Notices by allan (allan@mastodon.club), page 2

@keithzg I consider it a major victory that I mostly broke everyone of the habit of printing off reports from Proprietary Database™️ and typing it all back into their spreadsheets 😵

Of course all of this business is just an elaborate exercise in working around the obvious: this whole mess is exactly what relational databases are designed for, but every enterprise database solution anyone around here has seen was a utter tire fire and so...excel.

@kai I think most of the world runs on excel. Whenever people get all high on machine learning revolutionizing the work place I counter that until you can implement that in the oldest version of Excel still inexplicably on senior management's computer it will never happen.

The script was written to replace the previous huge, complicated, and impossible to maintain spreadsheet because it was huge, complicated, and impossible to maintain.

But nobody (well besides me and the original author) can maintain anything but a spreadsheet (with no vba) so it must be a spreadsheet.

I'm reimplementing a perfectly functional piece of code in a byzantine excel spreadsheet, because business.

One of my favourite podcasts, Let's Find Out, did an episode on what climate change means for #Edmonton
https://letsfindoutpodcast.com/2019/07/31/episode-36-the-climate-proof-farm/

tl;dr the growing season will get longer and we'll be able to grow things that normally won't this far north. Precipitation will be a major factor though, we are already prone to droughts and that may get worse.

@mpjgregoire will there be a spike in 2018? Probably.

But will the increase be as large as estimated? maybe? probably not? Extreme estimates have a habit of shrinking when the final data comes in.

You also have to take into account publication bias: the only stats that get reported are the record breaking ones. So while it may be a big increase, year over year, that doesn't necessarily mean anything over, say, a twenty year period.

@mpjgregoire maybe it's just my personal bias, as part of my job is doing estimates that ultimately get rolled up into Environment Canada's number, but I don't put a lot of faith in the projections.

That BBC article is referencing a projection based on estimated energy usage in 2018, not actual numbers. Which you can tell right away because the article was published early January 2019 and nobody will know what the US emissions were until well into 2019

@kai other than recent misadventures in photo-syncing I mostly use dropbox for syncing my password database and random other files, like my resume and such

@kai there was a good dropbox-style sync tool for linux, grive, but google changed how they do things and broke it in some fundamental way.

There is also a fuse thing, but in my experience it is really slow and buggy af.

@keithzg @mpjgregoire in general, though, if someone doesn't cite their baseline and assumptions there's almost no way to confirm or deny all but most extreme claims without going down a very deep, very tedious, rabbit hole of accounting pedantry

For example those two charts I posted specifically exclude impacts due to land use. When included things change significantly depending on how one accounts for, say, forests being a carbon sink (or not).

@mpjgregoire @keithzg the upside to using the NIRs is that they all nominally use the same methodology for estimating emissions, and they've been doing it for 20+ years so there's good data consistency.

The downside is that there's a 2 year lag in results.

So it could be that there is a trend but it is too recent to show up here? Or the trend they're talking about is really small.

@keithzg @mpjgregoire they could be talking about emissions rates or emissions intensity? It's really hard to say.

Just based on the UNFCCC National Inventory Reports (NIR) I don't see what they're talking about at all.
https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/transparency-and-reporting/reporting-and-review-under-the-convention/greenhouse-gas-inventories-annex-i-parties/national-inventory-submissions-2019

@kai installing it on xubuntu was as easy as apt, and it basically sets itself up really easily. Ditto the app.

I did find lan discovery pretty much didn't work, I needed to put in the IP address of my laptop to get them to find each other on the lan. Otherwise traffic was routing off into the internets and back again which made the transfer rate terrible.

Not a big deal since my laptop has a static IP, but still...

@kai I just installed it and it seems to be working pretty great for backing up my devices to my laptop, which is mostly what I want out of life.

it took some fiddling for it to use the lan to actually do the syncing and I'll have to think about how I want this running.

Contractors spent the morning jack-hammering away the parkade under my window and now, in the afternoon, maintenance is testing the alarm system. 😵

@kai that said I find the google drive stuff for linux suck. I like the dropbox app, which just syncs the folder old school style.

@kai I use both, mostly as a way of not paying for any cloud storage services.

I mostly stopped using dropbox once they restricted the number of devices that could use it.