#Data Efficiency

[rajaniesh]

Supercharge Your Data: Advanced Optimization and Maintenance for Delta Tables in Fabric

Dive into the final part of our series on optimizing data ingestion with Spark in Microsoft Fabric! Discover advanced optimization techniques and essential maintenance strategies for Delta tables to ensure high performance and efficiency in your data Ops

Welcome to the third and final installment of our blog series on optimizing data ingestion with Spark in Microsoft Fabric. In our previous posts, we explored the foundational elements of Microsoft Fabric and Delta Lake, delving into the differences between managed and external tables, as well as their practical applications. Now, it’s time to take your data management skills to the next…

[sharingknowledgewithmouli]

Efficiently Split Names in Excel: Using Text to Columns, Flash Fill, or Ctrl+E

Efficiently Split Names in Excel: Using Text to Columns, Flash Fill, or Ctrl+E

Do you struggle with splitting names in Excel? Are you tired of manually separating first and last names from a combined cell? Look no further! In this short tutorial video, we’ll teach you how to use two built-in Excel tools – Text to Columns and Flash Fill or Ctrl+E – to quickly and easily split names. We’ll guide you through the process step-by-step and provide helpful tips for handling more…

[mactiir]

sorry former gifted kids and burnt out perfectionists but: the only way to get better at something is to do it, and to repeatedly suck at it. failing. sometimes for years. until one day you step back and look at what has just been produced by your beautiful hands and beautiful brain (which are themselves the products of eons of failures-until-it worked) and think: wait a minute. this looks different. this feels different.

[dailypokemoncrochet]

A WEBSITE!

I finally got my neocities website up and running!! Thanks to @gildedware for building the foundation!!!!

I'm currently filling the website with all my photos and whatnot for the *checks notes* 668 Pokemon I've crocheted! That's so MANY. I've got even more project-related stuff to do now yay!! And what's also great is that if Tumblr ever does go down, we can still track my progress and have everything documented on the website!! And I'll be able to add a lot of neat stuff to it in general!

I've still got a lot of work to do on it, but go check out what's up so far!!! dailypokemoncrochet.neocities.org !

[transformersbrainrot]

Imagine: Rewind meets Optimus Prime at some point during the war and starts fanboying SUUUPER hard... NOT because that's fucking Optimus Prime or anything but because Orion Pax is a fucking LEGEND in the archivist community

[lonely-night]

Janeway/Seven in 6.08 “One Small Step”

[bakedbananners]

I need my life optimized but not in a silicon valley ai tech bro way more like in an autistic way

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Popular Information:

Several of Elon Musk’s associates installed at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have received unprecedented access to federal human resources databases containing sensitive personal information for millions of federal employees. According to two members of OPM staff with direct knowledge, the Musk team running OPM has the ability to extract information from databases that store medical histories, personally identifiable information, workplace evaluations, and other private data. The staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and feared professional retaliation. Musk Watch also reviewed internal OPM correspondence confirming that expansive access to the database was provided to Musk associates.

The arrangement presents acute privacy and security risks, one of the OPM staffers said. Among the government outsiders granted entry to the OPM databases is University of California Berkeley student Akash Bobba, a software engineer who graduated high school less than three years ago. He previously interned at Meta and Palantir, a technology firm chaired by Musk-ally and fellow billionaire Peter Thiel. Edward Coristine, another 2022 high school graduate and former software engineering intern at Musk’s Neuralink, has also been given access to the databases.

Other Musk underlings embedded at OPM following President Donald Trump’s inauguration include the agency’s new chief of staff, Amanda Scales, who until January was a human resources staffer at xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, and Brian Bjelde, who has spent the past 21 years at Musk's SpaceX, including the last 10 leading the human resources department. They are joined by Gavin Kliger, a former Twitter software engineer serving as a special advisor to the director of OPM, and Riccardo Biasini, a former software engineer at Musk’s tunneling venture, the Boring Company. OPM did not respond to a request for comment. Shortly after Trump took office, OPM installed Greg Hogan to serve as its new chief information officer (CIO). Hogan was tapped to replace OPM CIO Melvin Brown, who had accepted the job less than a month ago. The civil servants who oversee the OPM’s information technology services were then instructed to provide access to Musk's associates, according to the OPM staffers who spoke to Musk Watch. One of the OPM staffers received an email from the agency’s new leadership instructing them to give Musk’s team “access [to] the system as an admin user" and "code read and write permissions." “They have access to the code itself, which means they can make updates to anything that they want,” the staffer explained. USAJOBS, the federal government’s official hiring site, was one of the systems that Musk's associates were given access to. The database stores personal information — Social Security numbers, home addresses, employment records — provided by private individuals who have applied for federal jobs, regardless of whether the applicants went on to work for the government. Musk’s aides were also given access to the OPM’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) system. Contained within the EHRI are the Social Security numbers, dates of birth, salaries, home addresses, and job descriptions of all civil government workers, along with any disciplinary actions they have faced. “They’re looking through all the position descriptions… to remove folks,” one of the OPM staffers said of Musk’s team. “This is how they found all these DEI offices and had them removed — [by] reviewing position description level data.” Other databases Musk’s team has access to include USA Staffing, an onboarding system; USA Performance, a job performance review site; and HI, which the government uses to manage employee health care. “The health insurance one scares me because it's HIPAA [protected] information, but they have access to all this stuff,” the OPM staffer noted.

[...] A new server being used to control these databases has been placed in a conference room that Musk’s team is using as their command center, according to an OPM staffer. The staffer described the server as a piece of commercial hardware they believed was not obtained through the proper federal procurement process. There is a legal requirement that the installation of a new server undergo a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), a formal process to ensure the change would not create any security vulnerabilities. But in this instance, the staff believes there was no PIA. “So this application and corresponding hardware are illegally operating,” they added. On Friday, Reuters reported that some senior civil servants have been blocked from accessing the EHRI and other OPM systems, making it difficult for career OPM employees to know what Musk’s team has been examining or modifying. In the same report, the outlet revealed the team had moved sofa beds into the agency's headquarters to continue their work around the clock.

This should be a major national news scandal.

Elon Musk and the underlings he put in place at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have jeopardized data privacy and national security.

[kingofthering-two]

Got distracted writing the article and didn't notice it was already well past 2am. Going to nicely put my computer away but the good news is, the article on Marc's track results (where does he perform best) should be ready to post tomorrow.

[rajaniesh]

Unlock Powerful Data Strategies: Master Managed and External Tables in Fabric Delta Lake

Are you ready to unlock powerful data strategies and take your data management skills to the next level? In our latest blog post, we dive deep into mastering managed and external tables in Delta Lake within Microsoft Fabric.

Welcome to our series on optimizing data ingestion with Spark in Microsoft Fabric. In our first post, we covered the capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and its integration with Delta Lake. In this second installment, we dive into mastering Managed and External tables. Choosing between managed and external tables is a crucial decision when working with Delta Lake in Microsoft Fabric. Each option…

[sharingknowledgewithmouli]

Excel Name Splitting Made Simple: Using Text to Columns and Flash Fill or Ctrl+E

Excel Name Splitting Made Simple: Using Text to Columns and Flash Fill or Ctrl+E

If you have a list of names in Excel that are combined into one cell, it can be frustrating and time-consuming to manually split them into first and last names. Fortunately, Excel offers two built-in tools that make this process quick and easy: Text to Columns and Flash Fill or Ctrl+E. In this tutorial video, we’ll show you step-by-step how to use Text to Columns to split names based on a…

[asinglegrainofsandv3]

Long and personal post, im just being emotional about Star Trek, don’t mind me

Watching Star Trek made me and my Father’s relationship even better because not only can he share more of his interests with me but we use ST metaphors when having communication issues and it really helps.

Being Autistic myself, and my father being Autistic and ADHD, him being diagnosed with ADHD at 43 and still not a solid Autism diagnosis and me with my diagnosis in high school… well it’s difficult to connect sometimes because we have vastly different assumptions regarding human behavior.

As far back as I can remember, my father distanced himself from humanity, separated how others act and how he acts. He tried to instill the same mindset in me (now I know it was his way of coping/masking), the idea that we are separate. We think better, we are more intelligent than the average person, we understand the wider scene of things and moral applications more.

A week or so ago, when he was having one of his “my body is different than humans, I don’t need xyz emotionally” moments, I compared him to Spock. He paused, thought it out, and agreed with me.

Yesterday, he confided in me that he feels like ‘Spock, if Spock was born on Earth’ and I understood more of what my father has been going through than I have ever before.

[ivygorgon]

An open letter to the U.S. Congress

Stop Elon Musk from stealing our personal information!

6,399 so far! Help us get to 10,000 signers!

I am writing to urge you to stop Elon Musk from stealing our personal information.

It appears Musk has hacked into millions of Americans’ personal information and now has access to their taxes, Social Security, student debt and financial aid filings. Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency was not created by Congress—it is operating with zero transparency and in clear violation of federal law.

This violation of our privacy is causing American families across the country to fear for our privacy, safety and dignity. If this goes unchecked, Musk could steal our private data to help in making cuts to vital government programs that our families depend on—and to make it easier to cut taxes for himself and other billionaires.

We must have guardrails to stop this unlawful invasion of privacy.

Congress and the Trump administration must stop Elon Musk from stealing Americans' tax and other private data.

▶ Created on February 10 by Jess Craven · 6,398 signers in the past 7 days

📱 Text SIGN PUTWGR to 50409

🤯 Text FOLLOW JESSCRAVEN101 to 50409

[synthaphone]

so umm why can't you just use pokemon home 😂

oh i use pokemon HOME, lol. the thing is that i use it so often that ive identified a bunch of problems with it that drive me nuts!!!

ive listed a bunch of my issues on here before, but a big one is: im currently trying to put ribbons on a bunch of my old favorite pokemon, but you can only see what ribbons a pokemon has from the mobile app version of HOME.

so to know who still needs what ribbons, i’d have to boot up the mobile version, check which pokemon have which ribbons, and write their names and what ribbons they’re missing down- so that when i close the mobile app and open the switch app (you cant have both open simultaneously), i can remember which guys i need to move where. now with the spreadsheet, i can filter by ‘Sentimental’ (my category for my favorite individual pokemon) and ‘Pokemon that dont have the Paldea Champion Ribbon’ and be presented with a list of who is missing that ribbon

but also, im collecting info about pokemon i still have in earlier games, because i kept having moments where i’d go ‘what happened to DODE, the Dodrio that my best friend caught when she was 8 years old and then traded to me when we were in middle school?’ and have to start booting up all of my different carts across multiple generations. so why not make a comprehensive directory that spans across all of my games, that i can update to show which game a pokemon currently resides in?

also i just love making elaborate spreadsheets and being able to sort and filter data- its fun for me to be able to see all of the different species i have in Moon balls, or tag pokemon that i received from friends with notes about what i remember, and not have to worry about those tags being lost if i ever move one of those pokemon from HOME to a game (this is how the tagging system included with HOME works lol. i tried to use it! i made a bunch of tags and dutifully tagged almost all the pokemon stored in my HOME, only to find out later that if i moved one to a game and then put it back later, all the tags would be Gone and id have to reapply them all. super irritating!!)

oh another reason i just remembered- i will never remember the hidden ability for every pokemon species, and HOME doesnt have any special indicator if a pokemons ability is its hidden one. on my spreadsheet, i added a column where i can check off a box if a pokemon has its HA, in addition to the column that lists the name of the ability.

[kresnikcest]

Damn it you’re gonna make me use Python again aren’t you…

[alyfoxxxen]

Judge denies union demand to block DOGE’s access to Labor Department data - POLITICO

"[The government] also had agreed to limit DOGE’s interactions with DOL as a result of the lawsuit, pending Friday’s hearing. But Bates’ ruling clears the way for DOGE to begin examining dozens of Labor Department systems, including those that relate to workers compensation claims, workplace safety investigations and key gauges of the U.S. economy."