Excel spreadsheets have little to no validation logic that you're actually getting a good result, unless you have a secondary check (most spreadsheets are structured as "single entry" accounting, so lack the checks)
A prime example of this was the Reinhart/Rogoff paper advocating austerity that was widely quoted, and then it was discovered that the spreadsheet used had errors that invalidated the conclusions:
The point is not that people will be using specifically Excel, but that most business only pay for software because it is the tool that gives them the most power to automate their processes. They don't need high availablility, they don't need standards compliance, they don't extensive automated tests, they won't need cloud engineeers and SRE... all you need is some tool that can get the results your are looking for right now.
Academia already works like this. Software wrtiten for academic purposes is notoriously "bad" because it is not engineerd, but that doesn't matter because it is good enough to deliver the results that researchers need. Corporate IT will also start looking like this even at mid-sized companies.
An academic paper needs to deliver its output once, for the research. Maybe someone will try to replicate it later but that's someone elses problem (and fairly often proves the output of the former to be wrong)
Some stuff in companies might be similar, but there's a lot of things that people use every day, in a lot of different ways, and the software needs to work correctly regardless. You can't just drop it like a hot potato once you've built processes around it.
As always, the first 80% takes 20% of the time/effort, the last 20% takes the other 80%.
I don't disagree with anything you say here - using a tool that lacks guardrails is fine for a lot of tasks, but if that's the only tool and used where those guardrails go from "nice to haves" to something more critical is where the problem is.
I've been in ops for a long time and have encountered far too many "our IP addressing plan is just a spreadsheet with manual reconciliation".
I truly wonder if Excel and all it's predecessors and direct clones (Google Sheets, etc.) are holding back industry from making something truly better and more reliable.
> holding back industry from making something truly better and more reliable.
What "industry"?
If you are talking about the software industry, then I'd say you are creating a circular reasoning. If you are talking about all the other things that we actually need to do and which only incidentally have become too reliant on software to do it, then see back my original point: people don't need "better and more reliable" software to keep running their businesses.
If running your business to '90s standards is acceptable, sure, you can use AI to automate your manual processes with the same error rate and keep doing the same thing indefinitely.
But if the competitors have real software engineers and have used them to actually improve reliability, you'll be left behind.
What software engineers are being hired to work on:
- A facilities management company
- A bar/restaurant with a staff of 8
- An Architecture office
- A Law Firm with 10 associates
- A day care
- A car repair shop
- A cement factory
- A family-owned hotel
- A conference/event organizer
- A video production crew
- A roofing company
Ok, but if your competitors are getting/using software from a supplier who has real software engineers, and using that to operate at a higher level of reliability, then the same argument goes through.
If you want to go down the value chain, then by definition the less valuable the software is and the easier to be commoditized. The automation is not going to help just the manager-turned-vibecoder, it's also going to help professionals to create FOSS alternatives that can be robust enough.
It's not going to happen overnight, but the trend is there.
> If you want to go down the value chain, then by definition the less valuable the software is and the easier to be commoditized.
I'm not sure that holds for what we're talking about - high-value software can afford to be somewhat flaky because it delivers enough value when it works to make up for it, software that's only marginally worthwhile needs to be reliable because if it isn't then it's not worth the bother. Commoditized fields are more competitive.
> The automation is not going to help just the manager-turned-vibecoder, it's also going to help professionals to create FOSS alternatives that can be robust enough.
Not convinced. In my experience these tools don't really help with creating high-quality software. Maybe they'll get there eventually (at which point we're all out of a job), but right now they can't "hit the high notes".
Doesn't that also lead to the conclusion that "software engineers" are going to lose their ability to command high salaries, if the real value is in the domain expertise and not in the ability of optimizing some part of the business process?
> Doesn't that also lead to the conclusion that "software engineers" are going to lose their ability to command high salaries, if the real value is in the domain expertise and not in the ability of optimizing some part of the business process?
I mean the job has always required both - just being good at leetcode isn't enough to get paid well (except perhaps where there is a dysfunctional interview process), the key skill is being able to translate back and forth between the world of software and the world of business. Regular folk seemingly still find it difficult to think rigorously, in the way that fully correct automation requires, and AI hasn't actually helped with that any, so I think people with that skill will still command a premium. Work that doesn't benefit from rigour - being able to slap together a quick marketing site on wordpress or what have you - will pay badly if at all, but that was already the low end of the industry I think.
Shield TV + extra storage + HDHomeRun tuner is still a great device for getting OTA TV.
The only downside is that more recent versions use the Google Android TV launcher which is filled with a garbage truck full of ads, often for things I would never want to watch (horror movies? Nope!). Yes you can replace the launcher, but that's a pain.
Would love to pay more for a device that has updated codec support, no ads or tracking, and is basically identical.
If plex was smart they’d sell a little box of their own and ditch all this faux-social media nonsense they’re slowly implementing. I do not care at all what my friends are watching. Not one bit. Just make it connect to servers. People are happy to pay for it clearly. How many beelinks have been sold just to run Jellyfin/Plex? I’d gladly buy a plex box for $100 - talk about a great Christmas present for friends and family!
Sidebar: I like Jellyfin but it is nowhere as turnkey as Plex. Otherwise I’d advocate for that too. That being said, I am slowly trying to get mine nice and stable and user-friendly because the way Plex is going does not give me great confidence about the next 2 to 3 years. But at least right now, it is by far the best experience out there.
I get I have no research or anything to back this up and maybe it’s a terrible idea ultimately, but based on the number of low tech literacy people I know personally who are either running their own Plex servers or attaching to others, an even more turnkey simple piece of hardware seems like something that could do reasonably well.
I wanted to do this and got a Shield last year but returned it because of a live TV bug with the Android Plex client. The programming guide stopped working and could only be fixed by restarting the app, but on Android quitting to the home screen keeps the app running and you can't force quit without going into menus. Sadly that's the OS and changing a launcher didn't fix it.
Actually you can double tap the home button on your remote to see all apps currently running, and can then click the close button on any one of them.
Google TV apps leak memory like a sieve, so it's pretty common to need to manually close all other apps to make the one you're trying to use work. Even !y wife just dies of now as soon as any one of the apps starts acting up.
Projectivy has turned out to be my favourite launcher for the Shield TV after trying a bunch. It displays only the things I want to see, and has a great deal of options.
A million times this. I was so frustrated with how slow and ad-laden the default Shield launcher was. When I got it, it had no ads and was really snappy. Changing over to Projectivy (or any custom launcher really) fixed so many issues and made the device snappy again.
Oh, I've seen instructions, most of them start with "enable dev mode, then use adb to run ton of inscrutable commands that may or may not break the system over time".
Overall, it seems like a recipe to end up in an unknown state where you can no longer easily get updates and the only recovery is to wipe the system.
I've seen similar methods to "Clean up Windows 11", and it always seems like you're just putting the device into an unknown state. A few ads you can become blind to is not as bad as a totally broken system.
It does seem sketchy, but you can kind of guess what it's cleaning based on the name in the uninstall command. I just skim down to the section that says it's for removing the launcher and reqd those, then run only a few.
The upside of the launcher thing is that you can setup a new default launcher and use it for a while without doing any adb. That let's you verify it's working for you first. And when you do finally remove the Google one, a lit if the ad and nloatware stuff no longer runs in the background even if you haven't removed it, so it's abh8ge perf0rmance benefit.
If you are uncomfortable with ADB on the CLI, you can look up the subject ''Debloat++ Shield TV'' as discussed in XDA Forums' Shield TV subforum for how to use an app for that.
Friend, you are #11 on the leaderboard here on HN and you stated that enabled dev mode is too scary. I promise you, you have the skillset to research that your worries are false and you can accomplish this easier than rebutting me on this. I believe in you.
Once your find your comfort, you might even find other items of joy that are being gatekept from you like SmartTube.
Friend, I never said it was scary, only that it was not maintainable and would put your system in an unknown state.
How different is this from say installing Debian, then picking out a bunch of globally installed software that supports "make install" and spraying files all over the root filesystem, then expecting the next run of "apt update" to work properly without things breaking?
Maybe my concerns are unwarranted, but the vast majority of Android mangling I've done over the years has not generally resulted in long-term stability, for a variety of reasons. Recall that the point of this article is that it's 10 year old hardware still in support!
It’s a single app. several are open source. I recommend flauncher. Once again, you are overly complicating a process that you do not know and are arguing from a point of ignorance. As you point out, it’s a 10 year old platform. It’s very stable and known. I am done trying to let you see what you are not interested in.
Which is why they are spreading the 300g out over an entire day, and it's the entire diet for 2 days.
The study is not suggesting this is a long-term diet. They're saying "eat oats for all your food for two days, and your cholesterol lowers by ~10% and then stays low for ~6 weeks due to changes in your gut biome".
They're not saying eat 300g for breakfast and then eat as normal. They're not saying do this every day.
They're saying 2 days, this is what you eat, spread out to replace all your meals across those 2 days, then go back to normal.
That wouldn't really make sense since amount of water could vary. Anyway the article says "Each oat meal comprised 100 × g of rolled oat flakes... boiled in water."
I really wish MS had stuck with the Windows 8/Phone direction - bright square blocks that didn't waste space, which felt like it was a full refutation of the transparent everything of Vista that was still there to some extent in 7.
Looking at macOS 26, it's hard not to compare it visually to Vista given the transparency emphasis. Hopefully in a few years an Alan Dye-free Apple will move in a different direction.
Oh, the initial screens in Win8 were quite awful and offputting for most people who used earlier Windows versions, but the actual UI widget designs felt good.
The external power supply bricks aren't much better. I've had a few 27" LG 4k monitors, and the ones with a brick seem to fail more frequently (in the monitor, brick was fine).
I don't think I need a new $4000 refrigerator with an ad-spewing tablet and barcode scanner.
I do think a $100 device with a barcode scanner and a tiny LCD screen that attaches magnetically to the fridge and has 3 buttons: "Buy More", "Empty", "Expired", where you scan an item then hit the appropriate button it syncs to a backend service that helps build shared grocery lists would be a winner.
Mostly that VLC has had noticeable issues with displaying some kinds of subtitles made with Advanced SubStation (especially ones taking up much of the frame, or that pan/zoom), which MPV-based players handle better.
Note that, while I haven't had time to investigate them myself yet, IINA is known to have problems with color spaces (and also uses libmpv, which is quite limited at the moment and does not support mpv's new gpu-next renderer). Nowadays mpv has first-party builds for macOS, which work very well in my opinion, so I'd recommend using those directly.
A prime example of this was the Reinhart/Rogoff paper advocating austerity that was widely quoted, and then it was discovered that the spreadsheet used had errors that invalidated the conclusions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
Just because technology is in use and "works" doesn't mean it's always correct.
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