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Microsoft likes to do the "opt out for the next 30 days", including uploading all my spreadsheets to Copilot to be training data.
by trollbridge 7mo ago
Microsoft likes to do the "opt out for the next 30 days", including uploading all my spreadsheets to Copilot to be training data.
- colejohnson66 7mo ago"Can we do X, Y, Z?" Yes? Or maybe later? It's so annoying. No means no, not "pester me later"!
- bombcar 7mo agoConsent used to be "Yes" or "No" now it's "Yes" or "I'll give in later"
- salawat 7mo agoThere's a reason the tech industry is said to be rapey. Such fundamental misunderstandings of consent likely do not ultimately stop at the digital.
- mghackerlady 7mo agoWoman in tech (rare here, I know) and I can confirm, they don't stop at digital
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- al_borland 7mo agoThat would be enough to get me to spend those 30 days migrating all my spreadsheets to a new format.
- trollbridge 7mo agoGoogle Sheets is slower/has enough usability issues it's not an option and OpenOffice is missing a few features too, not to mention neither really can do VBA at all, nor do they have PowerQuery. So Excel it is.
- bee_rider 7mo agoIs this stuff… like, good? I don’t know anything about the MS ecosystem. If you could start from scratch, would using something more like Python, pandas, that sort of stuff, be viable?
- nemomarx 7mo agoYou're not going to get non technical coworkers like the finance department entering their data or reports in pandas. So it depends on how much labor you want to put in helping them do it, I guess?
- Rediscover 7mo agoI thought I read something similar in Levy's book "Hackers" but the following is from https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html "It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was [2]. He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program."
- array_key_first 7mo agoNo, none of it is good, excel is basically a bad tool for almost any job. There almost always exist a better thing for everything people use excel for. But excel has inertia, and it's the only programming non-programmers are able, or rather willing, to do. So we're basically stuck with it. And yes, I consider crafting and maintaining excel workbooks programming, even if no VBA is involved.
- HWR_14 7mo agoExcel works, the VBA macros with random business rules work, people with business knowledge know how to use it, the workflows are set up. If we were starting from nothing it wouldn't be built, but the value of what already exists is massive.
- stronglikedan 7mo agoSure, if you never have to collaborate on them with anyone else.