Yes, this one is late again, and this time it is due to the stupidity of your host. You see, I was feeling grouchier than usual yesterday – due in no small part to somehow tweaking my back again while doing squats the day before – and, after going out for a walk and a grocery run, amid rather gloomy weather, I came back and decided I needed a bit of a pick-me-up.
Now, for most people, that would mean going out and being around “people”, or at least doing something in public. However, on a Friday evening, my tolerance for most people – already exceptionally low – go from “they are only tolerable well-boiled with lots of salt”, right to “I will straight-up MURDERISE the next person who comes within 3 feet of me”.
Incidentally, most of my readership evidently feels exactly the same way. The funniest comment ever registered on my Telegram channel comes from LRFotS Kapios, who crafted this gem:
Well yeah, pretty much. Come for the constant stream of updates about the 404 War and geopolitics – stay for the community of cranky introverts.
So that was when I fired up my work laptop – bear in mind, this was at 8pm on a Friday – with my latte in hand, and started noodling around in Power BI to craft a dashboard.
Now, you have to understand that, for a data nerd with a technical background (like me), Power BI is WORSE than crack. I do not quite understand why Microsoft engineered Power BI the way they did – it has not one, but TWO separate back-end languages running in it, and the two are not really compatible. You use M-code to bring in, format, manipulate, cleanse, and update data, and that’s all well and good. But then, you can also use DAX to craft specific queries and tables on the fly. You cannot, however, use the two at the same time, and the logic behind each is very different.
M-code is more like a scripting language, a lot like Python or Javascript. DAX is more like a functional programming language, but… more RETARDED. I am dead serious about this. For example, if you want to find the current value you are looking at in a column, you use a function in DAX called EARLIER.
Yeah. Exactly. It is a highly misleading name for a function.
And that is before we get to the joys of using CALCULATE, which just makes everything about 20x more complicated than it needs to be.
Add in the godawful technical documentation that Microsoft has for these functions, and you have a really weird product, that is actually amazing at what it does, but is far harder to use than it should be.
Try making a Pareto chart in Power BI, for example. It is a GIGANTIC faff, and I still haven’t figured out how to get it to update dynamically. After literally HOURS of messing around yesterday, I still did not have things where I wanted them.
Meanwhile, if you know what you are doing in R or Python, you could create a proper Pareto chart, showing the cumulative value of a series, and marking the point where the top 80% of the impact comes from, in about 8 lines of code.
Of course, I knew this would happen, going in. I have what is known as “Rubik’s Complex“, and apparently a pretty bad case of it, too. (Not as bad as House, perhaps – and I am not quite that big an asshole, either, although I am sure there are plenty of people who would disagree.) So, when I meet a problem that I cannot solve, especially one that involves coding of some kind, I tend to get pretty stupid about it.
Anyway, that is just a long-winded way of saying, “yep, my fault this is late”. So let’s get on with the real reason you are here.
This is Ekaterina Sokolova (Екатерина Соколова), age 23 from Sverdlovsk, Russia. She studies (or studied) architecture engineering (which I assume is just a way of avoiding all the HARD MAFF in the engineering world, though in Russia, it is MUCH more difficult to get away with that sort of thing). Apparently, she loves high heels, surfing, and modelling – she was a finalist in the Miss Russia 2022 pageant – and no doubt is fond of puppies, rainbows, and unicorns.
And all of that is very nice, I’m sure. The real point, of course, is that she is Russian AND a redhead, which means 3x the crazy in one very attractive package. So this is one for you gingervitis sufferers.
Happy weekend, all. There should be a podcast dropping soon as well – plenty of crazy stuff going on right now, and it is well past time we looked at some of it in detail.
1 Comment
Excellent thot.