If you’re really interested…

Let’s say you want to know how an ad has affected your sales since it was released 3 months ago.

You could put every single sale as a dot on a graph, but it probably wouldn’t mean anything. Even if it showed the dots gradually getting higher on the chart. Was that caused by the ad or does it happen every year at the se time? What other factors could have caused this.

So I’ll pause right there and say you will never know. You will never know all the forces that affect trends. You can get relatively close, but not. Does weather affect your sales? Delivery time? Internet sentiment?

So that’s not very scientific, right? You need to know and control all variables to test an outcome.

Anyway, so you have a graph with dots and it may or may not mean anything. You think, ok what was last year’s sales during these same 3 months?

So you get last year’s data and plot the sales as dots in a different color. Now you have a graph with a ton of dots of two colors, and best case scenario: the dots for this year are higher than last year.

Is it responsible to stop there? If it were me, and my money, I’d want to make sure. So then you’d compare data from two years ago. Now you have a chart with three colors of dots.

Again, best case, this year is higher than that year too. However, as always is the case, the dots are getting difficult to understand, especially for people that don’t know anything about data. You need to make things simple to digest.

So you say “I’ll make an average of each month” and that will show how the averages are getting bigger, compared to previous years. Great!

So you average all the dots by month and plot them on a graph, and it looks great. But there are a few months that don’t prove what you saw in the raw data. For instance, one month, two years ago, you landed a big contract and sold an astronomical number of units. So that month is the biggest one of all.

Ofuck.jpeg

Ok, no problem, you’ll just remove those two data points, because they are skewing the day. Again, this is best case. Most of the time you will not be sure if these data points are errors in the data or Genuine sales. But anyway…

Luckily there is a method for removing “outliers” it’s called standard deviation, and it’s basically an equation that figures out what is an acceptable outlier and what isn’t.

Again, I’ll pause here to point out how unscientific this is. You are removing data because it doesn’t follow the trend you want to show. And this is a perfectly acceptable practice in data analytics. And I’ll point out something else, what was the affect of those contracts on your normal business sales? Did you make relatively less sales because of it? Is it responsible to completely remove those sales? Is it ethical?

And this is all very minor stuff in analytics. The more detailed the question, the more the data is “cleansed” by equations that get progressively more complicated - the more ethically vague the data is.

Data analyst here. It really do be like that. You can use stats to prove anything.

Yfw they say data doesn’t lie. Looool

If you don’t have apt backups, that is a failure of the process, not yours.

You can also do this by forgetting a WHERE clause. I know this because I ruined a production database in my early years.

Always write your where before your insert, kids.

I love js. But the date object has always been a total pain. Moment.js is a good package to deal with it, but yeah, it’s currently deprecated, but it would be nice if it or something like it became part of ECMAScript.

I have no idea why it hasn’t yet, except that it might be that js needs to work for everyone, not just the us. So time is not standard.

Dune is exactly what Lucas was copying when he wrote Star wars.

Yes, tape has very steep entry costs and requires maintenance and storage.

Most of the time it doesn’t make sense for a person to use it, but rather a corporate entity that needs to backup petabytes of data multiple times a day.

So tape doesn’t make sense for the typical person, unless you don’t have to buy the equipment and store i.

But, if you’re even a small company it becomes cheaper to use tape.

Companies don’t like deleting data. Ever. In fact some industries have laws that say they can’t delete data.

For example, the company I work in is small, but old. Our accounting department alone requires complex automated processes to do things each day that require data to be backed up.

From the beginning of time. I shit you not. There is no compression even.

And at the drop of a hat, the IT dept needs to be able to implement a backup from any time in the past. Although this almost never happens outside of the current pay cycle, they need to have the option available.

The best way they have to facilitate this (I hate it - like I said they’re old) is to simply write everything multiple times a night. And it’s everything since we started using digital storage. Yes, it’s overkill and makes no sense, but that’s the way it is for us. And that’s the way it is for a lot of companies.

So, when we’re talking about that amount of data, and tape having a storage cost advantage of 4:1 over disk, it more than pays for all the overhead for enterprise level backups.

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Speaking of slasher films, does anybody know of any movies that have terrible everything except a really good plot?

Bro, trying to give padding in Ms word, when you know… YOU KNOOOOW… they can convert to html. It drives me up the wall.

And don’t get me started on excel.

Kill em all, I say.

I was reading What to expect before you’re expecting and it says to stay away from any food that comes in any kind of plastic, esp if the plastic container needs to be heated/re-heated.

It says when it gets into your blood stream your body thinks it’s estrogen.

The most fucked up part is the EPA says the risk is very low. Probably because plastics are literally everywhere, and banning them at this point would cause an economic catastrophe. Which it def would.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/bpa/faq-20058331

This is an article about BPAs, but they are just the tip of the iceberg of the phtalates - chemicals used to make plastic more durable.

YES!

The savior of mankind. We are not worthy.

Any mention of a server room reminds me of the fable of the guy, we’ll call him Mike, who unplugged the Internet.

I can’t remember where I read it, I think it was greentext on Reddit years ago.

So Mike is an intern, and due to some weird circumstances he becomes the only network admin in the building. Well, one day he doesn’t esnt feel like working, so on his way in, he stops by the server room and unplugs the internet.

He then goes to his desk like a normal day. Then he starts getting phone calls. Everybody is freaking out because there is no Internet. So he begrudgingly descends into the server room and starts playing video games on his phone.

Close to the end of the day, he plugs the Internet back in and ascends a hero to the employees because they think he’s been working hard all day to give them internet.

No way anything about that was an accident.

PC Load Letter

Studies show more time spent in the store equates to more sales. They have to measure time in store and extra sales against time to reorganize. As regular time moves forward it becomes increasingly worth more to rearrange until it outweighs the time to reorganize by a certain margin.

Fuck yes dude. Such a good song.

That cod piece. What the literal fuck was going on with 80s kids movies?

The totally unnecessary tiddies in neverending story come to mind.