Except for us-east-2. Traffic between us-east-1 and us-east-2 costs the same as traffic within us-east-1.

Another thing is China kind of "herds" factory workers in a way the US cannot. For example, they limit housing options near factory towns so the space can be dedicated to factories, large-scale NIMBY-ism. If a company folds, workers' temporary mini-housing makes it logistically easier to move to a new town, but it's hard on families.

Thus, biz owners have a kind of de-facto slave class that's relatively easy to shift around as needed.

This is also a form of subsidizing industry. China has managed to combine capitalism and communism in ways that give it an advantage, or at least keep it a manufacturing superpower.

As mentioned elsewhere, spreadsheets are probably the wrong tool for the for that particular job. Just because one can make a giant sheet in a spreadsheet tool doesn't mean they should. It won't have sufficient indexes to quickly do JOINs or equivalent, for example. Nor proper caching of a data, having more of a file-centric design.

For one, if a handful of work-groups need Excel, that's not a reason for the rest of the company to use Excel. Most Excel uses will be mundane things. They can allow justifiable exceptions.

but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well.

Software tools/frameworks I knew well were ordered tossed because the vendor or support structure faded. It happens. Why are financial people given that latitude when almost nobody else is? Change is annoying and creates a learning curve, but inevitable in the work-place. I knew cases where employees quit over frustration over replacement-ware, but management said "we are doing it anyhow, live or leave" (paraphrased).

And I'm surprised there are not products dedicated to big org financial analysis. There might be, but "we don't wanna learn something new" lobbying may be stopping it.

Excel probably has other scaling problems they didn't mention in the article but just learned work-arounds, yet they are likely stretching Excel to its limits risking more problems, familiarity or not. Oracle Essbase allegedly is a big-org financial modelling tool. I don't like Oracle the company, but Essbase & competitors may be a better tool for that particular job. See what other big orgs use.

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.

For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet, it will be correct for the current year. No user has to think about that at all, they just load it and get a correct table. You can extrapolate this to basically any level of complexity because Excel has VBA and you can script everything. The user just follows instructions, and they aren't even allowed to edit any cells which could break anything.

In case anyone is going this far down the hole, it turned out great. Even though the item was shipped from the US, because the seller didn't respond I got a refund without having to return it.

So far Aliexpress has been responsive to 100% of my issues and I only have needed to be a little patient and not expect everything to be solved immediately or arrive immediately.

I agree that a database-backed application is the right way to go for that much data. However, Finance used Excel because they could. We all like to talk about how bad an idea it is to do that, but Excel brought financial computations on large data sets to people who can't write any code. It has enabled thousands upon thousands of businesses to do things they couldn't do before without paying a programmer to develop a solution they cannot maintain. The fact that other spreadsheets regularly crater when handed data that Excel has no trouble with is exactly why we have so much Excel.

I like to use Drupal to rapidly create database applications which can handle a lot of data without writing code. But I wouldn't expect someone in accounting to be able to do that at all, and that just shifts the problem domain. Instead of getting stuck with Excel, now I'm getting stuck with Drupal. All of the logic just winds up in a different system that you can't trivially transfer it out of, so you have the same exact maintainability problem, except more people know how to work with Excel.

which matches their brain-cell count

If you are an inventor or any kind of "creative", and you get AI to make something cool, take credit for it as a human, you don't have to tell anybody its from AI. If somebody spots AI artifacts, just say "I used AI to assist me".

Committees can convolutize anything. Some mamby pamby or non-IT manager won't say "no" and so every feature requests ends up in the spec, making a mess. Good managers know when to say "no".

Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.

Time for a database, people. You are using the wrong tool for the job.

Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like.