You see, according to Cocteau’s plan I’m the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body reading playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I’ve SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing “I’m an Oscar Meyer Wiener”.

I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There’s plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what’s led folks to react negatively to your statement.

On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub’s subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.

Why looky there - love to see a post get legs… have a boost and an upvote, matey!

Agreed. Spez’s support of The_Donald was the beginning of the end (although as he was a mod of jailbait before it was banned, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the genesis of Spez’s sickness), and now there’s nothing left of the communities that made it great. There’s hasn’t been anything rewarding about contributing there since about 2014.

Working fine on my end - sounds like ISP filtering or possibly a firewall setting. With an ad blocker to handle popups, you could also try g o k u dot s x - not quite the same server collection, but you might find what you’re looking for.

Cool! Glad it helps! One important thing to note is that the Data Model uses not Visual Basic, but DAX as its syntax. It’s considerably more powerful than - but similar to - VB. It should be easy for you to learn.

Once your data chops are strong enough, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing biology or e-commerce in this field - it’s all about how well you work with the information. I’m not surprised you got team lead given your self-directed nature and aptitude for this work. In fact, with your current experience, you’ll have a leg up, as analysts who work in your field are highly regarded. I think you’re well on your way - good luck!

It depends on the team you’re applying to. Marketing teams are much more relaxed about the skill set, and are more interested in the story you can tell with the data you pull. If you’re applying for a backend position, where you’re doing ETL operations (extract, transform, load) you’re going to get much more technical questions, particularly as it relates to SQL. That being said, the backend positions are much more stable employment wise than working on a marketing team. In general, I’ve found that most employers are less interested in the technical basics (which can be taught) than what your development skills brought to your last position, and your desire to learn. Self-directed learning is generally very highly respected, and your cert will definitely help.

I wouldn’t expect much on the job training - generally the seniors will expect you to learn through solving the problems they give you to fix, or you’ll be the one data analyst expected to figure out the incoming data. Imposter syndrome is somewhat common amongst analysts as a result - it’s easy to feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, even when it works.

I went back over your post, and I’d say at this point, focus on SQL even if your work won’t allow you to use it directly. It’s pretty easy to learn, and getting the basics down will significantly increase your employment chances.

Regarding your Excel limits issue, look into using the Data Model - it can hold far more data than a standard sheet (10mil+ rows with ease if your computer has the juice to parse it), as well as having relational database capacity between linked tables (that far exceed a lookup formula). I used this at my last job to build an inventory tracking system when Microsoft Nav decided to shit the bed, and with Power Query, Excel was able to perform SQL pulls from within the sheet with an ODBC connection to the database.

I would advise staying away from academia and niche industries - you’re going to be criminally underpaid. A data analyst with 3+ years experience can command 100k easily working from home for a mid to large scale e-commerce shop if you have SQL chops. I saw a jump of 50% in salary when I moved from a niche industry into standard e-commerce.

I haven’t done the certificate with Coursera, so I’m not sure what’s covered there, but one of the biggest challenges facing the e-commerce industry right now is the migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. If you can master that process (which is like riding an epileptic horse on PCP), you’ll have no end of career opportunities.

I’d recommend getting up to date with Google’s Looker Studio - it’s free and the capacities greatly exceed GA4’s standard interface (which is a downgrade from the Universal Analytics interface IMHO). R’s Google Analytics library is also extremely useful as you can export data without sampling, and you can test and write out your queries in Google’s Query Explorer before tying up your machine with a big export. Here’s the link on the CRAN site to the R library.

If you have the opportunity, I’d also learn Amazon’s Quicksight, which is absolutely fantastic. They allow you to build table joins from within the interface from full table pulls, so it doesn’t require advanced SQL knowledge to bring forth reports. They also provide object-oriented calculations, which can be engaged with their built-in machine learning to pull forecasts.

Context: 20+ years experience doing this shit.

The greatest challenge with AI is not how to make it, but how to make it better than us.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

Actually, when William Hearst originally started the campaign in the 20s to take out the hemp farmers that were competing with his timber business (he bought up most of Humboldt so he could corner the paper market), he targeted Hispanics (primarily Mexicans) with Marijuana in his articles about drug crimes and how they were ruining America. Henry Ansligner bought it hook, line and sinker, and he set the tone until the 40s, when hemp was briefly made legal for the war effort. Note that Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes does an excellent job illustrating this historical relationship.

Once the Beats started smoking weed in 50s, hemp was criminalized again, and the prohibition was expanded to felony status as law enforcement started targeting the evolution of the Beat movement, the hippies.

The subsequent prohibition on cocaine products was targeted at black neighborhoods (as per the GOP intention during the Nixon/Reagan era), and was built upon the “successes” of the previous marijuana prohibition.

This is why I don’t think they’ll stop at porn.

This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.

I’m reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.

It’s no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I’m not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.

The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There’s also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

A fine namesake, passed down through the generations, a mark of greatness none could have foretold, for his would be the seed that gave birth to a dynasty, and in 40054, Lord Syntax, Emperor of the Error, takes arms as Twelfth Commander of the Line against the Googlish heretics and their daemonic servers.

chainsword revs

I wasn’t gonna cry until I saw the drawings on the walls - that’s a piece of animation history right there, and something you just can’t recreate in a new space. If you framed some of that sheet rock and saved it for a generation or two, the cash from the collectors auction you’d get for it would probably pay enough to bring back Space Ghost.

A product’s name should reflect what it does, not what you were smoking when you came up with the idea.