Entitled middle-aged white men sabotaging their own careers is my new favourite sub-genre of news. Well, up until it happens to me, at least.

Read The power of AI is worrying senior Labour figures – as is the fear of ‘falling behind the public’ by Dan Milmo (The Guardian)

Only wrote to my MP expressing such concerns… 3 years ago. Better late than never?

Friday 7 July 2023

Dear Andrew Selous,

I’m deeply concerned by the lack of urgency within the current
government (and, frankly, across the country) to legislate regarding
“AI”. I can’t really be more specific than that because the legislative
concerns are enormous: crime, copyright and employment, just for
starters.

I’ve solved the mystery of poltergeists. It’s just short-term memory fails and “blindness”…

“I swear, I JUST looked there!”

All the windows are open. Watching horror movies with the subtitles on so the screaming doesn’t bother the neighbours 😂

Shout out to all the people that complained about Google AI Overviews and continued to use Android, Chrome and even Google search itself. You really struck a blow for internet freedom.

Posted on
by

I had an interesting problem recently when the JSON output from an API started to return a null value instead of empty list. This broke my PowerQuery so I wanted to share a fix.

Originally, I used the built-in “Extract values (from a list)” feature, which concatenated them to make comma separated values:

= Table.TransformColumns(#"Removed Columns", {"List_Field", each Text.Combine(List.Transform(_, Text.From), ","), type text})

And that worked fine. Until the content of that field was not a list. Evidently, this field had previously contained an empty JSON list if it contained no values. I’ve never looked at the JSON itself so I had no idea. So, when the API started returning null for that field instead List.Transform failed:

Expression.Error: We cannot convert the value null to type List.

In some of my other Queries it was also failing “silently” because this step was immediately followed by a RemoveRowsWithErrors step. Whoops. Having no idea that the API output had changed (or what it originally contained) was my big problem here. Took me a while to understand what had gone wrong and how.

The fix itself isn’t complex, simply check if the value is a list before concatenation:

= Table.TransformColumns(#"Removed Columns", {"List_Field", each if Value.Is(_, type list) then Text.Combine(List.Transform(_, Text.From), ",") else null, type text})

However, that DOES make me wonder why the built-in doesn’t automatically add code to check the type. Can’t be that hard…