I wish more people stop hating on Excel. It's an incredible tool with cool stuff baked in (Python support, PowerQuery, etc.). Just because some people misuse it as database or it doesn't scale well beyond a couple of 10k rows does not make it a bad product. For 90% of daily office tasks it's just fine.
> Just because some people misuse it as database or it doesn't scale well beyond a couple of 10k rows does not make it a bad product.
It's not just that making it a bad product. Those are minor annoyances when compared with it trying to keep your data hostage in opaque formats[1] and exfiltrating your data to the cloud[2].
The recent releases with new functions are great, there's a lot that can be done in a format that both pervasive and familiar. And Power Query is indeed a useful addition.
I don't think it's as bad as people make it, and certainly we can't blame non-technical users if they like it, for many tasks it's the only tool that's simultaneously usable by normal people and powerful enough.
It suffers from trying to do too many things at once, though. Excel 3 is enough for those use cases without being a complete nightmare for everyone else. Electronic spreadsheets as a concepts are genius, it's the implementation I hate.
Too many at once? Apparently, you can insert Python code into Excel now, which then gets executed into whatever Azure's equivalent of lambda is. I was recently introduced to someone at work who vibe coded an entire Python application in it and burned through their teams worth of cloud credits.
But using a spreadsheet to store data is completely reasonable. We delude ourselves as technically experienced people when we imply otherwise. When Excel fucks up data (perhaps the most unforgivable sin in all of software) with unexplainably bad defaults and UX for auto-formatting (i.e. "trying to be clever"), it's absolutely out of touch to point the finger at the end user.
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Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a correct point.
But the Unicode button is perceptually off center, because ASCII is a smaller word, and there's no visible boundary between the buttons. This comes up a lot in iconography, the classic example is a play triangle (like the media control) in a circle. Placing the triangle in the geometric center won't look centered, it needs to be a tiny bit to the right of that to account for the shape.
No separation between the buttons means you can't see the bounds which the words are centered in, so it looks off.
The 8 and 10 have the same problem, for the same reason. A visible background-gray line between the buttons would solve this problem, it should be 'squircled' to make it I-shaped and match the outer edges.
The selector issue is very visible in your video still: you can see black pixels at the top of the selected number where it shows the selector background, but none at the bottom because it's misaligned and the selection bubble is slightly outside its box.
Edit: zooming in closer it's maybe not outside the box at all, but there's some odd aliasing artifacts or something making the space above the highlight look bigger than the space below.
Honestly I don't think it makes it any better if the Unicode text is theoretically centered; the fact that there's zero separation between the options, and such poor spacing that it's difficult to tell and feels awkward either way is still terrible design.
I think royalties from <1k streams are basically nothing anyway. Giving up the ability to distribute your music for free and reach more people would be a terrible idea.
If you have a newer macOS version on an entry Intel machine, ordinary tasks can cause a lot of fan noise. You can activate Low Power Mode [1] to reduce clock speed and therefore the fan will not be as loud. See if the reduced clock speed does not interfere with your daily tasks.
It's pretty much guaranteed. Where else on the internet would this sequence of characters appear so frequently that it gets selected as one of the internet's top ~50,000 words?
Also, that Reddit is frequently used to train LLMs is widely known. It's an unusually clean source of conversational text because you can slice threads (i.e. pick a root comment, then pick a child, then a child of the child etc and then concatenate the results), and you'll get a coherent conversation. There are relatively few places on the internet where that is true. For example most phpBB forums conflate many different conversations into single threads, with ad-hoc quoting being used to disambiguate which post is replying to which. That makes it a lot harder to generate sample conversations from.
listen, some of the niche corners of that world aren't so bad, but it ain't the place to be training AI to do something, unless that something is a hate crime
