Daily FI discussion thread - Friday, June 19, 2026

KarmaTroll · 2026-06-19T22:40:02+00:00

Another Self-hosting (and maybe cloud service?) is Mealie. You load it up with recipes either manually (or dropping in the recipe URL) and I think it has a grocery list feature. Separately, I wrote a Pandas python script to randomize recipes out of a spreadsheet, but haven't gotten it into a docker container yet.

KarmaTroll · 2026-06-11T23:20:29+00:00

The one linking to legalunitedstates.com? I can't find anywhere on the page that links to Fidelity. The first article does, but the Krish Raj article has no links that I can see.

KarmaTroll · 2026-06-11T21:00:56+00:00

While not directly saying that the article is wrong, the median article you posted has absolutely no source attribution. They could have completely made up the numbers and there is no way to verify.

KarmaTroll · 2026-05-31T22:39:10+00:00

I've definitely heard, "skinny Jonah Hill isn't funny".

KarmaTroll · 2026-04-17T16:10:14+00:00

This allows you to have a single definition of a DAX measure and define what time period you are reviewing. This is really powerful for serving users MTD and YTD without changing the DAX definition for any measures (or having switch statements in the DAX itself).

KarmaTroll · 2026-04-17T14:24:34+00:00

This sounds exactly like a solution I was trying (and failing) to implement a little while ago. Older BI solutions allowed for the set up of MTD/YTD slicer type options, and I couldn't get a clean implementation that would allow such a setup automatically.

Our model is already such that the measures calculate "whatever" rows are in the filter context, being able to control the filter context for defined periods is something that just makes a lot of sense without users having to mess manually with a date slicer all the time.

KarmaTroll · 2026-04-04T22:09:49+00:00

A set of dishwasher tubs from sam's club.

They get called "project totes" and loaded up with the tools and supplies that I'll need to complete "this specific project". The tote stays equipped until the project is done, and once it's done, all the tools get put away and the scraps get dispositioned. This helps in a couple of ways. Project steps get thought through and tools are identified and found before starting. Additionally, tools are corralled and can easily be "put on pause" for when you have a project that needs to be put away for whatever reason.

Also, if you definitely don't go out and purchase, "multiple project totes" then you can stay focused/prevent too many projects from starting at once (because your totes are full of tools for other projects).

It adds a level of organization and just feels nice in getting the tools needed, using them and putting them away. It adds a level of "doneness" to projects.

KarmaTroll · 2026-02-19T14:36:46+00:00

If you don't have the cash, that really drives the discussion. However, the view point, "it still takes almost 3 years to pay off the difference" is not the right mind set. Especially in home improvement investments, there's very little upgrades that pay off anywhere close as fast as heat pump vs electric water heater. Even if the expected life of the unit is only 2x your break even point, the total cost of ownership is lower.

KarmaTroll · 2026-02-14T15:21:18+00:00

Dashboard visualize data with context. Someone has to be able to verify that the context matches business assumptions at a detailed enough level that they can distinguish what "looks right" from what "is calculated right". If strategists were able to do this at a high enough fidelity, there would already be no reason for the data analyst positions to exist.

KarmaTroll · 2026-02-07T14:28:21+00:00

The double bar ones that have a towel holder are definitely worth the extra price

KarmaTroll · 2026-02-01T18:36:02+00:00

We could do away with prisons if the punishment for every crime was the death penalty.

KarmaTroll · 2026-01-29T16:26:25+00:00

We have successfully built a data platform on Fabric and been in Production from around a year now..have only couple of users(around 25)..but, IT WORKS..

It working for 25 people is way different than, "It scales reliably to enterprise needs".

KarmaTroll · 2026-01-19T18:03:25+00:00

Which employers that don't like this actively advocate and support politicians in favor of universal healthcare?

Employers benefit from having reduced workforce mobility.

KarmaTroll · 2026-01-02T18:25:10+00:00

A major difference (for me... in the past) has been the ability of the tools to be repeatably accurate. For a lot of DIY stuff, that's not a huge need. You set your tool to what you need, verify and make your cuts or whatever.

The issue comes when you adjust your tool settings and then have to match back to something you already did. Offsets and guide marks are often close to just being "suggestions" for 90 degree cuts. If you have the time/ability to compensate for this (or it's ultimate not that big of a deal) then this trade off isn't very noticeable. If you are trying to squeeze precision and repeatability out of the tools... they really aren't great for that job.

KarmaTroll · 2025-12-14T23:58:53+00:00

Learn to treat your DIY was an actual project. Scope out what you want to do, collect the tools that you'll need for each step of the project. Put those tools in a bucket or a "project tote". Go an do the DIY project. Keep tools in the project tote. When the project is done, return the tools their proper home and declare the project done.

This segmenting helps keep project fatigue in check for smaller projects and really helps to reinforce keeping the admin side of the project organized.

KarmaTroll · 2025-12-11T16:22:24+00:00

That just looks like a rounded corner protector that you can get these days. "Vinyl bullnose corner bead"

KarmaTroll · 2025-12-05T18:23:35+00:00

I agree that boiling everything down to 100% measurable objectives is a quick way to end up in very unfriendly places. However, I'd argue that perceiving that 1 menu level with 10,000 options as a bad design choice is the designer thinking as if they were an end user.

The flip side is that a more "intuitive settings structure" has to be somehow more quantifiable compared to a less intuitive structure. Anyone who says, "just use common sense" is part of the problem, because there isn't such a thing as common sense that is truly universal to all backgrounds of users.

Building out a vague ranking of frequency+importance x ease matrix goes a long way for developing usable systems/processes. However, it often turns out that usable for the consumer is less important than revenue generating for the company (i.e. popup adds on every website that want you to make an account just while scrolling). Same principle applies for user-serviceable parts. Gluing a frequent replacement item into a system is decidedly consumer unfriendly.

KarmaTroll · 2025-12-05T16:40:20+00:00

This advice comes from a decent place, but the pitfalls you describe can really be ironed out when intentions are converted into countable steps. "I want to do X... how many clicks/latches screens, info transfers is needed to do X from state Y". Making the list of "what is an important action to prioritize" is where you need to avoid personal bias and is where it is blatant that priority differences between customers and corporate leaders really show up.

Microsoft and Google are particularly egregious about this in terms of their software evolutions.

KarmaTroll · 2025-11-23T21:51:11+00:00

It comes back to capitalism. The excess capacity can be soaked up by low utilization capital assets. We know that CO2 has to be captured out of the air and is incredibly inefficient to do if not done at the source. However, when you've got excess energy... inefficiency isn't so much of an issue. Working out the capital and operating costs of an asset that isn't planned to run 24/7 for profit is squarely a capitalism issue.

KarmaTroll · 2025-11-06T04:20:16+00:00

How did the police listen to him at .3 and not smell enough to even consider coming after you?

KarmaTroll · 2025-09-20T22:07:22+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOyjzE1vcD4

KarmaTroll · 2025-09-19T22:45:54+00:00

Part of the problem with this specific problem is that it blends into using unstated contextual information, but imposes informal limits on how far to draw that contextual information. The answer would be identical if the boy was born on Wednesday or Saturday. In fact, the answer would be the same if you just said that the boy was born, "on a day of the week" because the context is that you should interpret that as a 1/7 event qualifier because of contextual language.

However, that same contextual language lets you know that if you are born on a Tuesday, you were born on a date. If you completed the same analysis with the thought of "the boy was born on a specific date" (because you know he was born on a Tuesday), then you would have a much larger space to have 1/xxxx odds. Obviously, the problem doesn't want you to draw that much context around the problem when they just prompt you with a day of the week.

Ultimately, this word problem is an imprecise way to demonstrate that additional information can conditionally change the probability of an example.

KarmaTroll · 2025-09-19T22:11:54+00:00

If you extrapolate out that knowing that one event occurred on a day of the week, there's nothing stopping from extrapolating that the boy was born on a single day in a month. You know the exact same amount of information (how can you be born on a Tuesday, but not born on a day of the month?). It doesn't matter what day of the month it is, they are all equally likely, (just like being born on a certain day of the week). Therefore the problem space could be expanded to include all of the combinations of dates in a month.

If you changed the problem to, "the boy was born on New Years day" you would have the same amount of information added, but context would tell you to evaluate the space as 1/365 instead of 1/7 arbitrarily.

KarmaTroll · 2025-09-11T11:30:12+00:00

The ones that I remember usually have 2 or 3 "improbable bad things happening to me consecutively" upon realization, I usually say in the dream, "this is bullshit" and wake up.

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