T156

Got a link to the Onion story? Couldn't seem to find it.

Yes, it's that thing what 4-chan hackers known as Anonymous use, isn't it?

It's particularly bad now that it's forcibly embedded into every computer, and at the forefront.

You can't hit Win-C by mistake any more, since Windows will instead open a window to "chat with friends and family" by trying to install Teams. (Which makes it particularly bad on my end is that the install broke, so it will randomly pop up later with "Cannot install teams at the moment. Please try again later.")

And never try to deal with dates and timezones.

Or anything that looks like dates.

Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and 'helpfully' convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).

It's bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.

It isn't over nothing, though. Allergen information was missing.

Sure, it seems silly in this case, but not enforcing it also leaves wiggle-room that you really don't want for food labelling, otherwise companies could just start leaving stuff out of it because it's "obvious".

No-one with a nut allergy wants to be unexpectedly landed in the morgue because the company didn't put "contains cashews" in the label for their satay, since it's obvious, as nearly every satay sauce on the market contains cashews.

You can turn it off, but the fact that you have to go into the settings and toddle about is ridiculous.

It's a notepad, why does it even need settings to twiddle?

Enterprise would riot if they did.

They might do it later, but as it stands, this isn't the old notepad, and gets used by a good bit more than just Enterprise users, so they can stick their AI into it.

People also forget that YouTube ran at a loss for well over a decade.

And any new start up would have to compete with YouTube and their massive audience, and all the other sites. There's a reason that Vimeo never made quite the same height, for example.

Or reprise their old assistants from XP.

At least a "computer Wizard" would make them stand out compared to ChatGPT in a funny box.

Excel definitely has its flaws though. For example, in science, it will mangle your data in its attempts to be helpful by reformatting the file if you so much as open it.

The genomics committee had to change their naming scheme for some genes because excel kept converting them into dates (for example, you had a MAR-10 gene, it'd be converted into a timestamp or 3/10) and destroying the names, even if the file wasn't saved.

CPUs have multiple cores now? Amazing.

The split might leave a monopoly still, if it's the only major browser.