Non-clickbait title: Teslas running Autopilot have been in 0.0000273 crashes/km in less than a year!
I've been alive long enough to see a considerable sample set of human drivers and I've got to say the bar Autopilot needs to exceed in order to save limb and life is incredibly low. Couple that with the fact that just here in SoCal Tesla has become a common sight, 273 crashes sounds like a hell of a lot of human suffering was avoided.
As I've used slack over the last 5 years I've come to the conclusion that they have a quality problem of some sort. The software just behaves weird, especially in the voice and screen sharing areas.
It seems like their management runs the "quality via escalation" anti-pattern.
My grandfather, who I respected very much, was an accomplished career bureaucrat and considered any sort of promotion beneath him, and for sure crafting clickbait would earn his scorn. Thus marketing, promotion and crafting clickbait goes against everything I come from.
But, making something that I think will actually help people, and then watching it go unseen because I wouldn't do the thing required to spread the message via the network effect is a far worse fate.
“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don't complain about illogical behavior.” – Eli Goldratt
Tables are probably the most overlooked feature of Excel.
Why use tables?
* Each column is uniquely named - no more wondering if you are referencing the right cell, no more thinking about "to $ or not to $"
* The table's rows and columns are reliably discovered by pivot tables - no more wondering if the entire dataset is referenced by the pivot
* New columns that are formulas are automatically applied to every row
* Tables have names, so it is easy to understand which table a pivot is referencing
The true, reliable and sane power of excel lies in Tables + Pivots + Charts. If you drive most of the problem solving into those paradigms you will keep hair!
Most people have no clue these features exist, or that Excel even has advanced data modeling that supports all sorts of goodies including strict types and joins/merges/appends. It's not as accessible as just basic sheets, but I've had no problem crunching millions of rows of data in Excel with sub-second response times.
Excel 2013 and later has a columnar database capable of handling millions of rows, but not through the standard sheets interface so it loses a lot of the utility people are used to.
Yes, although you can have multiple sheets each with a million rows. Kind of like sharding.
But I’d be fascinated what kind of system spec is required to get good performance on those kind of numbers. I’ve been on a Mac for years, where Excel is crippled by limitations.
Tables have that all-too-common symptom of something that makes easy things even easier, but hard things way harder. Try making a table with a formula that involves more than the single row in which it's placed. What about tables with multi-row headers (e.g. title and units)? Section breaks in them? Merged parent data? I find I either want standard Excel layout, or a database. Tables don't really sit "between" those two; they're just their own extremely over-simplified universe that doesn't play nicely with anything else.
But hey, to each their own. Good on ya if Excel tables are what you need.
This, combined with judicious use of named ranges makes for much more pleasant formulas. Seeing `tax_rate` in the formula instead of `A$7$` is well worth the extra clicks.
I usually end up assigning names to nearly everything, single-cell constants, user input fields, computed lists, etc, etc
About tables, do they work when you automate the data entry part? For example, copy from a speadsheet into your spreadsheet with the first macro, and then transform the data with a second? That's 90% of my use case for Excel. (I know that doing this in Python/whatever would be "better" but I have to distribute this to users, and the only thing they have on their computer is Excel, and they're gonna manipulate the data after in Excel anyways).
I think Libreoffice Calc supports python integration. Maybe that way one could have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately I suppose most users are stuck in the MS garden.
On the one hand, it is great for doing a quick and dirty analysis with data not in a DB, on the other, it mangles data and translates the keywords/function names.
A large part portion of the software industry skips this form of testing in favor of using a portion of production with health metrics to detect chaos. Which is alright, unless someone like Boeing does it with an airplane.
If unleashing chaos on users is bad enough for your business, then TLYF is a good pattern. Here are some scenarios that call for TLYF:
* Customer will die from chaos in software
* Customer will remove product if they experience any chaos
* Software is deployed somewhere that is hard to update - think non-internet connected devices, or regulatory required change control
* Chaos will cause significant loss of value
Both Boeing and Toyota failed to apply TLYF rigorously, resulting in uneccessary deaths.
I've been alive long enough to see a considerable sample set of human drivers and I've got to say the bar Autopilot needs to exceed in order to save limb and life is incredibly low. Couple that with the fact that just here in SoCal Tesla has become a common sight, 273 crashes sounds like a hell of a lot of human suffering was avoided.