Remember it needs to get criminalised everywhere for it to stop happening.

I think I’m going to have a crack at with with Claude and REA this weekend, if nothing else comes up.

I’m grandfathered-in (account created in 2013 or something like that) but I voted their app down to one star on the Apple App Store and stated they’re committing highway robbery.

Those are references to "Hackers" the movie from 1995.

Missed the chance for a "RISC architecture is going to change everything" reference given that it's targeting aarch64.

Indeed. “RISC is good.”

The movie Hackers (1995).

This is a prime example of how to spot poser vs real programmers.

How could one even start programming without sewing HACKERS the movie. cult classic

And Wargames. Oh an Antitrust too.

I remember Jobs promising it would be released as an open standard. What happened behind the scenes to prevent that occurring?

Assuming you're thinking of FaceTime, I remember there being a patent lawsuit shortly after launch that apparently lasted a couple years: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114

By that time, not only was Android looking much more competitive, but FaceTime evidently demonstrated to be a massive hit that became very powerful for Apple's branding.

I also read that FaceTime eventually went from P2P to centralized servers (maybe in response to the lawsuit?), which of course is antithetical to the premise of being open.

Lastly, just speculating, but I imagine Steve Jobs had to have been a strong advocate for making it an open standard, if not the driving force. It makes sense that the promise would have fizzled out by the time the lawsuit was over, a year after his death.

He also said the same thing about FaceTime in 2010

Maybe I’m confusing the two.

Yeah, you're thinking of FaceTime.

A lawsuit happened with FaceTime though

I was not aware of this.

There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.

I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.

If you've got five minutes, you'll be able to crash their Python integration. Probably without trying to do so.

won't you get nested arrays not supported? or maybe you thunk it out, idk

I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.

And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?

So?

I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.

The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.

And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

I'm sure someone has already coined a law something like this:

The use of Excel expands until it fills the space of all use cases.

To my knowledge, you still can't write an email client in Excel.

OK, maybe with plug-ins, but probably not natively.

Probably not.

Maybe.

Sure you can. It would mostly VBA and not using much of the spreadsheet part, but it's totally possible to do with native VBA code. No plug-ins needed, although you might have to cheat a bit with Win32 API calls depending on exact functionality.

In a rigid lattice, aye.

I remember reading this as an undergraduate student already enrolled in LSE. My God how the times have changed.