I don't get this. Of all the software suites out there, MS Office must be the easiest to replace. LibreOffice does everything needed, and its free. It's a no brainer.

Unless people do any sort of semi-serious work in Excel. Nothing compares with Excel.

I get where these places are coming from - it is really easy to get started implementing these workflows in Excel and just grow it from there. But they are really fragile and hard to audit - who knows whether they work correctly even now! And it's highly likely that only very few people actually understand how they work and how to maintain and extend them. Great for job security, but there is going to be a lot of problems when the people who know them are not available anymore. Better to transition the embedded knowledge to something more maintainable as long as it's still possible.

That's exactly why it's hard to migrate them off from whatever they are using - which is Excel.

Excel is a programming language, so there is not reason why the general programming issues solved by AI wouldn't also fully apply to the Excel code.

I interviewed at a job with quite a lot of maths to do. I never worked in that industry, but I made a good profolio using Jupyter notebooks so I got an interview. Turns out everything was done in Excel, they asked me a few times how good I was with Excel. It seems they are not impressed with an answer of “Yea, that’s easy, I do my personal budgeting with it”

Excel is amazing. It is Turing complete and you can make literal games inside it. There are Excel mastery competitions/world chanpionships and you should check it out to understand what experts at Excel are capable of and why your answer did not impress. True Excel mastery is a totally different thing than fluency in Word/Powerpoint.

Exactly. Especially the backwards compatibility. You can have sheets from decades ago still giving useful results.

Expect problems as soon as the people who made and maintain them are gone.

I think the problem is that people view MS Office as the "standard", and therefore any deviation is considered "wrong" or "broken".

I take it you’re a software engineer and have never seen even a single percent of all things people use Office for.

$20k seems steep for whats effectively a small shed with a nice finish. Especially that the bare shed itself was $6k. In Ireland I can get an 18x10ft cabin for about €5k, and this is one of the most expensive countries

West coast prices are in a different ballpark. Im shocked at how cheap the concrete work was. I got 20 quotes and 6k was the cheapest for a 12x12 pour.

I have a neighbor 100k+ into a foundation retrofit for his living room.

morbid question, but do you know if any emails have ever been sent?

Of course, lots are sent every day. I don't know if they're from deaths, but lots of messages get sent. I know people have died because the police or FBI contact me sometimes.

Once, a girl had committed suicide and used the service to send accusing emails to her friends and family two months later. That was tragic all around.

Pretty neat but a talking dog is so weird, especially one that sounds like Stellan Skaarsgard

Would be better if he just barked

Im recently intrigued by Solo Flight, although I havent played it yet. The idea of taking that military flight sim base and just turning it into a casual flying-for-fun game is something that resonates with me. I did love Flight Unlimited which is an obvious spiritual successor

They worked on one thing forever

While I agree with the sentiment it seems unnecessary for things like this to have their own domain name. Surely a blog post would cover this?

I'm also working on an N64 style cozy flight game, but not over seattle. Also I am far less further along than you

the only thing they sell for anything close to that price is a pair of earphones for $99.

https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...

The cheapest walkman model is $399.99