1. I wish that people start taking back their device ownership. Right to repair is an extremely important thing. Like that Nexus 6P that I've recently repaired by jamming another battery into it, now it's at 110-ish% health according to AccuBattery. And it cost me.. €10 or so? All the while if I wasn't able to get in there, it would've been a €120 paperweight (and that's not even considering the €300-ish (? Someone please fill me in on that) price it retailed at back in 2015 when it was a flagship).

(edit the so many'th: according to https://express.co.uk/life-style/... the base model was apparently £449 at release, haven't been able to verify it though.. point is, a paperweight at such prices would've been quite a bummer, I mean for me it was even one given that it failed a mere few months after purchase for €120.. €40/m for a phone ain't nothing :/)

Right to repair is an extremely important thing, and the ability to do so shouldn't ever be impeded. Users should become able again to service the devices that they own.

2. I wish that people start caring about their privacy again. Google and Facebook and the likes are large companies, but at the end of the day, that's all they are. Large companies. And they're hungry for your data, not because they're selling it, rather because they're collecting it to an extent which they shouldn't. Over at DDG (https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckg...) they explain a very much viable alternative revenue model pretty well. Additionally, there's several tools which you can use to limit the amount of data that's being collected about you. These include but are not limited to Firefox, NoScript, ad blockers (I personally use uBlock), a trustworthy VPN (ideally one of your own), and Tor.

3. I wish that software would become less inefficient. It really pains me to see that applications with functionality that could be implemented in a couple of MB at most come at a size of several hundreds of MB. 1% efficiency, even the inefficient as fuck tungsten light bulbs weren't that awful!!! Imagine what could be done with all the hardware we have available nowadays, if every piece of software would be around 80% efficient as is a common norm in electronics. Just looking at Linux which is still in many ways convoluted, modern desktops with a couple hundred MB of RAM usage? You've got it! So why can't OS's like Windows (although I have to say, huge improvements have been made there over the last few years) and browsers like Firefox and Chrome be more like that? I really don't understand.

There's several more wishes I have of course, but those are the most important ones.. hopefully I'll be able to see at least one of them come true during my life.

Passover cleaning, for a keyboard geek.

On the right, I duct-taped a funnel and mesh screen on a vacuum cleaner motor, since I ran out of compressed air.

The keyboard is a Model-M reboot from Unicomp, bought on Massdrop (https://www.massdrop.com/r/JDLA54).

So, the PowerQuery type system appears to be a Joke.

For those you that aren't familiar with PowerQuery, it's the ETL language that is used in PowerBI, and some other parts of the MS PowerPlatform. It was formerly known as the M Language.

The language has a type system, that includes records (think hashes) and tables, which are, for practical purposes, a list of records.

The wonderful M language specification document states that:

"Any value that is a record conforms to the intrinsic type record, which does not place any restrictions on the field names or values within a record value. A record-type value is used to restrict the set of valid names as well as the types of values that are permitted to be associated with those names."

Except that the restriction is only to the set of valid names, and the language interpreter doesn't throw an error when I place a number into a text field, but also doesn't do any sort of implicit conversion. This is all hunky-dory, until you then try to load the data into the Tabular Model that underlies the query engine, which does expect the values to be of the type that is specified, and it throws an error.

But PowerBI, in its infinite wisdom, doesn't actually *record* the error, it merely tells you the error exists, and tells you to go back to the query editor to list the errors thrown up by the powerquery engine. Which, as previously stated, doesn't throw up an error for this instance.

So I've spent all afternoon trying to work out why my queries aren't loading, because I have an error that doesn't exist. fml.

[You can follow this issue on the communtiy feedback site here: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/... ]