sadly, business law says once you become the dominant product, you no longer have any incentive to invest, especially when you have pretty much no real competitors
As a matter of fact at that point you're pretty much incentivized to degrade the product or service because you've exhausted every growth vector in that market
Motherfuckers got ADS in their god damn OSes nowadays what the fuck
the only mildly good word processor i've used is pages, especially if you want to add pictures and put text in silly places, which is all a fucking nightmare on libreoffice, word and google docs too. it fucking blows for academic papers though.
An optimist says the glass is half full a pessimist says it's half empty. Excel says it's January 2.
They’re probably bruteforcing a 200k row vlookup when they should’ve just added the field to their original report but they don’t know SQL. Instead they’re mashing two data sets together without even sorting the data properly
Excel is good as a scratchpad, but the second you need to warehouse data or use it in production you need SQL. One thing that tickles me about my job is that we use ArcGIS, which is essentially a rudimentary drafting program slapped on a geospatial SQL database.
So everyone is constantly running SQL queries through the programs simplified drop down query editor all day, doing pretty complex joins, relates, and calculations. Then they turn around and use Excel for everything else...
I've seen people use excel almost like a crutch or a baby blanket. They know it albeit not very well but it is all they know.
I took two Information systems classes in college and the first actually taught VBA and MS Access SQL so I had at least a foundation once I began my career. The other class focused entirely on XML (XBRL) and it was the worst waste of time and money.
I actually like Excel a fair amount tbh. Obviously don't use it for what you shouldn't be using it for.
Bill Gates could have been good like Stallman but instead he chose to be a bourgeois tool. Many such cases. A lot of physicists are bourgeois tools. Most engineers too. Mathematicians are the coolest STEMlords and this is reflected in the gender makeup of classes.
The best lecturer I had in undergrad was an Egyptian-French mathematician. He lent me his notes when I crashed my bike and turned up late. The worst was an American engineer. He sent me a long-winded email like a nerd (my fault but still. Fucking lib).
I dropped out of college before I finished my math degree, but this is all completely true. The interesting thing about math people and their technology is their way more likely to run Linux, use foss, and hate M$ than even the so-called computer scientists. In my first ever college math class they taught me Latex, which was required for all future assignments, and which the prof taught use by recording videos of his Emacs + Gentoo setup.
CS people are often cool in my experience. The only uni exam I ever got 100 in was a CS exam. But to be fair it was an easy one. Good lecturer. Didn't get 100 for the subject because I didn't like doing assignments.
The thing about cs people is the professors and lecturers are the cool ones, because they're the onrs who didn't immediately leave after their bachelors to chase VC tech money.
Ah. That makes sense now. The ability to resist temptation.
Scott Aaronson is the least bad SneerClub target imho. He needs a good Marxist psychologist. Most guys do, especially liberal psychiatrists.
:thinkin-lenin: This guy is who I'd picture as this type of dude, so I think you're onto something. Mathematician and computer scientist, the look of a graybeard, etc
Counter anecdote, in the math department of the school I went to the head of the department and their spouse where two weird religious types (not that religion is bad or anything in itself, of course). The applied math person in the department and the statistician were chill though and I generally agree that engineers are often chuddy. I feel like biology types are usually cool but then again the first conservationist were eugenicist and racist.
My exact experience. Math majors/professors were the coolest while engineering majors/professors were by far the worst, pure distilled STEMness.
People think I'm too harsh in my intense personal hatred for guys like Gates and Jobs and so forth but like I was there pretty much from the start. I watched personal computers go from machines that would only do exactly what you told them if you told them exactly the right way to small fragile toys that don't really belong to you and mostly exist to spy on you while ruthlessly and recklessly manipulating your attention and generally just making the world worse.
The only good word processing experience is markdown + pandoc. WYSIWYG was a mistake.
I used to own - and wear - a t-shirt that said "I am a LaTeX fetishist" when I was younger.
Only one person ever commented on it
Latex is good for like your math thesis, but most of the time it's huge overkill because it's pretty hard to do certain things. The cool thing about pandoc is that you can stuff latex math mode into it, even though it's usually just markdown, so it's the best of both worlds.
Probably because it's considerably less pleasant and more difficult to work with and there would be no benefit to doing so 98% of the time
MS Word has figured out how to suck a lot less over the last five years. The current edition is almost usable.
I fucking hate that the government uses shitty Microsoft and Adobe document formats for everything. That means you can expect all that malformed trash to be around for another 50 years minimum.
