I'm using the MS suite for the first time in over a decade...and the collaborative aspects are still nowhere near Google's. I routinely get problems when multiple people are editing the same content (Word doc, spreadsheet, or PowerPoint). And sometimes the thick client works best, sometimes browser editing works fine...but it's inconsistent.
For all of them, Microsoft has a more complete feature set...but for 99% of things (and anything with lots of collaboration), I prefer Google Work Suite or whatever it's called this month.
>>It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.
100% agreed. Creating a spreadsheet is declarative programming, and Excel (and now Google Sheets) has made more developers than any other platform (probably by an order or two of magnitude).
I do not know a business that was not CRITICALLY dependent on Excel for actual business operations through the 90s and 00s...and the same is likely true today.
> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant,
I don't think that the Cal Grants program was ever designed to remove those people from the program. It was designed to make sure they didn't get an advantage. In other words, it was prevent universities from letting people who otherwise would not have made the grade in just because their parents made the grade.
Giving alumni's children an advantage isn't giving an advantage to "the smartest, most charismatic, most talented people" -- it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).
And the phrase "it would be ideal if those born into privilege could also clear the SAT" is such a strange one. OF COURSE rich people can "clear the SAT;" in fact, they get the advantage of MUCH better preparation, etc. So this is absolutely about giving an advantage to kids who could not qualify on their own.
To be clear: I don't think Stanford is doing this to keep poor people out (their scholarships have always been very generous). But I do think the administration probably done some basic calculation: they get more in donations from alumni who want legacy admissions for their progeny than they get from Cal Grants.
And Stanford has decided that accepting some kids who just don't make the grade is worth that economic advantage.
No! After about 10 years of writing software professionally, I moved over to product management, and my time spent coding decreased drastically (in the last 15 years, only some Python to show my kids a thing or two).
But I'd love to try! Maybe I'll take an online class for fun.
I just love his writing so much -- he captures what I felt when I discovered Lisp. As a kid learning programming in the 80s, I had already done some BASIC, Fortran, Pascal and COBOL in high school and early college. There were differences, of course, but they had some fundamental commonality.
At UC Berkeley, however, the first computer science class was taught in Scheme (a dialect of Lisp)...and it absolutely blew me away. Hofstadter is right: it feels the closest to math (reminding me a ton of my math theory classes). It was the first beautiful language I discovered.
(edit: I forgot to paste in the quote I loved!)
"...Lisp and Algol, are built around a kernel that seems as natural as a branch of mathematics. The kernel of Lisp has a crystalline purity that not only appeals to the esthetic sense, but also makes Lisp a far more flexible language than most others."
I love this so much. From 1992-1996 I was in a band in the SF Bay Area. I played the congas, but really I think they just let me do that because I also took on the band's webpage.
It was dozens and dozens of pages of hand-coded HTML, updated nearly daily, with lots of easter eggs, etc. I had programmed a ton (I was a C/C++ developer at the time), but never in HTML. I learned everything by "viewing source" (at the time, most of the web was hand-written HTML).
We hosted it at The Well, which even then had a little bit of cachet in the community.
One of my great regrets was that we didn't keep a copy of the site -- and we "retired" and took down the site early enough that the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy.
For demos, I long ago learned to "start with the good part."
If you have some fantastic monitoring software, don't start with an intro for how you installed it, how you set up the metrics collection, how you hooked the front end up to the time series database, then show a cool graph with info that the user never had before.
Instead: start by showing a cool graph they never had before. Explain why that graph is so useful. And THEN, now that everyone cares...you can take the time to show how you got to nirvana.
I've seen so many demos that start with a longish, boringish process to get someplace cool, and they would have been better had they started by showing something cool.
I worked at Google from 2013 to 2020. There were definitely employees (maybe a majority) who assumed that Google would always be the dominant force in technology. Those of us who were a bit older always understood that everything changes in Silicon Valley.
Those buildings represented that change to me. I can remember coming to concerts at the Shoreline in the 90s and looking at those Silicon Graphics buildings: they looked so cool, and they represented the cutting edge of technology (at the time). And yet...it all disappeared.
Same goes for the Sun campus which is where Meta/Facebook is now. Famously, the Facebook entrance sign is literally the same old Sun sign, just turned around! [0]
So I always cautioned co-workers: this too, shall pass. Even Google.
I can't stand it being called "hallucinating" because it anthropomorphizes the technology. This isn't a conciousness that is "seeing" things that don't exist: it's a word generator that is generating words that don't make sense (not in a syntactic sense, but in a semantic sense).
Calling it "hallucination" implies that there are (other) moments when it is understanding the world correctly -- and that itself is not true. At those moments, it is a word generator that is generating words that DO make sense.
At no point is this a conciousness, and anthropomorphizing it gives the impression that it is one.
I've been fiddling for a few minutes and have successfully moved a bunch of pieces...but also can't figure out for the life of me why some moves aren't allowed.