Before long you'll have a different LLM embedded in each of a series of cells, and they'll each have an opinion on what you are doing elsewhere in the sheet, and your One True Trusted Overview LLM (named OTTO) will survey them and take a vote and get back to you.
sosborn · 1h ago
Sounds like how things are run at my place of work.
nogajun · 11h ago
Linux can run on Excel, but not Excel on Linux.
smodo · 4h ago
Excel is not even Excel anymore. It’s different on Windows, Mac, web, mobile… And there’s different bugs across all them! My favorite ones have to do with regional defaults.
grishka · 8h ago
Excel, at least old versions, does run on Linux using Wine.
Aardwolf · 6h ago
Then it may be possible to run Excel on Linux in Excel
xattt · 5h ago
I’d like to see bare-metal Excel.
grishka · 4h ago
I was going to say that first versions were technically that, but apparently Excel was never released for DOS, Excel 2.0 was already a Windows application, and 1.0 was only available on Mac.
Aardwolf · 3h ago
Lotus 1-2-3 was available for DOS
tinktank · 12h ago
This is the insanity that I miss.
bagatelle · 4h ago
I don't know that I miss it, it's still around if you look for it. Even here, I find several posts a month doing something this insane and fun, let alone finding out about my friends' personal projects.
unixhero · 2h ago
How can you miss it, when it is right here
65 · 2h ago
I think the guy who made Doom in only Typescript types is a testament to the fact people are still doing insane things with their computers.
dmitrygr · 12h ago
“ The emulator is built as a seperate dll which is loaded by the VBA macro. The VBA macro calls the emulator in the dll and gets the output and writes it into the cells in the spreadsheet. ”
Not really in excel. Excel is just the console. Emulator is a native DLL
qwertox · 6h ago
I was expecting something like the cells being used as registers and the computer being implemented in the spreadsheet itself. Loading an emulator via a DLL and using the spreadsheet as a line oriented display feels like cheating.
yesco · 5h ago
I still think this is pretty neat even if it's just acting like the console.
zipping1549 · 10h ago
Still funny
AshamedCaptain · 7h ago
By the same logic I can also put a crappy emulator in a dll and make notepad load it via a hook. Linux on notepad.exe. should I make that into a HN post too?
Now that I mention it, I think someone already posted that on HN...
linux and the hit game doom are the things hackers always put on something first. any eletronic
padde · 10h ago
Any practical use cases come to mind? Could you actually interact from Excel cells with Linux userspace, e.g. running a cell's value through a bash script as if applying a formula?
necovek · 12h ago
It runs on neither MacOS nor Excel cloud though, as it depends on a Windows DLL.
yjftsjthsd-h · 12h ago
Wouldn't help with cloud of course, but there's WINE for macOS, isn't there? Or does that version of Excel not allow loading binary libraries such that you could hand it a DLL if WINE translated it?
pjmlp · 9h ago
Microsoft 365 is the reason why the new add-in model is focused on Web technologies, and mostly deprecated going forward for new forward.
p_ing · 5h ago
It's focused on web tech as COM add-ins are a huge source of security and instability in Office apps. It's also more flexible for developers as they can modify the backend without having to update the client and the deployment model is significantly easier for admins.
pjmlp · 4h ago
The .NET ones are also going away.
Regarding COM, it wouldn't be that bad when using COM Servers.
However I do agree that although COM as idea is enticing, Microsoft keeps failing to deliver a productive way to use it, despite how much they keep focusing on it for Windows extensibility and API delivery since Vista.
Indeed, nowadays I feel myself a fool for having advocated for WinRT, it was one of the reasons why I returned back to Web and distributed systems, after spending four years back in Windows GUI development land.
And my advice now is for .NET devs, stay with Windows Forms or WPF, depending on which approach they favour.
For C++, I suggest the aging MFC if it has to be on the Visual Studio (still better out of the box experience than WinUI 3.0 for C++, and C++/WinRT is in maintenance anyway), but really Qt or C++ Builder are much better option.
jeroenhd · 9h ago
On the other hand, if you can get it to work in the new O365 architecture using whatever JS API they're exposing now, you can call it "cloud-based" or maybe even "serverless".
nxobject · 12h ago
mini-rv32ima is incredibly compact -- I imagine a translation to VBA might not be too hard.
snvzz · 2h ago
RISC-V is inevitable.
userbinator · 13h ago
Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to run WINE in it, and thus another Excel inside that.
qemu-i386->export X with serial->SLIP->TCPIP->wine with X exported->Excel
Dog slow, but Turing complete.
tolien · 8h ago
Next step is to get Doom working on it :-)
apexalpha · 7h ago
Wow! We are in awe that you managed to run Linux on a database tool designed to query Bigdata tables sharded over 72 sheets.
Very impressive.
Greetings,
Deloitte.
unixhero · 2h ago
Now lets sing a consulting song
ngcazz · 9h ago
I thought for a second this would be about the use of a spreadsheet as a general computation device.
aussieguy1234 · 10h ago
Excel > Linux > Wine > Excel...to infinity?
nailer · 13h ago
I just posted the ‘doom on a lightning adapter’ story, and saw this in submissions. I’ll have to tip my hat to the better bizarre ‘X on Y’ post. You win this time, radeeyate.
dheatov · 6h ago
I support you to one up them with `Lightning adapter on Excel`
Not really in excel. Excel is just the console. Emulator is a native DLL
Now that I mention it, I think someone already posted that on HN...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/how-to-get-doom-runni...
A native one would be emulating a DOS 8086 PC with PostScript (some people already did a ZMachine emulator).
Libre Calc can load 64bit Excel plugins, but not 32bit (at the moment).
No comments yet
https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
Regarding COM, it wouldn't be that bad when using COM Servers.
However I do agree that although COM as idea is enticing, Microsoft keeps failing to deliver a productive way to use it, despite how much they keep focusing on it for Windows extensibility and API delivery since Vista.
And my advice now is for .NET devs, stay with Windows Forms or WPF, depending on which approach they favour.
For C++, I suggest the aging MFC if it has to be on the Visual Studio (still better out of the box experience than WinUI 3.0 for C++, and C++/WinRT is in maintenance anyway), but really Qt or C++ Builder are much better option.
Dog slow, but Turing complete.
Very impressive.
Greetings,
Deloitte.