This is very similar in style to my favorite presentation and paper of all time, titled On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [0]. The research, presentation and paper were all created inside of powerpoint and it is probably the greatest thing ever made. If you enjoyed the above video you will definitely enjoy this.
That was a great video! Unfortunately, clicking on each cell's entries really slows down computations.
At National Supercomputing Center For Energy and the Environment we retrofitted all the PowerPoints to use timed animations. Now all computations execute in constant time. There is no need to click! As a special bonus, the code is no longer susceptible to side-channel timing attacks.
SO true. Imagine how much important business knowledge is tied up in an Excel macro, or -- God forbid -- in a ridiculously long formula stored in cell Q237 or whatever.
Less snarkily, Excel is so capable that lots of office workers learn IT and never bother going any deeper, and so they do things like re-inventing relational databases using Excel, etc.
> Imagine how much important business knowledge is tied up in an Excel macro, or -- God forbid -- in a ridiculously long formula stored in cell Q237 or whatever.
Often none, and that's the bigger problem; those aren't vehicles that are good for storing business knowledge, so the business knowledge that went into them is often either stuck in someone's head (who may have left long ago) or lost entirely.
An (possibly entirely correct in context, possibly not) application of that knowledge in a particular context is captured in the macro or formula, but the knowledge itself, including the factors from the context contributing to the particular application, is not captured.
And this whole malady is especially common in finance departments, which are (typically) horribly documented anyway. It's all institutional knowledge, and those in that area tend to be long-term employees who don't know the difference between "things that are part of accounting and finance everywhere" and "things that are idiosyncratic to Acme Corp."
Microsoft Bob (codename "Utopia", seriously) “Assistants” and the vestigial Office Paperclip beat Siri, Home, and Cortana to the punch, commercial products anticipating agents and chatbots by two decades.
Very entertaining and well delivered talk; it not only does what the title says, but also explains some of the math and magic behind making HDR images.
I'm reminded of the oft-linked Goldbloom quote in Jurassic Park. ;)
I'm also reminded of a guy I knew in college. He would LOVE this, because when we were working together at a university computer lab, he was the guy who would learn a tool, and then use that tool to the exclusion of all else, even to the point of absurdity.
The only tool he really knew when he started working there was Lotus, and he ended up figuring out how to automate all sorts of network administration tasks in Lotus macros.
It's a little known fact, but Powershell runs with Excel as the internal execution engine. The secret is actually hidden in plain sight. Just look at the name for a clue...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8