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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • As someone on the outskirts of Data Science, probably something along the lines of “Just what the fuck does my customer actually need?”

    You can’t throw buzzwords and a poorly labeled spreadsheet at me and expect me to go deep diving into a trashheap of data to magically pull a reasonable answer. “Average” has no meaning if you don’t give me anything to average over. I can’t tell you what nobody has ever recorded anywhere, because we don’t have any telepathic interfaces (and probably would get in trouble with the worker’s council if we tried to get one).

    I’m sure there are many interesting questions to be debated in this field, but on the practical side, humans remain the greatest mystery.




  • Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.

    Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.

    WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.






  • Electric Callboy used to be called Eskimo Callboy until somewhat recently. Eskimo is now considered a slur for the Inuit and Yupit peoples. I’m fairly sure thay EC meant no offense by the term and rather used it out of ignorance (as evidenced by them setting in motion the presumably rather extensive process of changing their entire branding, including pulling old songs and changing all their old album covers), but given their early albums were all about edgy funny provocation, it’s not a great look.