Do you think the housing market can crash on its own?
Here is my crazy theory: After only one year of the second Trump admin, the US now seems to have damaged one of its greatest assets: namely attracting the cream of the crop. One second order effect of this is now we are entering population decline. If it becomes terminal, who is going to take out a 30 years mortgage on the overpriced houses? As boomers die off, we might see a collapse. There might be a scenario where a future Trump like character fumbles the bailout(or refuses to do it) and the housing market finally is allowed to burst.
The world runs on Excel. It is the largest development environment by far and no fancy language/framework can come close to touch it. The reason is because it acts as the glue to get real life things done in everything from large governments, militaries, large corporations all the way down to the small bed and breakfast operation across the entire world. Normal people have gotten real processes built by just twiddling around in Excel.
Sadly, Excel and the dumbness of the environment generated disasters on Genomics (and tons of other research areas too) causing millions if not billions of losses. Hint: skewed experiments/data and so on, making years of effort worthless.
That woudn't happen under BioPython/BioPer/Rl and a custom dedicated interface with no data mangling at all.
Poeple in the 90's joked about how MS turned the whole IT industry 20 years back. Now, literally, and not just IT.
And that's sad, because you have Turbo Pascal, Windows NT, the VB6 IDE against C/C++ libraries... good products on MS where data correctned was granted with low level libraries called from VB. For sure BLAS/Lapack would exist in the 90's as products for Visual C/C++.
Reusing MS Office for advanced tasks was the key of the shitty computing we were suffering on tons of places. Such as the idiots using Excel tables for Covid patients instead of having a proper SQL database. Even SQlite (IDK about the constraints, maybe it fits) could have been a better choice.
People said with Unix "Worse it's beter". He, nowadays even NDB 'databases' would grant you correctness on scientific data (it's plain text with tuples) that these rotten binary, propietary, office bound pseudo databases and spreadsheets. Or even AWK with CSV's/TSV's.
You're forgetting that Excel is the most ergonomic programming language in the world, full stop, nothing else even comes close. Until it's as easy to build something with those other things as it is to whip up a sheet in Excel, they're not leaving the starting gate when it comes to usage, especially by people who are not professional software devs
Ergonomic? Who cares? By 'ergonomic' a notebook it's zillions better than Excel or even Org-mode from Emacs when you don't even have to deal with the limited input from the cells, or worse, localized functions in spreadsheets. Go try debugging some functions in Spanish or German being yourself a native English speaker.
The most ergonomic programming environment in the world today it's a mix between a notebook and a REPL with live changes. Something like a cross between Smalltalk and Jupyter, and that doesn't exist yet. Org-mode for Elisp it's close as it allows you to do literate programming, a REPL and such in a 'live' and documented way.
They haven't released the old Excels as open source right?
Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format. At the rate LLMs are improving I hope someone will eventually partake in this challenge!
> Wonder if its feasible to reverse the old version using LLMs, vibecode it to run on modern platforms and then shorehorn in support for modern XLS format.
Oh no it won't. Photoshop PSD and the legacy Office file formats have one thing in common... they are raw dumps of the C in-memory structs representing the contents. That's how they save and load so fast [1], in contrast to the modern formats which are a bunch of XMLs in a ZIP in a trenchcoat. Unfortunately, that makes reverse engineering them not just a challenge in itself, but also reimplementing because you have to reimplement Microsoft's original engines piece by piece, quirk by quirk.
And that's before wading into the mess that is OLE or, yes, the older people will shudder, ActiveX. Or the wonders that VBA macros could achieve, including just running stuff directly from kernel32.dll. I'm reasonably sure you could import the DirectX DLLs into an Office VBA macro and implement a full blown 3D shooter engine with DirectX instead of Excel.
And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potential, simply put, not each quirk of the legacy format has been carried over to the "new" XML storage format, and certainly not into OpenOffice XML.
I mean if people are reverse engineering entire n64 games into its original code that can target the original SGI compilers, then it is possible to reverse this other code. I don't think there is a drive to do so though. Thats where I hope some future LLM could help lower that barrier to people already well experienced in reversing.
>And that's also why conversion in either direction almost always carries loss potential, simply put, not each quirk of the legacy format has been carried over to the "new" XML storage format, and certainly not into OpenOffice XML.
Can modern Office reliably open the old formats? If so they must have implemented the parsers correctly no?
> Can modern Office reliably open the old formats? If so they must have implemented the parsers correctly no?
It can. But at two costs: first, MS has to keep all that legacy garbage code around - and we all know that just blindly deserializing stuff from potentially hostile input raw into C structs is ripe for getting exploited, and there have been a lot of bugs in there. And the second cost is, you can't reliably save an old document into a new XML document, hence the warning you get "this document was created in an old version of Office, are you sure you want to save it".
Great site thank you. Just curious, I looked up my company(more than 40k employees across the world including many US states) and it seems like I am not seeing the layoffs that colleagues have experienced. This is probably expected as im probably missing some criteria. Do all layoffs have to have a WARN notice or are there mechanisms/criteria that allow companies to lay people off without filing these noticies?
I am agreeing with two comments. There might be many reasons. Just the fact that there are only 12M records in last 30 years or so for all 50 states it definitely doesn't represent all data - may be 10%
>Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?
Difficult to ascertain. Sales wise of course Sony will sell more. It was N64's 388 worldwide games vs Sony's 4,074 titles. More games than you could possibly try + Lower prices + higher install base will lead to more game sales and frankly I have seen so many more "experimental" titles on Playstation.
Never thought i'd be playing as a beach ball escaping a maze while eating watermelons and listening to egyptian trance but it happened on Playstation.
Plus Sony always felt like a "global" console. They expanded the user base to not only non gamers but a truly international audience (latin america, middle east etc.) It was probably the modchips that made it happen but still.
But "winning the console war" is more than just raw sales. For example, of that extremely small 388 titles it is astounding how many of those games have won numerous prestigious awards, were genre defining, moved its genre in a direction that all others copied, or are still cited as one of the best games of all time.
The N64 really laid down an entire historial footprint for the millennial generation despite its significantly smaller sales. I guess a lot of that is down to Nintendo and many of their games demonstrating why they have been in a league of their own. But the console also had superb titles released by third parties as well.
Enshittification caused food to become more processed and laden with garbage and the ability for a single job to allow people to live a dignified life died fully after the GFC. Health is one of the first to go in this new era.
Indeed, to the exclusion of the iPod or iPhone launches.
And it gets the core idea right, too, that NeXT was a commercial failure but built the core OS technology launchpad for the mobile revolution—after saving Apple, of course.
It’s told in a wildly ahistorical framing, but I find the stage play-like “your life passes before your eyes” structure to be much truer to Jobs’ story—and more entertaining—than the Isaacson book.
Was it really profitable when it was doing things fans did want? The original console was a massive loss and a mess because they didn't know what they were doing. The 360 gave them a few good years but in the end the ended the cycle in second place yet again. Afterwards it was years of being distant third. Will Microsoft ever recoup that investment? The only good years they had were because their competitor stumbled momentarily. How good was the brand when they never really made inroads into asia?
(I say all this as someone enamoured with the first console as it was a core moment of my upbringing)
Of course it was. The proof is in the pudding. You don't go from a skunkworks program to a major division without profit. Selling millions of consoles and games for hundreds of dollars with healthy margins is a printing press. The issue is while searching for making the printing press to have ever growing margins you squeeze the soul out of the product and make it so your customers leave. Optimizing for 3 months out kills you in 24 months. This is textbook enshittification. It is very obvious when it's happening and it should be very obvious when looked back on.
It was xbox yesterday, it's Windows today. Microsoft is on the way out.
I'm not so sure. Your comment is based on assumption that all they needed to do was launch the thing and then its free riding there. This is developing an entire platform we are talking about.
There are xbox engineers confirmed reading these forums so maybe some of them can shed some light but it seemed like the first console was a dud for multiple reasons and they killed it off early. Why would they do that if it was making money?
So thats a confirmed negative two billion dollars and we haven't even talked about the cost to develop 360.
Sony caught up to them after RROD and managed to turn PS3 around so 360 didn't even end the cycle as number one in sales. After that, they never had any real success again and continued to fall further behind until today.
That documentary looks like it pulled content from Microsoft's own commissioning of a documentary (an excellent one where they pull no punches on the mistakes they made). While most of it focused on the original Xbox going into 360 the last episode discusses the Xbox One years
God I wish I could just block throwaway accounts sometimes.
Since your snark indicates that you clearly have watched the documentary that I am referring to here is the youtube captions of the relevant segment:
"In order to fix this problem, breakthrough came when we understood that the connections that were being broken were not located on the motherboard but they're actually located inside the components.
The problem was a connection was breaking.
The reason it was breaking was thermal, but it wasn't because of the peak temperature; is because when the unit would get hot and then cold, hot and then cold, every time it did that would stress the connection.
All these people loved playing video games, so they would turn this thing on and off, and when it would turn on and off you get all sorts of stresses, and just like when you you bend something too many times till it finally breaks, that's what was happening."
Lets put aside that of the million plus people watching RIP Felix's "research" only a handful of people actually have the technical expertise to confirm or deny his thesis. Regardless of if his "research" is valid or not, his video is not exactly a mass market documentary like the Microsoft one was. The caption above does a good job of generally explaining the issue to normies and then moving on because you know they have like 18 years of history to cover. Its only a small cadre of weirdos that like to take this ~30 seconds of footage and blow it out of proportion.
Other big countries all have their propaganda outfits. Why shouldn't the US at least have something to promote their point of view? The alternative as we are experiencing now is that point of view is never even expressed among the competing points of view and thus any ideas deriving from it never get discussed.
Here is my crazy theory: After only one year of the second Trump admin, the US now seems to have damaged one of its greatest assets: namely attracting the cream of the crop. One second order effect of this is now we are entering population decline. If it becomes terminal, who is going to take out a 30 years mortgage on the overpriced houses? As boomers die off, we might see a collapse. There might be a scenario where a future Trump like character fumbles the bailout(or refuses to do it) and the housing market finally is allowed to burst.
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