Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
Glad to see not only our financial infrastructure relies on wealth management agents’ skills at writing formulas, but our army also relies on our general commanders’ skills in Excel.
Funnily Excel is the tool of adults born in 1980; The next generation will only know Canva, so I guess we’ll have great infographics about battle fronts.
Any VBA? I help out with an extremely complex 15+ yr old Excel workbook designed for managing school debate tournaments that's still in active use in the PNW debate world but the complexity is 90% from VBA.
It does inject Excel formulas when creating worksheets but also heavily uses UI controls/dialogs made with the VB6 era WYSIWYG designer built into Excel, plus some COM extensions for SMTP emails, with spreadsheets used both as a pseudo database mostly hidden from the user and as the output for rendering data but the actual logic is mostly VBA.
Excel's VBA IDE feels like a time capsule from 2002, and not in a good way (with some of the most comically unhelpful error messages I've ever seen and extremely aggressive syntax checking that constantly interrupts typing in code). Microsoft increasingly makes it very clear they don't want people using VBA but it still works fine in the latest PC versions from O365 after turning off a few security features/approving some prompts.
I wrote some VBA to try to reduce the size of the workbooks (dozens of MB) but originally it was just massive nested lookups and conditionals written by the people who had been there before me.
The problem with VBA or PS is that you'll be posted out in 2-3 years and your successor might not even know what VBA is or how to access it much less how to write it.
I ended up writing a lot of documentation based on my XLSX archaeology.
Nice, that makes sense. I'm always curious when I hear about other giant Excel monoliths still in use if they're truly a huge tangled web of formulas, or more like a VB6 program stapled to some worksheets that can be distributed as a single .xlsm file like ours.
You're definitely right that 99% of Excel users have no idea that an entire IDE is lurking in the background with Alt-F11 and wouldn't even know where to begin to do a simple fix/tweak. Whereas even a complex formula can at least be mentally parsed as a math equation with some strange ALLCAPS() names scattered throughout, or copy/pasted into Google/an LLM to get started, so much more discoverable than VBA.
Not to mention that the VBA IDE is a horrible dev experience in pretty much every way and frozen in time while regular Excel is actively maintained.
I've explored pulling out all the critical business logic currently in VBA and having Claude Code rewrite to VB.NET that can be called from Excel to gradually phase out VBA for maintainability. But unfortunately despite VBA essentially driving everything, it's tightly coupled to the Excel spreadsheet data model. So I'd have to use a .NET library to emulate the Excel worksheet functions, or pretty much do a full rewrite to use modern .NET methods for the in-memory data manipulation stuff.
Without good visibility into the Excel side of the VBA, Claude Code/Gemini CLI were just flailing so I abandoned that idea for now until I can find a solid conversion path.
> Improving FreeBSD will make it easier to run BSD on non-apple hardware which will eat into their bottom line.
The number of people who want to run FreeBSD on their laptops probably numbers in the hundreds. Not exactly a threat to Apple's bottom line.
On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.
>On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.
It wasn't that long ago that we used to have to endure HN commenters spamming the same copypasta every time BSD was mentioned: "did you know BSD runs your playstation and netflix and <...>. You should donate money!"
Evidently it's not worth more than the cost of assigning engineers to this, otherwise Apple would already be doing it.
There are effectively two Common Lisp worlds: the commercial world where Allegro and Lispworks dominate, and the non-commercial world where SBCL is more or less the only game in town.
Last release was August 14 2024. For a 30+ year old project, that's quite recent methinks.
It clearly doesn't move as fast as SBCL, but I wouldn't call it abandoned either.
ototh, afaiu, SBCL gave up on ARM32. Can't blame them for that, but until 2023 I was still using an early Banana Pi with such. CCL worked there much better (also it's GC seems more robust).
In a lot of smaller cars, you can fold down back row.
And if you are ok, with having trunk open, and tied down, you can transport fridges (I used reno clio, that is slightly bigger). Done that myself (not two door wide ones, one door fridge).
That's said I just found out you can hire van for 35EUR 20min away from where I live, so nowdays I just do that.
I looked it up. It does not appear to me it would be possible to fit an American dishwasher in that car in the box, seats folded down or not, based on the internal dimension and hatch width/height or door width/height. It might be possible if you take it out of the box.
It's important to note that American appliances are generally larger than European ones.
I drive a small very useful car almost every day I have moved a ton of stuff in (including a DRESSER) but it's inarguable that trucks simply have greater utility for this sort of thing. And any time I do need to move something...I just use the cheap pickup I bought so I don't even have to worry about it or spend ages trying to squeeze it in.
Most recent purchase: Christmas tree. Yeah, that wouldn't have fit in my car.
Christmas tree? Real ones are usually tied to the top of the car for transport. Artificial ones absolutely fit inside a car with the back seats folded, and possibly just across the back seat. I bought and transported my current artificial tree in my WRX years ago.
An artificial tree that can’t fit in a car would be a big tree.
1. Let the Christmas tree farmer toss a 8’ tree in the back of my truck, tying the base to the anchors behind the cab. Very little overhang with the tailgate down. Drive away. This is what most people do.
2. Spend 15 minutes balancing the the 8’ Christmas tree on the roof of my Honda Fit with substantial overhang, precariously tying it, I guess leaving the windows down in the cold weather and praying the Highway Patrol doesn’t pull me over. This is not what most people do but I’m sure it can be done.
Lots of things “can” be done but people value convenience.
I don’t know where you live but around me I see people carry trees on top of their cars all the time at Christmas. It’s not complex. You put the tree on the car. You open the doors and tie the tree. You get in and close the doors. You don’t drive with the windows down because why would you? And why would highway patrol pull you over? I’ve never even heard of anyone getting pulled over for carrying a tree or anything else.
Is it more convenient in the back of the truck, though? Sure. I didn’t say otherwise.
I will say that buying a giant truck with poor visibility and 2.5x the kill rate of a sedan so that you can haul a tree once a year is nonsense. It’s a shitty tradeoff and a much smaller truck would do exactly the same job. But little trucks don’t sell like giant trucks because people are not actually buying them for their utility.
Do you think suggesting people who do things you don’t like are just not as enlightened and rational as you a productive way to change hearts and minds?
Of course not. Probably more than 99% of online conversations are a complete and utter waste of time. I would assume there is literally nothing anyone could say to you that would make you get rid of your truck.
With that said, you admitted with your first comment that buying these trucks is based on feelings and not rational.
“Consumers buy what they like and feel like they need and can afford. They place an almost absurdly high value on convenience and not having to think about things like "oh I need to move this thing I need to go rent a truck because I only ever need to do this once every two years, making it irrational to buy one."
Because a 7 bedroom McMansion is unlikely to drive over my child in a parking lot or kill my wife in a collision. The dangers of these giant trucks are not hypothetical. It’s documented that they kill drivers of cars at 2.5x the rate of cars.
In terms of pure annoyance, the McMansion is also not using 3 parking spots at the grocery store.
An minivan will transport almost anything a normal person would want to move, while being more practical the other 99% of the time, but of course they have the wrong image.
A number of my whitewater paddling friends really like their minivans. There are still at least a couple of models available but they have largely gone out of fashion.
Personally I have a mid-size SUV but if you regularly need to transport around a lot of people, minivans seem more practical in general than a lot of the big SUVs.
The anti truck sentiment is directed largely at the ever-growing full size trucks. SUVs get less hate because the market for the absurdly huge SUVs is much smaller than the market for reasonably sized (by American standards) SUVs.
I don’t think smaller trucks get the same level of hate.
I absolutely use the capacity of my mid-size SUV quite often for a variety of purposes. Don't need anything bigger or the towing capacity of a full-size truck. And, given where I live, renting for a weekend would be very inconvenient. Sure, I could use a smaller hatchback/SUV day to day but I'm not going to own two vehicles at this point (though I used to own a two-seater as well) which some folks would probably also object to.
You pick a reasonable compromise and arguably a full-size truck is overkill for many but a Mazda Miata is probably too small for a lot of people even if it largely works for a lot of day to day stuff.
I own a small/mid-size SUV (and a van) so I’m not judging your car choice, but why would you not be able to rent a truck in Boston? Home Depot, Lowe’s, U-Haul, and more all rent trucks.
I don't live in Boston--about 60 to 90 minutes outside.
So, sure, I could pay for a delivery or rent something from Lowe's if I needed to for a specific purpose but I routinely use my mid-size SUV for weekend trips, transporting a canoe, picking up construction supplies, and the like. I need a vehicle in any case and it makes sense to own a somewhat larger one than I really need day to day to run to the grocery store, especially given that parking isn't an issue and my gas mileage really isn't bad.
If one actually lives in a city (which I don't), renting a vehicle can actually be something of a hassle on a weekend based on what I saw people go through when I was in a ski house after school.
If it’s a regular thing, yeah, renting becomes massively inconvenient because of the frequency. I misunderstood your comment to mean that even a 1-time rental would be extremely inconvenient somehow.
I don't need to transport 8 people around and I can always get mulch or gravel delivered. But, yeah, it's not uncommon for me to want to easily stuff a mid-size SUV's worth of stuff into my vehicle for a weekend or longer trip. I could probably do it with a somewhat smaller vehicle but why? The longer drives are probably when I need to do so anyway.
I did also have a smaller car as well when I did more shorter regular local drives but I really don't do those much any longer other than very local drives to the grocery store or nearby hiking trails.
A lot of standard SUVs don't have particularly great ground clearance relative to Jeep Wranglers and the like. Though that doesn't really matter unless you're going off-road in Death Valley and the like. The current Toyota Sienna (which has improved a lot) is better than my Honda Passport in terms on gas mileage.
Yeah. I don’t really need or want high ground clearance. But I would like enough that parking at a curb doesn’t risk dragging the front bumper. My van (Odyssey) is low enough that I’ve scraped on a few unexpectedly tall curbs and I would be pretty uncomfortable with anything resembling off-road. I wouldn’t drive my van anywhere I wouldn’t drive a Civic.
> The current Toyota Sienna … gas mileage.
Better mileage and optional all wheel drive were the only things I preferred about the Sienna. But while I don’t like the mileage the Odyssey gets, I also don’t actually drive far very often so it doesn’t matter much. I put less than 10k miles on my car every year.
I was actually surprised when I looked at what the current Siennas get. I have a friend with a, now, quite old Sienna who was really surprised at how high the mileage of my relatively new Honda Passport was. And the current hybrid Sienna is a fair bit better.
Do you really, actually, not comprehend the difference between a national STEM economy and a fast food restaurant, and how the two situations are not at all analogous, or were you just trying to come up with something snappy?
Are you referring to the taxpayer support of state (not private) colleges, which subsidizes the tuition of in-state students? Foreign student don't get that subsidized rate.
Or do you mean the taxpayer-supported research - that anyone with an internet connection can download the results of, from anywhere in the world, without paying a penny of tuition?
If we were to compare it to a transaction, I think something like California exporting alfalfa to Saudi Arabia might make more sense. We've only but so much water to use and it's far from absurd to question if it makes sense to let our limited resources get drained for exporting things elsewhere.
"Went" is a powerful word. With suitable helpers it can replace "proceeded", as you demonstrated, "attended" ("I went to a good school") as well as "became" ("On hearing this, Joe went all silent") or "said" ("So then she went 'Dude!' and we all laughed") and hundreds of other words.
Only a handful of words ("got", "y'know" and "fuck") rival its versatility.
Yes, I should have said "Samsung" rather than Android for that, however I stopped with the Pixels when my Pixel 3 (I think?) received an update which caused buzzing in the earpiece, and every "fix" didn't fix it.
Though I think the 3 received the buggiest updates of any phone ever.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.