LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.
Yeah, there’s no VBA support anywhere. LibreOffice has their own scripting thing, and it works ok but it’s not compatible with the VBA and VBA stuff broadly doesn’t work there.
Even without the VBA though, it’s missing basically any feature added in 2019 like Lambda and filter and dynamic arrays.
I wouldn’t consider myself a power user, I would say I am a “high level basic user”, and even I have noticed the shortcomings. And this is also coming from a dude who very much wants a FOSS thing to succeed over Microsoft.
I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.
Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company though.
I think the only way we can actually solve the problem is to get a FOSS product up to snuff with Excel. I use Julia if I need really elaborate number crunching, but I don’t view it as a substitute for Excel; the interactivity of spreadsheets is really useful, especially when you’re actively developing stuff.
Yep! It actually made the front page of HN a few days ago :)
It supports Office 365 and Office 2024 Home works as of about two days ago.
I think it would require very little if any effort to get Home and Business working but the license for that was too expensive (though pull requests are welcome!)
Currently limited to stuff that can be activated on Microsoft’s website. I tried very hard and was ultimately unsuccessful at getting Office 2024 Pro Plus working from a gray-market key I bought on Groupon, because the MAK activation stuff appears to depend on a lot of stuff that Wine/Proton doesn’t implement. Again, pull requests are welcome if someone here figures out how to do it.
I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.
No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.
I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.
I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.
My wife and father-in-law used to use Skype all the time, and when it shut down, the stars aligned as I suggested they try Signal and they both loved it.
> I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.
As I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate people who are willing to be a little rude in order to avoid wasting people's time or giving them false impressions.
For example, when recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn now, I almost always say something like "I don't want to waste your time or mine: what is the salary range?" It might be considered a bit "rude" to immediately jump to money, but I figure that that's less rude than wasting 30-90 minutes of time for a job that I have no chance of accepting.
I also try and be a little upfront if I don't like food someone has prepared. I try not to be too much of a dick, but if someone prepared something that I don't like and they ask my opinion, I will say that I wasn't a huge fan. Again, maybe a bit rude, but I also don't want to mislead people.
It kind of goes against my gut; I, like most people, don't really want to make people feel bad and I certainly am not immune to people-pleasing, but I've tried to fight that for the greater cause of being more-honest and upfront with how I speak.
I actually think it’s more about the emotional maturity to cut to the chase and address someone’s actual concerns.
I’m a big fan of bluntness / honest feedback, but it can still be done very rudely when inappropriate
like the svp observed that the ic was saying the details, not because the ic needed to share them, but because the ic was anxious that the svp didn’t view them as competent. So the svp cut to the chase and addressed that directly
For your food example, a host might ask if you like the food - not because they care about their cooking skills - but just want to make sure you had a good time. So, saying you don’t like the food and giving cooking suggestions would need to be accompanied by some reassurance that you still enjoyed their company or beautiful home or something. Otherwise it’s still rude
In the most recent case of food, it was a friend's cooking. I was more afraid that I would be pressured to have more of the food I didn't like, so I told them something like "you know, I really don't think this is my thing." Every people-pleasing instinct that I had told me to lie and say that I liked the food, because it was something they worked on and I don't want to disappoint people, but I fought through that.
They didn't seem to be too upset over it, but they know me pretty well.
I frame this differently - it’s about getting out of your own head and think about what’s useful to the other person. And making this a habit so it’s easy.
Providing feedback on the meal is useful for their next guest, if they are interested in improving. If they aren’t, just say it’s fine and move on.
Shifting focus outside of yourself is covered in a lot of areas but Never Split The Difference stuck with me, written by a hostage negotiator.
The first chapter or two of the book is good for the general principles. I found the later chapters about big org management to be less helpful.
I personally go one step further and mentally adjust radical candor to be winsome candor. I'm explicitly adding some empathy and humanity by doing that, so that I'm more likely to treat others how I'd want to be treated, even when the conversation is hard.
Having your subordinates think you’re dismissive is a risk when you’re SVP, and it’s one with a blurrier line.
Plenty of people would have come away from this interaction without the level of introspection the author had, and thought, “Man, that SVP is a jerk.” This can add up into frustration and, given time, turnover.
My claim wasn’t that SVP was ineffective - the point was clearly made and understood.
My claim is that it would have taken slightly more words to get that point across without any reputational downside to the SVP.
Whether that cost is worth paying is a question of culture and style.
Something that I feel like I should have realized earlier but didn't until last year was how unbelievably lazy everyone involved is.
I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.
But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.
It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.
As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.
I might literally be the only person on earth that can honestly say I have been paid to write FoxPro, Erlang, F#, and ColdFusion.
My first software job was at a Tae Kwan Do studio who ran their own billing department, and the entire billing half was some weird custom thing written with FoxPro. Not Visual FoxPro, I've never actually used that, but the old school DOS stuff.
I absolutely hated every time I had to touch it and I had hoped that it would die in a fire. I hope Visual FoxPro sucks less.
I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I worked part time in the university library working on databases and interfaces first in dBase III then Foxbase (the predecessor to Foxpro; basically an extended dBase III clone) then DOS FoxPro. I rather liked them, but this was long before I had ever seen SQL or anything like that. The weird thing was that my boss (besides being the library's IT guy) was a taekwondo instructor! What is it about FoxPro and that?
I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.
"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"
AI has, at the very least, confirmed something that I (and many others) have been saying for more than a decade: a lot of the writing you need to do while working in the corporate world is strictly performative.
I used to work at a very large BigCo [1]. On the first day, one of the first things they had us do was set up email filters. A lot of email filters. Many, many, many email filters. This is because it was not uncommon to get multiple-thousands of emails every day. Of course it would be impossible for anyone to read that much, so you set up filters to have emails moved to folders that you never open because you never read them, and you needed to make sure that important emails weren't missed because if you took more than an hour to respond back to an email you risked a phone call from an angry middle manager yelling at you asking why you didn't respond to their email [2].
Email, and most written documentation in tech companies, isn't there for humans to read, it's for plausible deniability. You send out emails that you know no one will actually read because then you can say "I told you so!" when things go wrong. You write pages of documentation that you know no one will read because you can tell people that you wrote the documentation. You can generate infinite comments for your code that no one will read so you can show people that you did your work to write comments.
When I complained about the quantity of emails I got, I would universally be given the response of "just set up filters", presumably because they know that most of the emails I receive were a useless waste of time.
It never mattered if the writing was "good", and it never mattered if it was up to date, and it never mattered if it corresponded to anything useful, because "human comprehension" was never the point. It was there to some bureaucratic rule-of-thumb that a middle manager would religiously adhere to in order to justify their existence in the company.
I'm sure there are exceptions but it always felt like all this performative writing was disliked by everyone. No one liked spending time reading low-effort "cover-my-ass" emails and no one liked writing pages upon pages of documentation that no one will read. Having Claude write and read all this shit and cutting humans out is the natural conclusion, because, at least in my experience, no one will ever seriously suggest we stop with all the performative writing.
[1] It's not hard to find my history, and it's fine if you do, but I politely ask that you don't post it in relation to this thread.
[2] That's not a joke, and it's not hyperbole. I had gotten phone calls from higher-ups complaining I hadn't responded to their email within two hours. I usually bit my tongue because I was a bit more of a coward in those days, but now I probably would have tried to explain to them the very basic concepts of synchronous and asynchronous communication.
I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.
I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform.
It was so fun that it was "animation-first"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want to add some code, so I convert to a movie clip and start scripting. I have played with a few game dev toolkits (and I'm even a maintainer for GDevelop on NixOS [1]), and they certainly can be fun, but I'm still chasing the high that I got from coding in Flash.
I actually think that, ironically, writing Flash games might be a valid path forward again. Ruffle has gotten quite good, and importantly the features are locked, so you could treat writing games in the same way that people do homebrew for the SNES or something.
Maybe if I can figure out how to get Flash CS6 working in Wine I'll give it a spin again.
I am sure that the legality of this is what prohibits it, but I wish someone would just do one of those decompilation projects of Flash MX or CS6 or something.
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
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