circuitfarmer

It’s an awful mix of half-assed approaches to things. Awkward syntax on everything and very poor at recognizing what types of data it is handling.

Open a CSV in a fresh Excel install. It will almost certainly mistake something for a date if the CSV is sufficiently large (unless the user is exceedingly explicit at changing settings for that particular CSV). It will reformat that data as a date, and as an added bonus, since Autosave is on by default, it’ll save that reformatted data back into your CSV. Yes, settings can be changed to avoid these things. But why isn’t it just designed better so as to avoid it altogether?

If that was just a natural side effect of spreadsheet apps, I could understand it. But LibreOffice Calc is a million times better at recognizing what types of data it is handling, so it seems to just be Excel’s shittiness.

The fact that it also hasn’t really changed beyond aesthetics since 2004 is just… wild.

Excel?! Have to respectfully disagree on that one.

Ah yes, you’re right.

I guess a better qualifier might be: closed-source Microsoft products tend overwhelmingly to suck.

For your sacrifices, I salute you

Is there a Microsoft product that isn’t?

To be fair, Teams is pretty bad even for MS. I’ve never seen something do so relatively little and still perform so poorly. When I switched jobs and got to use Slack it was like a great fog being lifted off of my being.

I still regularly use my original Steam Controller – for the trackpads. It allows me to do M+KB strategy gaming from the couch.

This lacks the killer feature, IMHO, given that I can use any of a wide variety of regular Bluetooth controllers for stuff with controller support.

This is the only corporate game left. Convince clueless investors that they’ll make more money if they give you money. No real innovation or even a real goal. Just buzzword after buzzword to get those investors on board.

Capitalism doesn’t breed innovation. It eventually eats it.

I’d like to think some things will change once not every major investor is clueless after just being rich their whole lives, but given how generational wealth works, I’m not holding my breath.

Thank you thank you thank you. This is exactly what I want on Lemmy.

We’ve gone from alternative facts to alternative reality.

Did they ever ramp down?

Especially when creators find interesting ways to work them in, which is pretty often, in my experience. They’re the one type of ad that doesn’t annoy me.

They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.

Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.

Ich auch

The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.

This. It was meant to be viewed at 480p.

I agree with all this, but I think it is all to say: ISPs support Net Neutrality when it behooves them.

Shareholders demand ever increasing return. There is only one way any of this goes, and we are witnessing a total systematic collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.

You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.

It’s certainly possible. I do get ads that don’t seem relevant for me pretty regularly. But this last time I’m referencing: one of the first ads I saw that night was for our discussion topic.

I’m not disagreeing with you, so I’ll just mention it’s safe to say: whether it is digital fingerprinting or mic listening, the surveillance level is absolutely off the charts.

They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.

I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.

It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.

And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.