Interactive voice response systems are actually customer repulsion systems used to keep costs down. Same answer for various chat systems. Cutting labor costs is the hyperfocus of many organizations, to their great peril.

Another side of this is that let's say we took 12Million taxpayers off the roles. They won't need housing, so mortgage lenders, builders, etc, don't get any revenue for them (data centers *might*).

They don't need healthcare, or hospitalization, pharma, etc. They drive no cars, need no roads, pay no fuel taxes. They have no progeny, no schools, and can't vote or donate to campaigns.

They don't drink much water, rarely poop, suck lots of air, and need wicked constant energy to do their job (if that's what you call it).

Commerce isn't bad, indeed it's how our civil cultures survive and sustain themselves. Remove the human elements and there's a very mixed result, with the reputation of getting blood from rocks, repulsing those that need actual customer service, and generally injecting more mud than high quality/low cost lubrication to revenue streams.

But hey, I'm not liplocked to VC udders. Races to the bottom are never fun, and while I find it's OK to have shareholders, some shareholders will do anything to milk that cow, it is what we teach MBAs today.

It seems reasonable; but also like something that should really spook the customers.

It seems to be generally accepted that junior devs start out as more of an investment than a genuine aid to productivity; so you try to pick the ones that seem sharp and with it, put some time into them, and treat them OK enough that they at least stick around long enough to become valuable and do some work for you.

If that dynamic is now being played out with someone else's bots, you are now making that investment in something that is less likely to leave, whatever as-a-service you are paying for will continue to take your money; but which is much more likely to have a price regularly and aggressively adjusted based on its perceived capabilities; and have whatever it learned from you immediately cloned out to every other customer.

Sort of a hybrid of the 'cloud' we-abstract-the-details arrangement and the 'body shop' we-provision-fungible-labor-units arrangement.

Some customers presumably won't care much; sort of the way people who use Wix because it's more professional than only having your business on Facebook don't exactly consider web design or site reliability to be relevant competencies; their choice is mostly going to be between pure off the shelf software and maybe-the-vibe-coded-stuff-is-good-enough; but if your operation depends in any way on your comparative ability to build software Amazon is basically telling you that any of the commercial offerings are actively process-mining you out of that advantage as fast as the wobbly state of the tech allows.

If the litigation is anything to go by; their "Suicide Solution" nostalgia callback colab with Sony Music Entertainment should be a hit!

From what little we get to see of their books; I full expect them to continue as an aggressively nonprofit org; for a while.

I further expect them to do so in a spirit of arrogant, rapacious, desperation that will just keep getting more intense until that while is up.

He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.

Your first full paragraph is 100% opinion. Run along now.

... no.

As mentioned above, other countries realize that free/inexpensive higher education is actually an investment in their citizens and in their country's futures.

But i the grand tradition of the American “free market,” the U.S. once again proves that if there’s a way to squeeze its own citizens for profit, it’ll find it.

Other countries invest in people; we just invoice them and call it freedom, leaving generations shackled to long-term debt.

Other countries realize that free/inexpensive higher education is actually an investment in their citizens and in their country's futures.

Truth. Ever notice how every single one of the politico's who've been railing against "elitists" and who continually warn us against the dangers of "liberal" colleges all have their own advanced degrees?

Trump graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and from the Wharton School of Business. Marco Rubio graduated from the University of Florida and the University of Miami Law School. Jeb Bush? University of Texas. Rand Paul? Baylor and Duke. Tom Cotton attended Harvard and Harvard Law, and Ted Cruz hails from Princeton and Harvard. JD Vance? OSU and Yale.

But you? Nah. Can't have the common folk bein' "overcredentialed". Might start gettin' uppity and askin' too many questions.

Best to leave all that higher learnin' to our new ruling class and be properly thankful for any table scraps they toss our way...

So the 'hyperloop' people have a cool website; while the 'train' people are just plain getting on with building stuff; whether conventional or the now-quarter-century-ish old maglev option.

Looks like someone signed up for another round of 'faff with apps vs. offshoring our entire high tech supply chain' and hoped it would work better this time.

And some dumbass 'managing director' is telling us that a gigantic safety-critical vacuum system is 'not effected by strikes'; more or less because he has no idea what the maintenance and operations would involve? Truly a joke telling itself.

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.