I have been annoyed for some time that there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in society by which people who cannot sing are taught en masse how to sing. We spend so much time in school music classes "singing" with no actual instructions as to how to do it correctly.

I genuinely wonder how some people are able to sing properly while others cannot. Those who can sing, where did they learn it at?

Does Excel for Web still spin up an actual copy of Excel.exe on a machine somewhere? I heard that is how the initial version worked.

No, as the other comment mentioned. But I’ve heard of more than a few customers running their own “server excel workflow” where they have an instances of excel.exe running a VBA macro that talks to a web server (and does some processing).

Never did this. WAC was the original version (integrated with SharePoint Server). Everything was server-side.

While working at MS I remember someone in the office team saying that the original version of Excel online spun to the actual Excel backend and had it output HTML instead of the usual win32 UI. Was I misinformed by chance?

> WAC

Now that’s an acronym that I had forgotten about.

There is an irony here that this would be more performant with a 2002 coding model. A native plugin, COM, OLE, whatever. C++, crash prone, but fast.

Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency.

That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.

Proposition 1: The majority of a code in a modern app is from shared libraries

Proposition 2: The most popular shared libraries are going to be quickly torn apart by LLM security tools to find vulnerabilities

Proposition 3: After a brief period of mass vulnerability discovery, the overall quality of shared libraries will dramatically increased.

Conclusion: After the initial wave of vulnerabilities has passed, the main threat to open source code bases is in their own comparatively small amount of code.

There are benefits to having the same type system throughout a code base. Also Typescript is a really nice language.

The other issue is, many websites are basically apps. The HTML is a byproduct, it isn't the main event. The template based systems are fine if you have mostly plain HTML with some interactivity sprinkled in, but for people who are building complex web apps, there is typically a tiny bit of HTML and a lot of logic.

The old template based systems fall to pieces for really complicated sites.

In regards to language, if you are going to pick a JITed or interpreted language, may as well pick one that has had a lot of effort put into making it fast, and the JS runtimes are really optimized by now. Java is faster, but Typescript is a much better language (and more type safe!) than Java.

Agree that TypeScript is nice, especially for sharing templates and types between server and client. But you can still use TypeScript on the server without sending it all to the client, and without a complex and insecure protocol like RSC. I’m working on making this as simple and dependency-free as possible: https://mastrojs.github.io

For the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.

Seconded that I'd love to hear more.

A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes.

The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.)

Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots.

With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.

JS is primarily a functional language, it is built around functions as first class objects and closures.

The issue is the bar has been raised for what people call "functional" now. Everyone is picky "OMG not pure so it isn't really functional!!"

Yeesh.

Microsoft OneNote had this back in 2007 or so, granted the speech to text model wasn't nearly as advanced as they are now.

I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.

It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.

I remember trying out some voice-to-text around 2002 that I believe was included with Windows XP.. or maybe Office?

You had to go through some training exercises to tune it to your voice, but then it worked fairly well for transcription or even interacting with applications.

OS/2 had it built in in 1996.

> "put a computer in every home and every office"

That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.