You do

That’s cool!

Ouch.

Is your username a reference to this song by the way? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4LWIP7SAjY

Yep, I got an absolute novel length comment from some far left .ml person as one of my first interactions on Lemmy.

I don’t like musicals but this film is amazing, truly one of a kind. Absolutely worth watching!

It could go that way, but on the other hand they could be more like MorningLightMountain in Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star, i.e. fascists who exterminate every other organism that competes with them for resources.

Great book if you haven’t read it!

I tried SailfishOS, gave it about 5 years but in the end a combination of bad hardware options and small user base (leading to small number of high quality apps) led me back to Android (grapheneOS).

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

Checking in

Just a small note that the businesses only have to open source their version if they release it. If they just use it internally then they don’t have to distribute the source code. So it depends on the use case.

My wife hates it when that happens

Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).

I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.

In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.

I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.

Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.

Harry Plotter

It made me chuckle, so thanks for that!

I’m feeling warmer already, thanks!

Was not expecting that! What a dark character arc :D

What do you use nowadays?

With the price of energy being what it is, people need the systemd flame wars to keep them warm!

I’m just grateful to have a place to discuss niche topics where there’s a reasonable balance of power between users, mods, and admins.

Federation means no more rug pulling after years of building open source apps to access proprietary services.

Proper ‘competition’ between instance owners means nobody can degrade the quality of experience for a quick buck.

Thank you for your part in building a better alternative!