Optimal_Persona

I was going to post much the same regarding SQL <> Excel. Once underlying data sources are cleaned, wrangled, and access-controlled, it's amazing how far VLOOKUP and Pivots will get you.

I've also found that giving non-technical users the opportunity to self-serve when more than one data source is involved always leads to offline mashups of data and the question - "Hey data team, why doesn't 'your' data match 'mine'", always with the assumption that 'theirs' is the correct one!

Thanks, I need a LOL moment today and you gave it to me! Good thing I didn't soil myself in the process...

My thoughts exactly, as someone who manages 145 iPhones for a health-care org, all of this stuff needs to be completely blockable and granularly manageable in Mobile Device Management or things could go very, very wrong compliance-wise.

Adobe just doesn't get it when it comes to privacy/data security. I cancelled Adobe Acrobat/Creative Cloud subscriptions at my health care agency because by default all content was being saved to the cloud whether user opted in or not (major HIPAA risk!) and the only way to defeat was with Windows registry hacks...WTF?!

Good thing it runs on negative energy - there's no shortage of bad vibes in the world today!

I didn't learn to type properly until I was in grad school in my 40s, though I had been a data person and did some web programming for years. Also I got through 3+ decades of being a gigging musician who recorded and did live sound before I learned another truly transformative skill - how to coil cables so they won't knot, and are easy to uncoil.

I am not a physicist, astronomer, mathematician or anything like that. But as a lifelong musician who's learned a thing or two about acoustics, I am familiar with the topology of a space affecting the perception AND measurement of vibrations produced within it.

Example - take a speaker with good bass response, play something through it holding it above the floor in the center of the room, then on the floor in the center of the room, then where the floor meets a wall, and finally in a corner where 2 walls meet the floor. You will perceive (and measure) a 3dB increase of low-frequency for each of the boundaries at that position. This is a trick I've used as a DJ to fill rooms with sound from very small speakers.

Is there any way that the topology of the universe/higher dimensions could affect measurements of things like dark matter, etc.? Again probably a very naive question as I know not all modes of vibration are identical.

I discovered this a couple years back, truly the worst. I don't know what kind of cynical cargo-culting fools are wasting resources, designing this junk and selling it to unsuspecting people who don't read the fine print.

I've been burned buying "name brand" stuff on Amazon too many times (counterfeit garbage drop shipped instead) so for anything Apple I go to an authorized Apple reseller, not ScAmazon.

I'm sure Philadelphians were glad that JAWNS from the SouthEast US got renamed!

Yeah, how did that Willy S. guy put it?

2B || !2B

I have been struggling to arrange lawn care for an out-of-state relative while they're incapacitated. While Google search populated some tables in its search results with a bunch of lawn care companies saying the address was in their service area, each and every company I contacted said it was not and asked where I got the info.

Visiting each company's site showed they didn't serve this town/address so it's really not clear how/why Google returned those results. In some cases the address was 20 miles from the nearest town served. Whether or not due to AI hallucination, or just general Googlenshittification - not a good result.

In "Critical Path", Buckminster Fuller said that US scrap metal companies were furiously selling scrap to Germany & Japan in 1939 to capitalize on all-time high prices...

Wow, I've been waiting a while for this. Madrona Labs' Aalto is probably my favorite software synthesizer in my 18 years making music with computers. Thanks Randy!!

Honestly the biggest uptick of weed use I've seen in my peer groups is in the >= 50 set for pain management, sleep, and...fun.

In the '90s/'00s I worked at the Davis Food Co-Op in Davis, CA which was one of the largest full-service (meaning not just hippie health food) consumer-owned grocery co-ops at the time. After working in the bakery I was on the Board for 3 years, a fascinating experience (we followed the Carver Policy Governance model, where the board is basically the legislative/judicial branch and the CEO is executive).

When a Whole Foods opened across town, they shut down in less than a year largely because of the strength/quality/loyalty of the Davis Food Co-Op.

Zoho Analytics came bundled with an electronic health record we use. Support has been very responsive, and I attended a 2-3 day intensive data reporting training with some of their Indian data team who were absolutely fantastic, experts in the system and fun to work with.

Hopefully their beaches are known for more than just their comic sands...

What do you mean by "cog.sci winter of the last 20 years"?

The research of Dr. Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk and others into the effects of trauma on brain development, behavior and social functioning has had a profound impact on the understanding of cognition, the mind-body continuum, and the treatment of human suffering in this time frame.

https://earlylearningnation.com/2023/02/author-bruce-perry-a...

As a former professional baker for 2 decades, from corner bakeshops to a hippie co-op to a large scale dessert manufacturer with worldwide distribution - as soon as I saw the recommendation to use volume instead of mass I closed the tab, nothing of value could be there.

Baking is both an art and a science. If you're a home baker you can ignore the science, if you are trying to make money you have to understand at least the basics of the science/physical behavior of your materials.

I take a more intuitive/heuristic approach to cooking, and the single best resource I've found for cooking confidently & authentically by the seat of one's pants is Samin Nosrat's "Salt Fat Acid Heat". I've yet to find a similar guide for baking, and don't think one could exist given the narrow range of actually useful parameters.

https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/

Reading down in the comments - ratios can be useful conceptually, but for production baking the actual size of the batch vs. the mixer, oven and other tools make all the difference. Gravity plays a part in, say, how a moist dough behaves in a 5 lb. vs. a 250 lb. batch, same for how things bake/burn in a full vs. partially full oven, same for depositors, extruders, sheeters, etc.

It's perplexing that the article makes very little mention of what Justin Frankel did after Winamp - founding Cockos and creating REAPER, LICECap. As you note there's nothing quite as fully scriptable/customize-able as REAPER in Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)-land.

I've not found a media player I like as much as the original Winamp - especially the ability to use plugins, and how devs and users could easily change the look/feel. I've never understood how literally the worst media app I've encountered (especially on Windows) - iTunes - took over, aside from the fact that it made it easy to buy music and load it onto your iDevices.

We get resold Sisense for healthcare data analytics from our Electronic Health Record vendor. So this could be a massive HIPAA breach, if so I hope Sisense get driven out of business ASAP. A year of free credit monitoring will not make this better for us or thousands of clients.

Thankfully the EHR company has been working on a Sisense replacement for some time now and we're in the beta group, but...

Agreed, granted I'm over 50 so get off my lawn but "busy-dizzy" is how the Discord UI makes me feel.

I have a pet theory that one of the reasons the V7 to I resolution is so pleasing and so fundamental to Western harmony is that the ET b7 is the sharpest from the harmonic 7th, and the ear wants the V dominant’s b7 to resolve down to the 3rd of the I chord.

Look out a^2 + b^2 = c^2, blitzar is coming for ya!

In 20 years I've encountered precisely one Access Database that was very well designed, adequately documented, and implemented correctly - meaning people used a single instance on a specific machine, or Remote Desktop Protocol'd into same.

Connecting to an Access database over a network from individual client apps is a recipe for pain as the database file gets locked, so then people start saving "copy of copy of copy USE THIS ONE" versions and you get divergent database backends with no clean way to merge. IME this always happens for business critical Access systems with no backup and documentation at the least convenient time, and suddenly it's IT's problem/fault. Yes you can connect to a SQL Server backend, but then it's IT's problem/fault/responsibility to maintain, and it takes Access out of the "simple enough for business users" domain.

That said, as a rapid app development desktop tool Access can work very well if you know its limitations. It's somewhat surprising MS never made a 365 web-first equivalent, but that's probably because they'd rather charge for Dynamics 365 licenses and Azure SQL hosting.

First through colander and then 1 or 2x through fine mesh strainer.

Indicates their tireless commitment to air safety!

Way to B# !

Extra meta-bonus points if the quine's MIDI notes are from a transcription of a Robert Quine guitar solo!

Fascinating project, xpointer!

I'd say your offering seems to fill a void for nonprofit agencies like mine, and possibly public entities (like counties) who don't have the internal staffing/expertise to spin up and monitor HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, and are responsible for integrating health data from disparate sources.