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 58 days ago [-]
Sounds like how things are run at my place of work.
cyanydeez 57 days ago [-]
Before long, CEOs will be on Mars and their AI avatars will download daily updates into their excels.
CartwheelLinux 57 days ago [-]
My vote for comment thread of the year. Had coffee coming out of my nose with these two
sargstuff 58 days ago [-]
sounds like excel cell that calls html link to dynamically 'fetch' what needs to be display in cell. Link results can be the result(s) of almost anything. OTTO could well be a redirected link by server to 'sub-server' machine.
dmitrygr 59 days 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 59 days 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 58 days ago [-]
I still think this is pretty neat even if it's just acting like the console.
jayd16 59 days ago [-]
Excshell
ChocolateGod 59 days ago [-]
Execell
zipping1549 59 days ago [-]
Still funny
AshamedCaptain 59 days 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...
Ditto with a ZMachine being called from a VIM plugin...
A native one would be emulating a DOS 8086 PC with PostScript (some people already did a ZMachine emulator).
padjo 59 days ago [-]
Coulda shoulda woulda…
qwertox 59 days ago [-]
We've seen better on HN. Much better.
DrillShopper 58 days ago [-]
We've also seen worse. Much much worse.
nogajun 59 days ago [-]
Linux can run on Excel, but not Excel on Linux.
smodo 58 days 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.
"I am the author of the 'app' called Puter which loads up Puter inside Puter, which then loads up the Puter app again, which ..."
xattt 58 days ago [-]
I’d like to see bare-metal Excel.
grishka 58 days 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.
tech234a 58 days ago [-]
It was actually a Windows application that shipped it's own runtime copy of Windows [1].
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.
sargstuff 58 days ago [-]
Preference for NP over P?
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 58 days ago [-]
So when will there nmap be backported to run in this VM?
Would be awesome to have a little VM that can scan for lateral movement possibilities, in an excel spreadsheet. Next-gen malware!
valorzard 59 days ago [-]
Would this same trick work on LibreOffice Calc?
shakna 59 days ago [-]
Probably not. It calls out to a DLL library for most of the work. One that, unfortunately, is 32bit.
Libre Calc can load 64bit Excel plugins, but not 32bit (at the moment).
59 days ago [-]
necovek 59 days ago [-]
It runs on neither MacOS nor Excel cloud though, as it depends on a Windows DLL.
yjftsjthsd-h 59 days 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 59 days 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 58 days 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 58 days 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 59 days 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 59 days ago [-]
mini-rv32ima is incredibly compact -- I imagine a translation to VBA might not be too hard.
padde 59 days 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?
ivolimmen 59 days ago [-]
Question remains: can you run Windows in LibreOffice under Linux?
zombot 58 days ago [-]
I was about to say, "If it can run Doom...", but actually the deamons in Windows are worse and even more hellish than those in Doom.
what's 'run'?? same box or link to cloud instance ?
nailer 59 days 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 59 days ago [-]
I support you to one up them with `Lightning adapter on Excel`
userbinator 59 days ago [-]
Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to run WINE in it, and thus another Excel inside that.
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).
?? LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult... )
or "Autocorrect errors in excel still creating genomics headaches" ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4 )
Guess time to bump things up to a higher order portable programming language. Python for excel anyone vs. go "R".
This remind me of the top comment on Puter's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838179):
"I am the author of the 'app' called Puter which loads up Puter inside Puter, which then loads up the Puter app again, which ..."
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42168173
Would be awesome to have a little VM that can scan for lateral movement possibilities, in an excel spreadsheet. Next-gen malware!
Libre Calc can load 64bit Excel plugins, but not 32bit (at the moment).
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.
https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
Dog slow, but Turing complete.
Very impressive.
Greetings,
Deloitte.