People also used it to collect COVID data during the pandemic, and a lot of data was lost because someone accidentally opened it in an older version of Excel.

It's one of my pet peeves. Excel should not ever be used to maintain data. It's a fancy calculator.

I recently learned about this (not sure if it was a YouTube video or an article): apparently, it's not that we become infertile long before we die, it's that we live long past our fertility ends. And the reason for that is really simple: old people have accumulated a lot of knowledge that is valuable to teach to younger generations. The alternative is not to be fertile longer, but to die younger.

Presumably, menopause only occurs in species that learn and teach, and are able to accumulate so much knowledge that it becomes useful to keep experienced individuals alive longer so they can continue to teach.

As long as they use it for actual calculations, and not to maintain tables full of data.

If you mean Linux-only classic open source games, like Angband or Battle for Wesnoth or something, they still exist, but the demand has clearly gone down because now almost all games work on Linux. Except the ones with anti-cheat systems that rootkit-style access to your system.

For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.

And yet, every person high up in business that I talk to, including my wife, advises me to use Claude for this sort of thing. I don't get it. Claude text sucks, and it hurts my eyes when I'm forced to read it.

And yet, I'm stuck having to write an important message to someone that has real stakes riding on it, so I use Claude to refine it, and I see myself succumbing to Claude's pressure to use its words instead of my own. I hate it, but my words aren't very good.

And finally Claude proclaims the message perfect and I let my wife take a look at it, and she rejects the entire thing, restoring some semblance of sanity again.

But it hurts readability. If you're going to do it, at least don't use it anonymously, but give it a name that clearly describes what's going on.

But even then, there can be hidden performance traps. I've often seen javascript that used reduce and created the new accumulator by using a spread on the old accumulator and adding the new one: `[...acc, newValue]`. But that spread is another iteration inside a loop, turning it from O(n) to O(n^2). A for loop where you append it is much faster.