When we write programs in a conventional programming language, what we're doing with the data is shown front and centre, and the data itself is sidelined or often not even present. In a spreadsheet, this is reversed: the data is prioritised, and the formulae are hidden.
There's an immediacy to a spreadsheet: the user can start with very literal actions on data, and slowly introduce abstractions like formulae. In conventional programming, the programmer has nothing but abstractions with which to work.
It's reminiscent of one of Fred Brooks' remarks about how showing the data structures makes the algorithms obvious, but showing the algorithms reveals little about the data structures.
I think similar remarks can be made in regard to Jupyter notebooks and their popularity among scientist, engineers and data people. Yes, they are still more in the conventional programming realm, where the code is in the foreground, yet to some extent they bring more immediacy. The fact that you can look and investigate at the data you are dealing with at every step (print the table, make a plot etc) is powerful.
Another thing would be of course powerful REPL environments.
And there are also visual environments like Matlab's Simulink and Modelica. Can you write control algorithm or a bunch of differential equations in any language? Yes. But control engineer can just take a quick look at screenshot of a Simulink model and already have a good idea on what is going on there. This cannot be said about the code.
This may be rather unpopular among hackers, where TTY clones and vi emulation rules everything, but computers and software seem to me most powerful and enabling outside the usual coding context of putting streams of characters into the source file using a keyboard.
As developer starting coding in the 1980's, that always valued high level approaches to computing than plain bits and bytes, I find this a kind of tragedy, given that productive tools helps everyone.
I love a quote from from some VB folks, that while others laught of them using VB, they were laughing all the way to the bank themselves.
My only complaint about visual environments, is that not all offer modular tools, the EEE IC version of a module or function, some are quite primitive only allowing one screen for the whole flow.
I wonder what place will be left for the TTY clones and vi emulation folks, when everything on the system is driven by systems programmed in agentic tools, command line wizardry replaced by MCP like tools and such.
Even just regular matlab gives you some of that data immediacy because you can just ctrl-enter on a block of code which will execute just that block and show you results in the console. Very handy for seeing what various bits do to the data.
The immediacy is you are looking at the data. What you’re going to do with it may not yet be known Is it the right data? What are the values? What are the features?
I write scripts at work and tell colleagues if they want my help they should first work it out in Excel and write an outline of the details. If they can’t do that, then the problem may not be a candidate for _script automation_.
Our pipeline is not fully automated, but that’s how I describe it. The rest is Excel Carpentry.
I've had a lot of experience with dealing with exactly this problem in ML.
There is no replacement for visualizing the data and intermediates. You have to see what is going on, it's the only way to catch bugs and issues and make good performance improvements.
Like actually looking at the gradients and weights and activations and predictions and stuff often shows you that something janky is going on, its great for adjusting architectures. Looking into specific high loss test samples and mispredictioms and stuff will show you that there are problems with your data or normalization and whatnot.
The issue is that there are basically an infinite number of intermediates you could potentially look at. So ignoring almost all of them is the only thing that scales and you have to be extremely deliberate.
Now that you mention it, that’s one of the things I always appreciated about working with Adobe Flash as a developer - the vector graphics and key frame tweeting is prioritized, while the Actionscript is hidden. Most visual elements you can change immediately by clicking and dragging with your mouse.
That is an interesting take on spreadsheets. I wonder if it is possible to establish some way to switch back and forth between 'programming view' vs 'spreadsheet view'.
I think the best we have at the moment debugger view; in other words a snapshot of the state of the system. Maybe with a dashboard you can see some progression over time ?
(I somehow though of the videogame Factorio and of that thing called Labview, but I cannot form a coherent thought about it)
You're in for a treat. The quote, in case you haven't looked it up yet, is "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." The canonical work is The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Last week I bought my first iPhone, having been previously been only an Android user. The iOS gestures have this physicality to them; as described in TFA, it's clearly designed around a coherent metaphor for physical objects. In Android, gestures feel much more like easy-to-perform actions that have been mapped directly onto actions from desktop computers.
I'm not sure which I prefer yet, but I definitely know which is more comfortable, intuitive and premium-feeling to most users.
I appreciate the point you're trying to make, and I agree taking responsibility for one's own life circumstances is the only way to improve them, but surely you understand that 'save and invest' is wholly unsuitable advice for someone with no disposable income or no income at all.
You have two options. Continue to point fingers and complain and be broke, or start putting $100/mo in VOO and save what little money you have for your future?
I know it sucks. I know income inequality is huge. I know the only way out of this is to put in sweat equity. I know the only way to put food on the table is to have a second job at a gas station. I’ve been there. However, as much as you DON’T want to hear it - the only way out of your mess is by you working your way out of your mess.
As I said, I agree with taking personal responsibility - I'm not sure why you're still trying to fight me on that.
> You have two options. Continue to point fingers and complain and be broke, or start putting $100/mo in VOO and save what little money you have for your future?
The imaginary person you're trying to give this advice to graduated from university eighteen months ago and has been living in their parents' house ever since, applying for jobs non-stop. Their income is $0 per month. They are entirely unable to apply your advice; applying your advice is something they aspire to.
If my child was living with me for 18 months post graduation, they would have any job that pays > $0. I don't care if it's McDonalds, but they would be working.
$100/month in VOO isn’t going to do anything (except help people like me who already own a lot).
> the only way out of your mess is by you working your way out of your mess.
Third option is revolution. Could be violent, could be passive like not starting families, complaining on the internet, scrolling tiktok as long as the benefits and body allow, and suicide if necessary.
It is possible for too much of the benefits of working having too high of a likelihood of being captured by rent seekers to not make the work worth it. In old times, the lack of birth control made people have to work more due to needing to support kids, but if I didn’t have kids, I could get by with a much lower standard of living.
West Oxfordshire District Council is currently trying to find a way to stop a certain demographic from racing ponies and traps on the A40 dual carriageway.
Calling them travellers and/or gypsies (I know they are technically different groups of people but generally the terms are often used interchangeably) is not in itself a slur.
Brexit was an economic policy decided on emotional terms: most Britons voted on the basis of I like Europe or I don't like foreigners, and economic forecasts about potential effects were just throwaway talking points to bolster those preconceived opinions. Unlike the US, we have no common vision of a destiny to manifest; unlike the Russians, we have no expansionist goals; unlike the French, our political system is an outcome of a thousand years of compromise, not blazes of revolutionary zeal. We are just an archipelago of people quietly bumbling our way from cradle to grave, buffeted by the winds of change, and taking the advantages they afford us while we can.
Brexit was a mistake, but there is no way back to the privileged position we once held in the EU, and so anyone who still wants to talk about it is just a pointless shit-stirrer.
> anyone who still wants to talk about it is just a pointless shit-stirrer.
Talk about Brexit you mean? I think it's important to point out if it was a bad decision caused by deception, even more so if that was driven by illegal foreign influence. One can learn and perhaps something similar won't happen again, be it in UK or elsewhere. Brexit bombing already had a positive effect on other countries where this topic went from prime serious discussion to something only Russian parrots keep bringing up.
There's no way back to how it was but there are lots of things that could change on the hard vs soft brexit lines. Like going back to common standards on food and health would make trade easier, seriously inconvenience almost no one and probably not be that much of a hard sell?
The part that baffled me the most was how the decision to Brexit seem be driven mostly by immigration. But the UK was one of the few EU countries that wasn't part of Schengen. They had an actual border with the EU and could control their immigration!
Not only that but the French helped the UK keep migrants out of the island (migrants were a hot topic at the time), which meant that good relations with the French, and by extension the EU actually helped.
There were no limits on legal immigration from the EU. Of course the endless stream of East Europeans had mostly dried up by the time of the referendum and most immigrants (especially the type a lot of Reform/Brexit supporters don’t like) were coming from third countries which had nothing to do with the EU..
You shouldn't be making decisions such as Brexit on economic terms. It doesn't matter if it's a mistake just as it doesn't matter about thinking the country can go back. Brexit is a 100% permanent outcome from the referendum vote. Those changing their minds now as they thought it might not happen, or doing it for fun, are directly responsible for the outcome. BoJo delivered what the people demanded and now Britain's place as an island off the NW coast of the EU is cemented - warts and all.
Not well known but this was actually the second Brexit referendum. The original decision to join the EU wasn't decided by a referendum at all, a Labour government just did it, despite the profound constitutional implications. So there was no argument for requiring a higher threshold to leave than the join. Arguably leaving would not have required a referendum at all, given that joining didn't.
But when people cried foul about this move in 1973, Labour agreed to hold a referendum on leaving it again, which was held in 1975 and won by Remain. Unfortunately, the way they won was by misleading the public. They claimed the European Economic Community (as it was known at the time) was purely about building a free trade zone, with no political unification goals. Official leaflets sent to households said no federal "United States of Europe" was intended. The Leave campaign pointed out that it wasn't true and the EEC wanted to take over political power in Europe.
The Leave campaign were honest. The EEC later rebranded to the EU, and took over many powers that had nothing to do with free trade. This is one reason why a common comment heard from older people back in 2016 was "I voted Remain in 1975 and I'm voting Leave now, for the same reasons".
Regardless of the legitimacy of your other arguments this is a silly thing to say.
Besides the lies and misinformation. Boris was driven purely by his political ambitions and saw Brexit as a great opportunity to take over the Conservative party. That’s it.
Also legally binding referendums are not a thing in the UK. They aren’t a requirement for anything and the parliament has the right to do whatever it wants. Of course it would be a political suicide to ignore the outcome when you agreed to hold one.
Of course tying it to turnout would have been a sensical idea (i.e. requiring that at least 50% of registered voters would vote for leave for it to be binding)
Those would matter except it was winner takes all and vote counts were for the whole of Britain, other factors didn't matter, including voter age, location, gender, etc. The only thing that mattered was getting majority of the vote for the whole country.
Given the political sensitivities of having Northern Ireland and Scotland as part of the United Kingdom, their individual outcomes deserved at least a little bit of consideration.
sure, I don't expect the UK to apply for membership tomorrow, but (unless either the EU or the UK disappears completely) both parties would gain from deeper integration
Because of all the timesuck that Brexit was interfered with the EU's ability to make progress. For the Brits to rejoin would require every nation's parliament to approve it. Not gonna happen ever.
The mascot it super cute lion too. How can a project do everything so right? I was browsing some popular python libraries and they just slapped on the first image they got out of ChatGPT. It's nice to see care in the craft.
A mascot is an animal figure that represents a product or sports team. For example, the penguin named Tux is the mascot of Linux, and the mascot for the Brisbane Broncos rugby team is the horse named Buck the Bronco.
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