Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the flying billionaires heads up in the clouds who don’t give a fuck for life offtheline

193 points

Damn they found a way to make python slower

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28 points

Emulate that shit with Java!

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4 points

java isn’t slow

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16 points

I mean, whatever speed java has or doesn’t have, what the other person said was emulate, you’ll have your os then on top of that the JVM then on top of that your python implementation, then finally the python code. If that’s faster than os->python imp…

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-13 points
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Plus Java IS slow, quite slower than compiled languages at least

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4 points
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I used to make high performance distributed computing server-systems for Investment banks.

Since the advent of Just In Time compiling, Java isn’t slow if properly used.

It can however be stupidly slow if you don’t know what you’re doing (so can something like Assembly: if you’re using a simple algorithm with a O(n) = n^2 execution time instead of something with O(n) = n*log(n) time, it’s going to be slow for anything but a quantum computer, which is why, for example, most libraries with sorting algorithms use something more complex than the silly simple method of examining every value against every other value).

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5 points

Just because you can make slow assembler doesn’t make Java fast.

Java is clunky and not fast compared to C++ which is clunky and fast, Python which isn’t clunky but slow bla bla bla bla…

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16 points

That made a python interface wrapper arround VB Script.

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94 points

Wow, Microsoft is now copying LibreOffice. Who could have guesses?

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73 points
Deleted by creator
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82 points

The Python bit. The cloud was copied from Google’s suite.

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21 points

I was just going to ask how long before Libreoffice has local python scripting. Of course it already has it and MS is copying them in a shittier way, silly me.

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2 points
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GSheets lets you run python code? I thought they were all js-based

edit: I misread, you’re saying LibreOffice has Python support, nvm

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0 points

So who is hosting libteoffice’s python cloud?

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24 points

The difference is Microsoft will feed your scripts into training its AI.

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21 points

Microsoft is stupid, but not too stupid to realize that Excel users are generally tech-illiterate and most of them will produce garbage code.

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10 points

Gpt/Bing attempts at python code for excel lmao, full circle, ai training on itself

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84 points

I don’t get it. Why I need cloud to run Python scripts which can be done locally? Installing Python isn’t hard and MS can bundle it as a library with Office either.

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23 points

I’ve been asking this for every other cloud service - either companies are jumping on the 10-year-old bandwagon or want to collect data for AI training purposes in a way you cannot just disable in the settings. And of course you cannot self-host your own server.

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20 points

This sounds like a security check. Our liability and ransomware insurance both require scripts to be turned off for excel and word.

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16 points

I believe security threats can be mitigated locally without resorts to cloud.

Actually, one can argue using cloud is less secure because there is a risk of sensitive data leaked out of cooperate network.

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You could argue that, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Microsoft has a massive amount of resources to throw at securing their environment, whereas most businesses simply don’t have the ability to field a dedicated security team. The solution many reach is to offload risk to your software vendor, in this case Microsoft. Then, if there is data lost, it’s Microsoft’s fault, and it’s their problem to fix, too. It’s not ideal, but it’s the world we’re living in.

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3 points

But Micro$oft never implement any permission system or checks for Visual Basic in Office so any macro can use anything the user has access to. If the scripting language could only access its document’s content in an undoable way without explicit permissions such as to use the filesystem and Internet or modify the Normal template (as opposed to the current system, which does not differentiate between useful scripts and malware and can easily be bypassed by social engineering), the risk would largely be mitigated but Micro$oft does not care.

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3 points

Cloud doesn’t have access to local drives…but in this day and age, python could be containerized or sandboxed. Sounds messy though.

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15 points

Richard Stallman on Service as a Software Substitute:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html

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5 points

When you save your doc to one drive then you can access it from the web version of office. That’s the reason they’ve been encouraging developers to write add-ins that run from the cloud. I’m guessing that this is for similar reasons

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3 points

You can also access docs by uploading it to the web version of office. Correct me if I’m wrong but last I remembered add-ins don’t choose between desktop and web.

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4 points

Not everyone has an opportunity to work with Python in their work environment. I’m on the “business” side of the company, capable of doing most of programming stuff myself (Python, C#, SQL, etc.), whereas only “IT” people can work with the proper compileable code. And I’m left out working with VBA macros, or ask IT to write a script for me, which will take 1 year to develop. This change now will improve my local productivity for sure.

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15 points

This issue isn’t about authoring the script, is about why it needs to execute on the cloud rather locally.

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3 points

Fair point, maybe I replied to a wrong comment. Nonetheless, I’ve seen comments saying “just use native Python”. Not everyone can do that.

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3 points

This happened in my old place - also on the business side. Asked for python, got it, then had it immediately removed because of security risks.

I told the head that I could still access tables and shit via excel if I wanted so what does it matter? He didn’t realise this, and asked that I told no-one else it could be done. FFS.

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70 points

Does anyone not think Microsoft is going to use all their cloud data for training language models?

“We promise not to” doesn’t seem realistic to me. Proving they used it is impossible.

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7 points

“We promise not to”

Where did you quote this from? I think they won’t care, just like GitHub Copilot, or it will be an opt-out feature.

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53 points

Surprising no one. You can’t even autosave files in Office software anymore unless you use OneDrive.

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32 points

unfortunately the local storage technology just isn’t there yet. we have to rely on the magic of the cloud to handle complex things like auto saving files and running python interpreters

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5 points

😂😂😂

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2 points

What does Lemmy think about emoji

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2 points

Yeh that pisses me off. When I looked that up, I saw that on the Microsoft help forums their response was ‘well, you never really had that feature locally anyway’.

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