therealjumbo (u/therealjumbo)

therealjumbo commented on Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices office365itpros.com/2025/... · Posted by u/taubek

embedding-shape · 3 months ago

Yeah, that's the opposite of what I want, then I'll just continue using Excel... What I want is for someone to figure out a better UI and better UX, not just copy what's out there.

therealjumbo · 3 months ago

My hot take on a better excel: the two things excel sucks at: version control and syncing. On the backend, separate the data and the logic in the spreadsheet and put each into version control. Then use something like syncthing to share documents with colleagues. You might also need something like bitmessage for initial handshake. Now you have a spreadsheet you can collaborate on in real time over the Internet or LAN without screwing around with a server, a google account, a credit card etc.

There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.

I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...

therealjumbo commented on Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI" twitter.com/yishan/status... · Posted by u/admp

DaedPsyker · 2 years ago

I don't agree with that framing. It reads more as saying what Google did was worse than it appears, not waving away.

Whatever your own opinion, Google did it out of what they perceived to be good intentions (and very likely business sense given a global audience for their products). Yet their intentions directly lead to unintended consequences. Google is being a baby with a gun in essence. Like he says, what if they decide to ask it to solve climate change and it decides to wipe humans out?

Obviously it's still very theoretical and can't do anything like that, but the point is more that perhaps Google doesn't have the culture necessarily to truly interrogate their actions.

therealjumbo · 2 years ago

Here's his central point:

>This event is significant because it is major demonstration of someone giving a LLM a set of instructions and the results being totally not at all what they predicted.

Replace LLM with computer in that sentence, is it still novel? Laughably far from it, unexpected results are one of the defining features of moderately complex software programs going all the way back to the first person to program a computer. Some of the results are unexpected, but a lot are not, because it's literally doing what the prompt injection tells it to. Which isn't all that surprising but sure anyway...

>Obviously it's still very theoretical and can't do anything like that, but the point is more that perhaps Google doesn't have the culture necessarily to truly interrogate their actions.

Oh that's definitely true.

therealjumbo commented on Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada fieldandstream.com/conser... · Posted by u/HR01

mkoubaa · 3 years ago

selling wild game appears to be illegal in Canada like it is in the US. Ostensibly the reason is because of risk of illness but it's likely also due to lobbying by farmers.

I think there's a solution staring at us in the face here

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

The original reason for banning sales of wild game meat in NA is because species were being driven extinct or extirpated due to hunting. https://www.grandviewoutdoors.com/big-game-hunting/should-yo...

Unfortunately allowing selling of specific species we don't like that reproduce easily would probably just lead to private land owners promoting habitat and food for that species on their land. That's what's happened in Texas on a lot of private ranches due to the popularity of pig hunting. Texas is mostly private land, unlike Montana which is mostly public but still.

therealjumbo commented on Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved theregister.com/2023/02/2... · Posted by u/rntn

circuit10 · 3 years ago

On https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index the UK is one the most democratic countries (18th), significantly higher than the US (30th)

Edit: To be fair that’s done by a UK-based company but I don’t think they would have much reason to be biased

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

Democracy is orthogonal too authoritarian.

therealjumbo commented on Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves sos.noaa.gov/catalog/data... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

geuis · 3 years ago

Just to put the numbers in slightly easier to imagine numbers: imagine ocean waves about 13000 feet or 4 kilometers high.

No, I can't really imagine it either.

In San Francisco, the tallest building is the Salesforce Tower at 1070ft. The biggest wave would be about 13 times taller than that.

I totally have trouble visualizing it, other than just looking up and up and up.

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

When I went skydiving, they took me up to 12.5k feet. Good weather was necessary, and they offered to only go to 9k feet if I was a little "scared". Not sure why jumping out of a plane at 9k feet is any more reassuring... A wave that tall is insane.

therealjumbo commented on Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours npr.org/2022/12/26/114553... · Posted by u/edward

makestuff · 3 years ago

In this case no, but I was more referring to the 2016 delta ground stop that was due to their datacenter burning to the ground.

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

I remember reading about the Delta incident a ways back, here they claim it cost them ~$150 million. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/09/08/delt...

That's not the article I hoped to find however. I seem to remember there was another article where they hired a investigator/consultant to figure out the price to migrate to the cloud and ensure "this never happens again."

My recollection of that was: their scheduling/ops team is also in the same city (Atlanta GA) as this datacenter, and that teams work was brought to a halt by the datacenter outage. The investigator concluded that Delta would need redundant copies of the ops team or the whole effort of moving the software to the cloud would just be at risk to something happening to the human team all in the same city. That would obviously cost to much money, so Delta decided to skip it.

therealjumbo commented on With food available, many bears at Tahoe forgo hibernation tahoedailytribune.com/new... · Posted by u/jerryjerryjerry

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

The black bear population in CA has quadrupled since the state banned black bear hunting with dogs a long time ago.

Nonetheless, the humane society sponsors bills: https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/policy-and-legisla... and petitions: https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/wildlife-managemen... to completely ban bear hunting, claiming that "climate change" has decreased the population. When in reality it has not, the black bear population in CA has exploded, and in particular, the Tahoe area now sees a lot more human conflict with black bears due to their increased population and lack of habitat.

You can further see that the humane society opposes any and all hunting (not just hunting predators and bears) on their own website. Like say hunting whitetail deer, by far the most popular big game animal in the US: https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/what-do-about-deer

This political movement is directly opposed the science based management of wildlife. See the WA spring bear hunt ban: https://www.fieldandstream.com/hunting/washington-spring-bea.... Which was done despite the advice of the state's bioligists.

therealjumbo commented on Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries nytimes.com/2022/11/21/bu... · Posted by u/stephc_int13

Cannabat · 3 years ago

It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.

What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed.

Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other creatures than non-animal agriculture simply due to the additional land requirements. It is far easier to accept the less harmful industry.

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

I think they are simply pointing out that you must kill other animals in order to live. There's no way around it.

If your interested in killing the least amount of animals, why not go hunting and fishing, that almost assuredly kills fewer than industrialized agriculture. I've replaced almoat all beef all year round in our family with deer venison kept year round in a chest freezer.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think that veganism or vegetarianism for most people is very emotional action. Most of the pop media around it focuses on the cuteness of the animal not on the total number of animals killed. and it's ignoring that like in hunting or ethical farming, the animals have a very full happy life.

As a hunter it's interesting seeing this article on HN and seeing no mention of hunting. Also not a bad thing, it's not part of the culture here, but it's interesting to see that bias in the HN culture.

therealjumbo commented on Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things sharats.me/posts/shell-sc... · Posted by u/sharat87

Cerium · 3 years ago

"Use [[ ]] for conditions"

Oh how I hate the double square bracket. It is the source of many head scratching bugs and time wasted. "The script works in my machine!" It doesn't work in production where we only have sh. It won't exit due to an error, the if statement will gobble the error. You only find the bug after enough bug reports hit that particular condition.

After a couple shots to the foot I avoid double square brackets at all cost.

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

This should be fixed with a shebang and shellcheck. If your shebang is #!/bin/sh, shellcheck will complain loudly about bash-isms. If production is sh and doesn't have bash, there's quite a few other bash-ism you want to check for. You can run shellcheck in CI to check your scripts and return non-zero if they aren't clean, and you can force off warnings for lines that are ok.

EDIT: I should have said, "could be fixed once and for all", "should" is just my opinion.

therealjumbo commented on San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet sfchronicle.com/sf/bayare... · Posted by u/crhulls

m0llusk · 3 years ago

You are making light of things for your own delight and political leanings which is exactly the kind of thing that leads to all this nastiness. The station you are talking about is multimodal and is going to get Caltrain even though it takes a long time. It has a unique structure that makes it essentially a big floating barge and the problems that came with that have since been fixed. Lots of stuff got closed for COVID that could probably have been kept open with precautions. Your pointed criticism needs to be balanced against alternatives and you provide none.

therealjumbo · 3 years ago

This is laughable. So poking fun at a projects cost overruns and failures is actually the reason for the failure in the first place? I guess then Jon Stewart is responsible for the failures of the Bush administration then?

Why did your project take 2x as long and cost 5x as much? Because somebody on the internet made snarky comments...

No, this is grift, red tape and incompetence. Go look at other cities in the US, they don't have these costs that are anywhere near SF for the same amount of work.