• 19 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Yesterday, I asked it to help me create a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table. The answers it gave were completely wrong. Each time, I would tell it the error that Excel was displaying and it would respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t use that function there for [x] reasons.”

    So it knows the reason why a combination of DAX functions won’t work but recommends them anyways. That’s real fucking useful.





  • During WWII the United States government rounded up tens of thousands of people, including many US citizens, and put them in internment camps because they looked sort of similar to the people who bombed pearl harbor. Why? Because fear is a powerful drug and when people are afraid, logic tends to go out the window, if there was any logic to begin with. If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you’ll notice that much of it is intended to stoke fear, while inserting themselves as the solution. They do it because it works.

    Way out in the Arkansas Delta, in a soybean field 50 miles from anywhere, there is a memorial where one of these internment camps stood. If you aren’t looking for it, you’d probably drive right by it unnoticed. All around the camp there are these little voice boxes that you push a button on and it explains what you’re looking at. The voice providing the narration is none other than George Takei who was held there with his family as a child. Spend a little time at a place like this and it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that America has always rejected fanaticism.


  • I read an interview in the Democrat-Gazette with the daughter of Ms. Taylor, one of the victims. There are no words to describe how awful it must be to have one of your friends or family members just minding their own business only to be shot to death while checking out at the grocery store.

    Ms. Taylor’s daughter expressed frustrations that she wasn’t there because she thought she could have done something, implying that she would have shot the assailant. In her defense, the woman’s grieving and people who are in that state tend to think and say all kinds of stuff.

    But here’s the thing, the “good guy with a gun” mantra is idealistic at best. Even if you are a “good guy” with a gun, odds are that by the time you can even respond, the “bad guy” has already killed someone. Not to mention that in that very panic filled moment, there’s a much higher chance that you might accidentally shoot another bystander.

    “Good guy with a gun” is not a solution to “bad guy with a gun” because no amount of bullets fired by “good guys” will bring back the people who are already dead.