turkishlurker

nitpicker here: enshitified or enshittified?

I've been in manufacturing for ~13 years across 5 different organizations. There'll inevitably come up a spreadsheet use case where you'll have to execute a well defined series of steps on a recurring basis (and some of these steps may not be possible using the built-in functionality alone). Which is where VBA comes in. I've sometimes wondered what I would do in the absence of VBA and come to the conclusion that

a) I'd be forced to complete a painstaking task "manually", and likely committing the occasional error in the process, not to mention all the time I'd have "wasted"

b) In the case of "optional" tasks (whatever that may mean) I'd have had to give up on whatever functionality/feature VBA enables and some level of detail/sophistication/speed would thereby be lost.

To get a bit more concrete in terms of use cases, any spreadsheet task involving a bill of materials or having to do with stock management is probably ripe for some VBA enhancement. I am aware that it is looked down upon by some, but advising against VBA in favor of Python or some other "proper" tool that calls for an IDE is a bit like telling someone who wants to take up home cooking to get a fancy Japanese chef's knife set plus a sharpener instead of the good old all-purpose knife he is certain to have lying around.

The company in question must be taking planned obsolescence very seriously or else with the R&D budget I assume they have, they would have come up with a nearly durable product by now.

One explanation would be that if you are an "extreme" user, you are bound to find fault with all the offerings on the market. The need to tweak/customize/adapt naturally arises when you have reached a certain level of sophistication and when it does, you can only be satisfied by a product/service appropriately tweaked/customized/adapted.

Assembly in auto plants relies on a parts bundling/feeding process that begins in advance, analogous to mise en place and cooking.

I wish Kenji did a piece on the components of an "ideal" salad.

I remember a PG tweet along the lines of "if faced with a choice between two things, pick the harder one".

A former version of sandberg.nl from circa 2005. It was Flash based and if I recall correctly the work of Luna Maurer, a Dutch designer. I am not sure it is safe to admit it here but I am nostalgic for the heyday of Flash.

Schliemann was a curious character--he seems to have been as much of a pillager as an archeologist. As a non-sequitur his personal story is a testament to how much more "globalized" the world was in the 19th century, for better or worse.