> How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes?

FWIW, I do. I don't live in the US, though.

Cheers, mate.

Note that it's hard for researchers in Europe, too.

But as far as I can tell, not nearly as hard as in the US. I don't think that any PhD student in Europe has been deported by masked agents, for instance.

Erm... security?

Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.

Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.

Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.

Good thing we're not in the US to terrorize us with the ICE.

Yes, I do, but it's not going to prevent me from doing so.

I believe that the current generation of GenAI (as a market, not necessarily as a tech) is going to crash and burn by 2027. I also believe that open-source will stay and will keep helping people and that, as the world becomes more lawless and free-for-all, we'll need all the help we can find.

Or Doom.

Was going to say the same thing. With way more processing power you could output the video over USB-C/TB at one end and connect a keyboard at the other.

Maybe?

I have friends working on IT in public administrations, starting to prepare for a switch from US tech to EU tech.

And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.

Not sure whether Excel is still good.

Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

For everybody else, Libreoffice is fine as far as functionality is concerned. UI might be another story, but that's worth getting over anyway, especially since a lot of people for whom this is a problem, would also have problems with getting away from Windows as a whole, just from buttons moving and things being different in general.

> Excel is really good for the wizards and for that one spreadsheet full of macros written by a wizard, which thus can't be ported over to Libreoffice or anything else. Many of those probably should Just™ be made into actual databases, but Excel is a lot more approachable than those, so you end up with giant spreadsheets instead.

Yes!! Misusing Excel as a database is really part of the problem. It also causes so many issues. Having multiple data elements within one cell. Someone overtyping a formula in a column of 200.000 values leading to one cell no longer being updated. Needing 32GB of RAM just to edit a spreadsheet with a measly 500.000 rows.

All stuff that never would happen with a real database. Microsoft never really put much effort into making Access approachable.

You could do this in Pandas with Python under like 400mb of ram

Porting involved Excel sheets into web apps has been a decent chunk of my dev career.

What works best in those situations, in your experience?

Do you recreate a spreadsheet, use an existing online service, and/or create a database with proper logic, etc.? If the latter, how do users handle the UI change, and can they have an ease of creation similar to what Excel provides?

In my experience it's mostly about understanding business requirements of people using said excel sheets and then replicating it to CRUD WebApps while keeping capabilities of importing said sheets and exporting them so user flows are unharmed till a wholesale transition is mandated.

Good source of money for contractors as OP said.

Bad how? Works just fine for everything I have ever needed to do with it. I'm not a power user, though, but my point is neither are 95% of users and the basic functionality is just fine.

I find the UI clunky and a clear regression from older versions.

A family member has recently written a book on the latest version of MS Word. It's not their first book written with MS Word. It's also not the first time I give a hand to make sure that typography matches publisher requirements. I find that using style sheets has become more complicated, more limited and better hidden with successive versions of MS Word.

Contrast with Apple Pages, in which style sheets are so well integrated in the UI that you barely need to think when you create a new rule.

In fact, I find that even LibreOffice is much better at style sheets these days.

I remember the (not necessarily good) old days when I used MS Word to create character sheets for my tabletop RPGs, or in-game newspapers, etc. These days, I would hate doing this with MS Word – and not just because I'm an open-source aficionado.

Being good is one thing, being compatible with existing files full of VBA macros is another.

Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?

Oh, the web version doesn't support them? I hadn't realized that.

It doesn't even support many basic functions of the office apps.

MS was working hard on creating feature parity but at some point they just dropped everything and gave up.

FWIW, when I was studying, I trained on some decades old physics exams. Some of them were largely about calculating things by hand.

So, yeah, calculators did lead academia to change how exams had to be designed, because it solved some questions automatically.

I still think that LLMs are much worse, but I feel that the question is actually valid.

Yeah, the Marshall plan was a master stroke.

Shame the US didn't manage to reproduce it in Irak.