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_dain_ · 2026-04-03T17:39:05 1775237945

VBA, PowerQuery, structured references, the newer formulae like XLOOKUP, dynamic array-spill formulae, map/filter/reduce/lambda, various obscure financial stuff.

Sheets and Calc don't have these.

_dain_ · 2026-03-27T18:15:57 1774635357

>The only worthwhile change in desktop environments since the early 2000s has been search as you type launchers.

Add to that: unicode handling, support for bigger displays, mixed-DPI, networking and device discovery is much less of a faff, sound mixing is better, power management and sleep modes much improved. And some other things I'm forgetting.

ziml77 · 2026-03-27T21:53:05 1774648385

There are some people who would exclude all of those an enhancements because they don't care about them (yes, even Unicode, I've seen some people on here argue against supporting anything other than ASCII)

VorpalWay · 2026-03-27T23:05:43 1774652743

Unicode is a fair point, I do speak a language that has a couple of letters that are affected. And of course many many more people across the world are way more affected by that. I didn't really consider that part of the desktop environment though, but I could see the argument for why it might (the file manager for example will need to deal with it, as would translations in the menus etc).

I was primarily thinking about enhancements in the user interactions. Things you see on a day to day basis. You really don't see if you use unicode, ASCII, ISO-somenumbers, ShiftJIS etc (except when transferring information between systems).

Cold_Miserable · 2026-03-28T05:51:16 1774677076

That's me. 1 byte ASCII is all that's needed for text.

_dain_ · 2026-03-22T21:48:38 1774216118

Yeah it seems like we're still in the "XYZ ... but on a computer!" stage of AI.

_dain_ · 2026-03-15T13:23:47 1773581027

Oh wow, I've never seen that "list of iterators" trick before. I always thought you needed an explicit queue for breadth-first.

Thanks!

_dain_ · 2026-03-11T20:17:01 1773260221

_dain_ · 2026-03-08T17:46:47 1772992007

The existence of countries other than the US is not a "technicality".

But it doesn't matter because the whole article is AI generated.

_dain_ · 2026-03-08T13:02:29 1772974949

how do I get a rich synthwave wife

_dain_ · 2026-02-27T23:41:35 1772235695

>Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.

Nevermind Claude, does that mean Anthropic's offices can't use a power company if that same company happens to supply electricity to a US military base? What about the water, garbage disposal, janitorial services? Fedex? Credit card payments? Insurance companies? Law firms? All the normal boring stuff Anthropic needs that any other business needs.

This is a corporate death penalty. Or corporate internal exile or something, I don't know of a good analogy.

_dain_ · 2026-02-20T18:39:01 1771612741

The implication is that they got divorced.

wincy · 2026-02-20T18:46:31 1771613191

My wife still uses Facebook sometimes but I have it blocked on my phone and laptop, I’d have to get on my desktop to even check it.

HoldOnAMinute · 2026-02-20T18:41:41 1771612901

Not always

_dain_ · 2026-02-15T13:02:03 1771160523

>-sure, but weirdly the effect has to be wavelength dependent, but there are no color fringes.

I do think you can get colour fringes in some circumstances. Try doing it in a dark room with a bright light coming through a small gap (e.g. between curtains). Like:

                                |
                                |                    (dark room)
                                |

    light source - - - - - ->- - - - - - - - - ->- - - - - - ->- - - - - - - - - ->  eye
                                                                       |
                                |                                      |
                                |                                      |
                                |                                    finger
                        small-ish gap (1-5cm)

(not to scale)

IIRC you can get colour fringes between the finger and the top edge of the gap behind it.

EDIT: I just tested it, there is definitely a rainbow spectrum between the finger and the gap. The gap side is blue and the finger side is red. Not sure if this is the same effect as the article though.