously.

How far is your train station? Mine is 7-8min on foot. Gets me at least 15min of walking in my daily commute.

And if I’m in a bus or in a train, I can use my phone or laptop, work, or watch a series or a movie, whatever that I could do sitting at home if I would have “saved time by having a car”.

This comment was written on a train ;-)

I get irritated when my wife suggests driving to the grocery store I can reach on foot in 13 min. Aside from the occasional big haul, where a car is really handy, I just feel like the car doesn’t really save much time and effort.

I know you were using multiple instances, but I wasn’t sure if that was a typo, auto cow wrecked or genuinely not knowing.

This might require a bit of background knowledge about Power Query in Excel and Power BI, specifically the concept Query Folding.

Power Query is a tool to define and run queries against a host of data sources and spit out tabular data for use in Excel (as tables) or Power BI (as Tabular Data Model). The selling point of it is the low-code graphical presentation: You transform the data by adding steps to the query, mostly through the menu ribbon. Change a column type? Click the column header > Data Type > select the new type. Perform a join? Click “Merge Queries”, select the second query, select the respective key column(s) to join on and thr join type – no typing needed. You get a nested table column you can then select which columns to expand or aggregate from.

Each step provides you with a preview of the results, and you can look at, edit, delete or insert earlier steps at will. You can also edit individual steps or the whole query through a code editor, but the appeal is obviously that even non-programmers can use it without needing to code.

Of course, it’s most efficient to have SQL transformations done by the database server already. Bur Power Query can do that too: “Query Folding” is the feature that automatically turns a sequence of Power Query steps into native SQL. A sequence like “Source, Select Columns, Filter Rows, Rename Columns” will quite neatly be converted into the SQL equivalent you’d expect. Merges will become Join, appending tables becomes Union, converting a text to uppercase becomes UPPER and so on.

If at some point there is a step it can’t fold, it will use a native query to load the data up to that point, then do the rest in-memory. Even if later steps were foldable, they’ll have to be done in-memory. You can guess that this creates a lot of potential for optimising longer queries by ensuring as much or it as possible is folded and that the result is as “small” as possible – as few rows and column as feasible etc.

Now, when I tell you that there is a table in one of our sources with a few large text columns you almost never need, you may be able to smell the smoke already. A colleague of mine needed help with his queries being slow to load. He had copied some code from Stackoverflow or what have you that joins a query with itself multiple times to resolve hierarchies. In theory, it was supposed to be foldable, provided the step it runs off of is. The general schema of my colleague’s query went Data Source -> non-foldable type conversion -> copied code -> filtering (ultimately keeping about 20% of rows) -> renaming columns -> removing columns. Want to guess which columns were loaded, processed with each join, explicitly renamed and only then finally understood to be useless and discarded?

“I always do the filtering last, don’t want to miss anything.”

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that MS (and our corporate BI team) can present Power Query as self-service data transformation tool all it wants, that still doesn’t mean it’s actually designed for use by non-data techies.

FYI, an operator with three arguments (such as ?:) is called ternary. The word is related to tertiary, if that helps remembering it.

Naming

Both variables and constants can be named with any Unicode character or string.

const const letter = 'A'!
var const 👍 = True!
var var 1️⃣ = 1!

This includes numbers, and other language constructs.

const const 5 = 4!
print(2 + 2 === 5)! //true

This is a recipe for disaster I kinda wanna try

Hope they fix it the same way spaying or neutering dogs is called fixing: Prevent it from propagating further.

That’s the reason I put up with a lot of FOSS issues: “I’m not paying you for this, so it’s still a better price/result ratio than paid services”

I just wish everyone was chill about doing whatever someone likes.

Preach, sibling.

As an aside:

Like long hair/short hair for example.

This reminds me of the song “Turn The Page”, specifically the lines “Always the same old clichés: Is it woman, is it man?”

They refer to the issue rock musicians with long hair faced, back when Seger wrote it. ~30 years later, when I first heard it, I was a metalhead with long hair. On one hand, I felt it keenly because classmates made fun of my “girl” hair. On the other, it struck me as odd because I saw plenty of metalheads with long hair (nevermind people from other cultures where that was never an issue).

Eventually, with figures like Thor making long hair “manly” enough, that stopped. It’s curious how culture shifts can be so irregular, once slow and uneven and then suddenly very quickly.

Nobody said I use it well