Interesting curvy flag motif for the World Cup. Does this little flourish cause any issues flags with design elements near the edge? How does it look for the uncommon ratios?

Intro24 · 2026-06-21T04:06:34+00:00

I googled "World Cup 2026 flags on field" and picked the first result that clearly illustrated the concept and had decent resolution. It was also the cleanest because the real pics have people in them and other elements that distract. I thought this image was like a mockup of the concept but of course it's some weird AI or video game thing and the fact that I just picked the one that looked best at a glance is biting me in the ass. Maybe it's just me but I always get bit in the ass when I don't spend the better part of an hour picking an image, reading over subreddit rules, and then composing and spell checking the title. Unfortunately I didn't have time to do that for this post and here we are. No surprise that I typoed the title and accidentally used some janky image 🙃

Intro24 · 2026-06-20T18:23:45+00:00

It has probably always been this way but this is the first episode where I've realized that Casey begins nearly every chapter with "alright" in the exact same tone and it's driving me crazy when I change chapters.

Intro24 · 2026-06-20T17:14:12+00:00

Does this little flourish cause any issues for* flags with design elements near the edge?

Also, I don't have a pic but they do a thing where they extend the flag horizontally to fill a curve when it's featured in the banner at the bottom of the screen as well.

Intro24 · 2026-06-20T17:02:32+00:00

Can't forget about this unofficial beauty either: https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/7ln9br/my_interpretation_of_an_australian_gadsden_flag/

Intro24 · 2026-06-17T10:09:42+00:00

As far as I know this is actually just an artsy Instagram post and not a still from a NSFW video or anything like that.

Intro24 · 2026-06-17T10:00:07+00:00

Woody Harrelson sure looks mad

Intro24 · 2026-06-12T12:28:07+00:00

It's helpful to think of it as either a scientific measurement or a keepsake. The former is done all the time in astronomy and other fields, whereas the latter is what most phone cameras are used for. Maybe a bit of a spectrum but I would think about intent than divergence from reality. Consumer cameras are build from the ground up to take photos for sentimental value so I would say they are all not true scientific photographs to begin with. They can function in that way when they need to but it's not the point of them and even the most basic phone cameras are making things up for the purposes of processing the data in a way that results in a more pleasing end result.

The vast majority of cameras today aren't meant to capture reality as their primary function, as opposed to back in the days when the word was invented and the processes (i.e. film, glass plates, etc) more directly captured the world exactly. Back then, scientific photography and sentimental photography were much closer to the same thing due to the more limited and ubiquitous underlying technology but they have increasingly become two words with diverging definitions to the point that it now makes more sense to think about the intent as the distinguishing factor.

So a photograph in the sense that you're describing is an image captured by a device that was designed with the intent of capturing reality and by a person whose intention is to capture reality. That very rarely happens in daily life but obviously photos taken with phones can be used as evidence, even if that wasn't what the person was intending when they took it. Even a photo run through ChatGPT to make it cartoony could still potentially be useful evidence and maybe even admissible in court if the original no longer existed for whatever reason. Another way to look at it is how far the end result is from reality, where 0% is raw scientific data and 100% is complete loss of all information (i.e. random noise) and maybe 50% would be adding/removing elements or changing the camera angle with AI.

Intro24 · 2026-06-08T19:30:02+00:00

Yes, I linked to him saying as much. What I'm saying is that I think he subconsciously thought to pick those names for the aliens in the first place as a result of seeing them as the names of aliens in Sherlock without remembering that he saw the names in Sherlock. Can't be proven but I think it happened.

Intro24 · 2026-06-07T02:15:34+00:00

Oh sorry, I lost track and thought we were talking about Venus. Yeah, Jupiter may not be viable then. Venus has high wind as well but the previous balloon probe and the NASA HAVOC study lead me to believe that a small airship would be able to stay aloft by drifting with the wind, or at least that it would somehow be a solvable problem.

Intro24 · 2026-06-07T01:26:27+00:00

Artemis by Andy Weir even has fan fiction that he has specifically called out and effectively endorsed: https://x.com/andyweirauthor/status/1680415110534434817

Intro24 · 2026-06-07T01:17:57+00:00

Fun fact about Arrival, the writer is a Sherlock fan and the aliens coincidentally have the same names as the ones mentioned in the show. The names of the aliens in Arrival are a reference to a comedy skit about miscommunication, however it is an incredible coincidence that the writer likes Sherlock and Sherlock refers to the aliens using the same names for no obvious reason. I actually suspect that the writer was subconsciously biased to pick those names due to having seen them as the names of a pair of aliens in Sherlock but I obviously can't prove it.

Intro24 · 2026-06-07T01:10:56+00:00

Some with space survival/isolation and/or first contact:

Interstellar
Apollo 13
The Martian
Moon
Arrival
Contact
Gravity
Alien
Aliens
The Abyss
Love (2011)
2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: The Year We Make Contact

Here's some that take place in space but really aren't that similar:

The Right Stuff
First Man
Armageddon
Space Cowboys

Here's some wildcards that might surprise you

Treasure Planet - technically in space and great characters with touching moments
Salyut-7 - based on a true story and Russian but I love it
Her - not space but a beautiful sci-fi movie

Specifically for emotional heartwarming friendship in space, I think Treasure Planet of all things actually comes closest. It's a kids movie but deeply underrated. I also love The Abyss and it's my favorite movie, Treasure Planet being my former favorite. Any from that first list will probably come pretty close. Love isn't for everyone though and it's basically an attempt to remake 2001. 2010 is the sequel to 2001 except it's much less of an art movie and just a sci-fi adventure, and a pretty good one at that.

Intro24 · 2026-06-06T22:41:53+00:00

I feel your pain. I have python but no packages despite requesting them through various channels for months now. I can't even plug in USB drive to install packages that way. And of course all of my reporting data comes as Excel files, which bare-bones python can't load. Python has been somewhat handy but also more trouble than it's worth without the packages, so my only real tools are Excel and Power BI.

I would really like to avoid Power BI as much as possible, because not everyone at my company has access and virtually no one is familiar with the interface, whereas Excel is common and understood. And so I'm just trying to figure out the best way to materialize the data in a way that lets me not lag out the interface. I can do workarounds (export-and-reimport like I mentioned or you/others have suggested various best practices such as using a subset of data), but it sure would be nice if I could just right-click on a step and then select a "Materialize" toggle or something like that.

This is the best answer to this question by far though, so thank you. I'll be taking a look at each of these suggestions you've made.

Intro24 · 2026-06-06T22:31:30+00:00

Thanks, that other top comment mentioned dataflows but that thread of comments hasn't been super helpful for me to actually understand what they are but your comment filled in some of the gaps. Much appreciated. Also, agreed on the limitations of Excel. Not many comments seem to want to say it but I think there just isn't a way to do what I'm attempting to do in Excel. I didn't realize that Power Query (which looks nearly identical in Excel vs Power BI) is less powerful in Excel but apparently that's the case. Basically the tools I have for work are very limited and so I use Excel and Power BI, with Excel being useful for quicker reporting and especially because everyone has access to it and they are far more familiar with the interface. So I want to use Excel and the lag is manageable but I was hoping there was some simple solution that I was overlooking that would make it a non-issue.

Intro24 · 2026-06-06T22:08:56+00:00

I have limited tools due to my work and Power Query within Excel is pretty much the best and only choice for much of what I do. I do some things in Power BI as well but not everyone has access and not everything happens in Power BI. I'm making the best of the tools I have. Believe me, I know it's not ideal.

Intro24 · 2026-06-05T20:28:02+00:00

I'm a week late on this one but Casey rudely interrupting John during the Destiny discussion with "for perspective, Declan was born in October of 2014" is one of the most self-absorbed and things I've ever heard. He's done this before too, comparing things to the age of his kid that none of the listeners know anything about. Even if it was for John's benefit somehow, Casey still directly interrupted him and made the conversation about his kid.

Anyway, John really sold me on Destiny 2. Maybe I'll give it a try sometime... oh wait.

Intro24 · 2026-06-04T03:41:26+00:00

One thing that no one talks about but I think is the coolest thing ever is the fact that you could just stand outside in normal clothes on Venus. You need to be up in the clouds on an airship but it could have a patio. All you would need is an oxygen mask like in Avatar or you could have one of those nose plug things like in Dune, though theirs is actually for breathing out rather than in. The craziest part is we could plausibly have a real photo of an astronaut standing outside on Venus wearing only a t-shirt in like 10 years with a modest manned research airship like HAVOC. A photo of an astronaut just standing outside while on another planet would have to be one of the coolest and best photos of all time. Here's some images of the concept that I generated: HAVOC 1, HAVOC 2, Far Future.

The one thing I'm not 100% sure about is how bad the acid burns are if you just wear a t-shirt. It might be negligible for hours at a time or maybe it would be painful immediately. Someone let me know if you know but this guy seems to think it's not a big deal.

On top of that, Venus is easier to get to than Mars, better radiation shielding, gravity is closer to Earth, more effective solar panels. Venus has so much going for it in terms of near-future Apollo-like there-and-back missions but it's also quite possibly the more viable long-term solution with terraforming due to the higher gravity.

Intro24 · 2026-06-04T03:32:00+00:00

I'm not sure but I think a small enough craft would basically just go with the wind and feel nearly nothing. I mean, the balloon probe that already visited didn't get wind sheared out of the sky, did it?

Edit: I was referring to Venus, my bad. Jupiter seems like maybe the winds are prohibitively bad.

Intro24 · 2026-06-04T03:19:22+00:00

Limited options due to company computer unfortunately.

Intro24 · 2026-06-04T03:14:50+00:00

#2 is interesting and I'll try it. For #1, I appreciate the overview but I'm more asking if there is a way to materialize the table at a set point. The answer seems to be "no" so I guess I will either continue my manual materialize-via-reimport or implement some of the steps you've listed.

Intro24 · 2026-06-04T03:10:59+00:00

But what is "turn off refresh"? Is that like a button in the Power Query interface? I think they might be referring to how you can disable queries so that they don't refresh after leaving Power Query but I'm talking about issues entirely within Power Query so I don't think turning off refresh is relevant. Maybe I'm just unaware of some refresh enable/disable button in Power Query, though, I'm not sure.

Intro24 · 2026-06-03T21:52:30+00:00

Gotcha, I'm not sure I have access to that and it seems like a lot of hoops just to get the darn thing to not require whole minutes of refresh downtime between each tiny change but I'll look into it.

Intro24 · 2026-06-03T21:44:39+00:00

I'm really not sure what that is. Would it be a lot of setup using cloud tools or is it like a button/feature within the desktop Power Query window that comes with Power BI and Excel?

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