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

Right. Magically, everyone on the Internet has become infatuated with communism out of thin air over the last few years. Must just be my paranoia to surggest influence from a hostile government.

Lemmy is whatever we make it, except for the communism posts that love communism until they realize workers need representation. I half believe those are Chinese bots or high school kids who are stupid enough to believe the Chinese bots.

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.

My vote is for archomage’s idea of getting an AI to be in charge of things. But, then again, like sauron what corruption and evil will be built into it?

So I have a younger, semi-autistic relative that wants to be called “Kalcifer.” To be it seemed absolutely stupid, and I refused, but I was nice about it. But I’ve heard of other people wanting the same thing. Can someone explain this to a Millennial please?

Hot take: The world was better when the ruler was trained from birth to govern. Let’s start training people from birth to govern, and give them access to more power. Take away power from the Oligarchical media that has turned the poor against each other.

These are my exact thoughts on Communism and unions in general. If only the representatives of the people could somehow not be corruptable.

I see your point. Personally, I like the brackets and braces, they help organize. Or maybe that’s just what I’m used to.

Sorry, I meant ECMAScript

It would be great to use some emojis in coding.

Imagine how much more readable it would be if you could break a loop with 💀 or return true with 👍. Or use ❓for ifs, or ↔️ for switch (the emoji didn’t work for that one). Or use an emoji to represent a custom object?

Maybe the ECMA should get on that!

Edit: I guess you can use emojis for custom objects in js.

Edit 2: ➡ for console.log

Jesus Christ. One part of me really wants to see some green text rant about this. Another part of me empathizes with the horrible pain and suffering it would wield.

I was old enough to have used Napster before it was terrible.

Cool

Will do, thanks brother

I’d really like to see something where there is no explanation at all. Terry Crews is just Snow White.

Maybe Seth Rogan and a bunch of stoners are the dwarves.

No explanation at all, just as if it were a woman playing the roll.

Hats off to you, Potato_in_my_anus, for my biggest username laugh on Lemmy so far.

> demake

Someone give this guy some gold… wait where are we… I applaud your genius.

I’d watch that. But there should be a really good musical number called “Everything is rape without consent” or something… It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for the target audience, but yes I agree with the point you’re making: Snow White & Cinderella are way fucked.