A field can change a lot in 35 years.

I can see someone saying something like that if they don't feel progress is being made. I met someone at a conference who said, "Everyone thinks their own research is bullshit." That rang true to me.

It can be quite dangerous, yes.

The biggest benefit of the new features is the ability to create named functions that can be reused. Which means I can write it once, debug it, put it in a commented text file in a GitHub gist, and then rely on it in the future. That's a lot better than copying some huge, unreadable formula across hundreds of cells.

This can improve the readability of existing spreadsheets. It can also be used judiciously to add nice features that still make sense in spreadsheets. I implemented a function for cubic spline interpolation of data, for example. Doing that directly with formulas would be a nightmare, but it's pretty clean with the named function.

Somewhere a little more sophisticated than that is getting into danger territory. It's tempting because the people I work with love and understand spreadsheets but are less comfortable working with traditional programming languages. I am comfortable doing "real programming" and prefer it due to a mixed background. My manager thinks spreadsheets are overused. But spreadsheets are what most of my coworkers know, so they're what we use in practice.

I weep for all the scientists wasting their lives working on quantum computing, which will never work. They'll wish they had listened to gweihir. Same goes for all the companies wasting money on this technological dead end. They need to get their heads out of the sand.

Last I looked, it didn't have support for LAMBDA. Here's a post indicating it wasn't a feature as of 15 days ago, but someone is working on it: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/is-a-lambda-function-in-calc-possible/75866.

Do you realize who you're talking to? Slashdot's very own gweihir is the most knowledgeable person in the world on the viability of quantum computing. Indeed, everyone else is an idiot.

Someone has implemented

bool isEven(uint32_t n);

with this method. See https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/12/27/4-billion-if-statements.html

That's a fascinating take.

I've recently discovered lambda functions in Excel. Between dynamic arrays, LAMBDA(), LET(), and the advanced formula environment module of the Excel Labs add-on (import functions form a GitHub gist), it is possible to do some actual programming in Excel. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00115 discusses some of that.

I'm in electrical engineering and have started using Excel with these features more often because at least now I don't have to copy long, unreadable formulas into hundreds of cells, and my coworkers love spreadsheets. I also write programs in C++ and Octave to solve engineering problems, but that's a higher bar for other people to work with.

You have to understand that gweihir knows more than all of the experts actually working in the field. It's a shame that they are wasting their time working on this technology that very obviously isn't going to work, and it's all because they did not seek out gweihir's superior knowledge.

/s

Now, were there errors in the code behind Microsoft's paper? Errors in academic code is something I believe in a heartbeat. Glad someone reviewed it at this level of detail.

However did you acquire so many admirers?

Varactor diodes are a thing, but they top out around 120pF.

This rings true to me regarding most jobs.

I get your point, but it's worth noting that they had access to modern technology for the time: punched card machines. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust. I don't think they could have done what they did at the same scale without at least that level of data collection and automation.

In 2018 or 2019, I was working in embedded software development despite not formally studying CS (electrical engineer with some coding experience, mostly numerical stuff). My coworker was interviewing new hires and complained that none of them could answer challenge questions that he thought were fair and not too hard. He had me work through the question set, and I think he was right.

My current manager says some kids just out of school are fairly obviously using AI during the interview. They don't get hired.

Ah, thanks. Pretty sure the PHP 4 docs in 2004 recommended individual salting. Save each salt alongside the hash. A global salt is just a really odd combination of doing a little more but still being lazy. They probably did it to make their study achievable.

My friend in high school made a website and rolled his own hash function. I was able to brute force every password in a reasonable amount of time with interpreted PHP code on a 667MHz Celeron. It didn't help that he failed to sanitize inputs; the ASCII null character really sped up finding collisions.