The Unlikely Overlap of Data Formatting and Social Awkwardness

Description

This meme presents a simple Venn diagram with two overlapping circles, making a clever and cynical joke by connecting two completely unrelated concepts. The left circle, colored grey, is labeled 'Incel'. The right circle, colored green, is labeled 'Excel'. The intersection between them, a darker green, contains the unifying phrase: 'Incorrectly assuming something is a date'. The humor is a multi-layered pun. On one hand, it refers to the social awkwardness associated with the 'incel' subculture, where a person might misinterpret a friendly outing as a romantic date. On the other, it points to a notorious and deeply frustrating feature of Microsoft Excel, where the software aggressively auto-formats various text and number inputs into calendar dates (e.g., converting gene names like 'MARCH1' to '1-Mar' or identifiers like '1-10' to 'October 1st'). This is a well-known source of data corruption, especially in scientific research, and is a major pain point for data analysts, scientists, and developers

Common Tags

DataFormats ExcelSpreadsheets SoftwareBugs DataValidation DataQuality

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick I've written data validation scripts stricter than a bouncer at a club, all because Excel is more optimistic about finding a date in my CSVs than a fresh college grad on Tinder

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

I've written data validation scripts stricter than a bouncer at a club, all because Excel is more optimistic about finding a date in my CSVs than a fresh college grad on Tinder
Anonymous

Excel parsing a CSV is the incel of data tools - ignores your schema boundaries, insists every hyphenated string is a “date,” then gaslights the pipeline when half your primary keys disappear
Anonymous

After 20 years in the industry, I've seen Excel turn MARCH1 genes into March 1st, version numbers into dates, and entire research papers get retracted due to auto-formatting. The real tragedy? We still deploy critical financial models in spreadsheets that think '1/2' means January 2nd, not 0.5. At least the incels only misinterpret social cues - Excel misinterprets scientific data and crashes pharmaceutical studies
Anonymous

This meme brilliantly captures Excel's infamous date auto-formatting behavior that has corrupted countless datasets, including forcing the scientific community to rename genes like SEPT1 and MARCH1 because Excel kept converting them to dates. It's the kind of implicit type coercion that makes you appreciate strongly-typed languages and proper data validation pipelines - because when your ETL process has to include 'undo Excel's helpful assumptions' as a preprocessing step, you know something has gone terribly wrong with the tool-data contract
Anonymous

The non-idempotent step in every ETL: someone opens the CSV in Excel and silently converts IDs into 4/5/24
Anonymous

Excel's date autocorrect: turning '45053' into Feb 14th, 2023 faster than an incel spots 'friendzone' as flirtation
Anonymous

Excel: the only ETL that confidently turns string IDs into anniversaries - SEPT9 → 9‑Sep, 03/04 → “depends on locale” - which is why we enforce schema-on-write
@callofvoid0 4y

wait what?
1. @sylfn 4y
  
  from google translate
2. @sylfn 4y
  
  An incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ IN-sel, an abbreviation of "involuntary celibate") is a member of an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. (copypaste from wikipedia)
  
  @callofvoid0 4y
  
  definition even harder than word😂
  
  @feskow 4y
  
  A dude who wants to date a woman but always blames the woman (like, rage at her when she denies a sex)
  
  @callofvoid0 4y
  
  oh thanks
  
  @kitbot256 4y
  
  not just blames the women. He is never dated by anyone, at least on their own free will. Possibly because he starts talking about his collection of Star Wars characters right after "hello", or maybe something else but no less unattractive.
  
  @SamsonovAnton 4y
  
  This is weird then. Because... what on earth can possibly be more sexually appealing than a collection of Star Wars characters? 🤪
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  So me talking about sorting algorithms and how counting sort is cheating is not attractive? /s
  
  @kitbot256 4y
  
  absolutely. Everybody is divided into two groups. One group thinks that it is nerd stuff and not attractive. Another group knows that counting sort has a very specific application, but is in no sense cheating.
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  it is cheating when competing with general sorting algorithms in sorting a randomized linearly ascending list with no holes - that's how comments like "why not use counting sort for everything?" appear in the comment sections of "the sound of sorting algorithms" videos
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Go go radix sort
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  radix sort beste
  
  @SamsonovAnton 4y
  
  omfg I think it won't hurt to add small explanations to the meme pictures - 'cause I really thought that "Incel" may just be some new software, like a popular JavaScript framework, that messes with date formats, too.
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  wont be surprised if incel.js exists
  
  @feskow 4y
  
  Well, it's an empty project. Does that count? https://www.npmjs.com/package/incel
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  it does... (but is cant mess dates)
@callofvoid0 4y

thanks anyway
@rmshko 4y

Ahahahahahahahahahahaha THIS IS SO GOOD
1. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  beta males: lol nice alpha males: lmao that's funny delta males:
  
  @rmshko 4y
  
  Still laughing
  
  @rmshko 4y
  
  But just realise how perfect this joke is!
@dosboxd 4y

this one is good
@p4vook 4y

Stalin sort
1. @p4vook 4y
  
  On each pass eliminate all elements that are less than previous
@sylfn 4y

std::vector<T>::clear()-sort
1. @p4vook 4y
  
  Legendary O(1) sort
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  clear() is O(n)
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  lmao
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Of course you should override delete with "do nothing"
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  with no-delete allocator?
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Cheers to Burunduk
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Aka Sergey Kopeliovich, the father of Russian optimizations
  
  @affirvega 4y
  
  Stalin Sort
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Dude
@RiedleroD 4y

bah, I prefer Intelligent design sort. It has O(1)
@p4vook 4y

*tovarisch
1. @sylfn 4y
  
  origins from "tovar" (product)
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Morphology in ancap 👍
@kitbot256 4y

And funny enough how many people in this thread can as much as implement bubble sort in a whiteboard interview? What about radix? Merge?
1. @p4vook 4y
  
  Sufmas in 10 minutes
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  sufmas ---> suffix array [non-russian won't understand sufmas because "suffiksniy massiv"]
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Where's your boat, cap?
  
  @kitbot256 4y
  
  you would rather https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/sufmas/?hl=en ?
2. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  I can do all three :)
3. @sylfn 4y
  
  void bubble_sort(vector<int> &a) { sort(begin(a), end(a)); }
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Error: forbidden to use sort
  
  @kitbot256 4y
  
  that's not bubble
4. @thematdev 4y
  
  *kicks in*
5. @thematdev 4y
  
  i can do it
  
  @p4vook 4y
  
  Wow but how?

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The Unlikely Overlap of Data Formatting and Social Awkwardness

Description

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Common Tags

Comments

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