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librasteveon How accurately did science fiction stories predict AI?

Nothing before 2017? What about:

  - Sally, Asimov 1953 (spot on with Waymo)
  - I, Robot etc, Asimov
  - HAL 2001 A Space Odyssey
  - any Iain M. Banks Culture novel

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

that a gap in the doc … as of today (in test) uses the Polars csv import same s parquet

still working out the use cases more thoroughly, for now i would say that they range from ad hoc calculations (like a quick thrown together Excel), though LLM workflows (markdown centric reports with numeric calculated tables) to 1GB+ dataset ingestion and interactive analysis

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

I agree 100% with that. And I suggest that LLMs make it much easier to “pull out” business calculations. Maybe into SQL with a custom Python script even :-).

For 41 years Excel has been the dominant way to mess with numbers in a grid. Google Sheets and Apple Numbers are really just me too players, albeit with their niches. LibreOffice struggles imo since its main claim is to be fully Excel compatible but there are so many ancient Excel sheets that fail in practice (VBScript?).

I think that there will continue to be a need for folks to mess with numbers in a grid … more between a super calculator and an interactive dataset. I could have chosen a DB vernacular for Omasheet - DuckDB does this for Polars - but that lacks some of the numeric purity of the sheet. So I have gone for the core Polars query model - closer to Arrow columnar data (parquet), streaming support, lowered calculations, lazy execution … but without the DB abstraction layer.

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

not really … I did play with pyspread some time ago tbh i was put off by the basic UI and rather childlike website (sorry I know that’s not really fair, but I am a human). I’ll definitely take a fresh look at it now you mentioned it. curious: what are the standout features of pyspread that you like?

oh and omasheet is Rust and uses Polars so I am working with that rather than NumPy SciPy

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

hmmm sigils, eh?

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

I imagine a world where LLM makes languages like SQL akin to middle English (ie a specialist skill taught to graduates and up)

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

that’s why https://omasheet.org has its own DSL. that said it’s no doubt got some wrinkles so I’ll be reviewing all the comments on this hn post very carefully

librasteveon Adding Window Functions to a Spreadsheet

I’m all in favour of making spreadsheets better, with code friendly formulas. Here’s one I’m working on - somewhat earlier in dev cycle than grist and while I did consider Python (and lua) for the formula DSL decided to cook up my own.

All feedback good and bad v welcome.

https://omasheet.org

librasteveon Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI

modern day Mary Shelley

librasteveon Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI

vibe comments!

librasteveon Pico CSS is no longer maintained

this

librasteveon We should be more ambitious with the software we build

same reason that readable machine code is not on my list

librasteveon We should be more ambitious with the software we build

I made a new spreadsheet https://omasheet.org based on a wish list of the things I wanted:

  - ease of use
  - markdown friendly
  - strongly typed
  - exact maths
  - columnar data (Apache Arrow)
  - fast queries (Polars)
  - code oriented
  - AI driven

(a partial list btw!)

Happy 41st birthday Excel

librasteveon Claude Now Works with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

ah … wondered when that (or Excel) was going to land - about time

librasteveon In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible

Sean Carroll (name checked in the article) has an excellent podcast “Mindscape” (https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)

I particularly like the one with David Wallace.

librasteveon The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction

I second this. Worked at Weitek in the 80s and my first job was to write a P754 test suite in C. At that time, Sun engineers wrote a test called “paranoia” and would regularly pick holes in our FPU chip designs. Mostly they ended up taking what we had built and we were in notice they weren’t happy. Then then built their own SPARC FPU and we went to the wall.

I spent months in all the corners of P754 and can attest to it being the most carefully thought through and subtly powerful document.

At this time we built custom FPUs for non P754 such as DEC format which iirc was deliberately close to P754 but slightly twisted to maintain code incompatibility.

Anyone who thinks FPU math is deterministic has not got close to circuit design for these beasts. I suppose MAYBE that got fixed in the last 40 years, but the move to GPU leads me to suspect that determinism in all the myriad corner cases is not top of the list.

librasteveon Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications

Potemkin == Omarchy

librasteveon Ask HN: Why aren't Americans rising up against tipping?

https://cart.tips

This gets my goat.

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

when I worked in Swindon (Intel fwiw), HR told all the Americans “draw a circle 15 miles radius around Swindon station and live outside it”

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

dang … guess I am stuck in 1961 https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/EW1961PRE/1?utm_so...

fwiw I just threw this in since many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading

red face

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

I claim 1% commission if anyone on HN buys it

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

Reading (the largest town in the UK btw) has other tunnels … for example https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/14492484.sneak-a-pea... and there is a rumour of secret escape tunnels from the (medieval) abbey.

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

oh yeah! tunnel merch

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

aol wtf

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

well I (the submitter) messed up and wrote 15M in the submission title (note the cap) in error just to add to the confusion (now fixed, soz.) … I thought “best” just to repeat the article title

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

sorry for the capital M … I have fixed in the title to 15m as in metres

that’s ~ 45 ft underground, I believe … perhaps not that impressive, but quite funny since I would hesitate to undermine my own house and surely this makes it worth less

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

oops … sorry … now fixed

librasteveon House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

sorry for the ads … but this made me smile

librasteveon Vx – One Language, Every Chip

> Are you not biased having created another PL in a similar fashion?

guilty as charged (but also with experience that I have made something cool that I would not otherwise have had the skills or time to do)

> same fashion as a group project in school

you describe my approach to schoolwork with uncanny accuracy

> that’s the funnest part!

amazingly, finding a name for a new PL is the hardest part and yes I plead guilty to working collaboratively with an LLM for inspiration and for grunt checks (motorbike for the mind)

librasteveon Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language

Soon, hopefully, we will have evidence based analysis of those programming languages best suited for LLM authoring. Fwiw I doubt that CL will make the cut - but happy to be proven wrong. Obviously a large factor remains the facility of the human driver for a particular language.

Until then, I subscribe to the view that strong types fit LLM coding well since LLMs are prone to make silly mistakes when they patch together code examples in dynamic languages.

[Disclosure, my new language https://bil-lang.org aims to add “strong typing” around parallel programming to help weed out deadlock conditions.]