199600+ entries in 0.121s
mircea_popescu: puts in perspective what maga has
to actually accomplish.
mircea_popescu: if pressed i wouldn't even have imagined
there were 1mn people who doi
things left in
the 80s us.
mircea_popescu: got a number
to save me from fishing
through
the memorabilia
tripod ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes,
they want
to do
things
that don't involve
talking
to girls or ~~~horror of horrors~~~ being at
their call.
mircea_popescu: "we'll end up hiring
two excel support people for every backofice gurl!!"
mircea_popescu: which is ~how "from scratch for srs db" projects even end up engaged in by banks and
their ilk.
the it dept is pushing relentlessly for away-from-excel for
this reason every single board meeting.
mircea_popescu: also, i dunno how relevant but factual in any case : 90% of in-house it support requests from excel users is exactly, "i did
thing and it did i dunno what or why halp!1"
mircea_popescu: and my party girls would not have been well served by
the soviet dress fashions for professional females cca 1965.
mircea_popescu: and
this goes right back ot
the literacy vs hyeroglyphs
thread, amusingly enough.
mircea_popescu: it's just not clear
that
the particular sense is actually relevant in any public sense.
mircea_popescu: (and no, it NEVER happened
that
two people in
the same
team using
the same
tools actually had compatible notions of what
the
tools did.)
mircea_popescu: before coming up with
the "Write it down. By hand." i had an excel depacker, which cost me literal man-years
to have made and
tuned, and which was good but far from perfect.
mircea_popescu: in my own (limited) experience, every
time i found myself consulting for
this lot i had
them write, by hand, in narrative form, what
they
thought
their excels did.
mircea_popescu: the attempt
to understand another's excel pile is not unliuke
trying
to grok
the intended functioning of
the preferred emacs setup of a rabid squirrel.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform
this naive view is mostly borne of not much using excel.
a111: Logged on 2017-04-10 18:29 phf: ok, i guess we both know what
the problem is. my solution is "study db related algorithms until you know enough
to write a db", your solution, unless i misunderstand, seems
to be "use an existing database a lot". i don't understand how learning, say, postgresql will get you from not knowing anything about db internal design
to writing your own
mircea_popescu:
http://btcbase.org/log/2017-04-10#1641504 << From experience,
there's a definite slot for learning filled by sql. i personally show girls how
to use a db for
their own shit, which may be simply grocery lists ("now
tell me how many kgs of pepper we bought by day last year").
truthg be
told
the path
to a structured mind is long and arduous.
☝︎ mircea_popescu: lobbes see, because
they made
the mistake of banning
things instead of simply banning stupid.
☟︎ lobbes: Now I pour my brain into
tmsr, much more rewardinf
mircea_popescu: let
the man play with his excel and feel happy, just like some writers prefer
to sketch
their novels in gf's faeces on bathroom floor. none of
this makes gf shit an economically relevant inkwell system.
lobbes was dismayed when I came in, automated a 40 hr excel proccess down
to about 10mins just by using sql (access of all
the god awful
things) only
to be
told it was verboten
trinque: or biologist, goes on safari, starts catalog of observations, begins drawing relationships between
them
mircea_popescu: i am not proposing an alternative for
that function. doctor isn't in
the line of proposing replacement for cocaine, and from
the "i wanna feel good" perspective
the whole pharmacopoea is a waste of space.
trinque: mircea_popescu: what'd
the guy's classification and distinction device look like in
the alternative?
mircea_popescu: you realise all it
takes is for someone
to salt
the parking lot with hello kitty usbs.
trinque: lobbes: of
the NoSQLs of which I'm aware,
that's
the saddest
mircea_popescu: lobbes what happens when
they starty paying
the btc ransoms ?
trinque: visicalc and descendants leaned most
this way, and
thus he still uses
that when alternatives aparrently exist
a111: Logged on 2017-04-10 23:58
trinque:
the accountant fellow I mentioned, for $100mil scale oil contract compliance, also excel macros.
trinque: the vast majority of
the accountant guy's job is defining categories, listing
their properties, relating
them
to each other
mircea_popescu: and
this goes directly
to all
the "no mp, dope
totally makes you a better
thinker"
threads.
mircea_popescu: cocaine is
the eminent example. it FEELS like it does
things
to you. it does not
therefore HELP.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: trinque
the issue is
that just because it felt convenient
to
the wee
tyke it doesn't follow it is ~useful~.
trinque: to quote my old boss, one of his better observations imo is
that spreadheets (and db as discussed in
thread) are
tools for classification and distinction
mircea_popescu: !!deed for instance works fine by my eyes, but it does not pass
the "monkey do, monkey see"
test.
mircea_popescu: i have no position here, merely observing
the history of
the
thing.
trinque: this'd be one of
those overly broad ones.
mircea_popescu: yeah well. anthropologically relevant
though, created a whole identity mythos.
mircea_popescu: batching was
the preferred mode of engineers. historically.
mircea_popescu: this seems about as unlikely as saying "in sane russia, sexually attractive women and women with pleasant personalities are
the same woman"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i make most of my money out of being capable
to use
the
tool
that's adequate for
the job whereas everyone else just goes with
the fastest loop.
mircea_popescu: it's
their hypercad. "When i was a wee
tyke
this seemed like srs bzns"
mircea_popescu: "excel i understand" "no you don't" "but i've been using it forever" "not even
that."