First they came for the Chinese (can’t buy GPUs), then all of non US citizens (can’t use latest models). What’s next, we can’t use encryption? Cybersecurity tools? Access to latest publications in science?
Absolutely love HP calculators. Almost fourty years ago, my HP28s introduced me into programming in RPL, a stack based Forth like language combined with elements from Scheme (Lisp), and symbolic calculation. It was a language that was way ahead of its time, nothing I had seen in Pascal or C. Only a few years later in Mathematica. From there I learned Scheme, and was introduced to the book SICP. All of this had a lasting effect on how I program and think.
HP started my journey so to speak :)
I also had one of those mentioned in the article, just for nostalgia. Rock solid, RPN based, lovely product. The kind of product companies do not build anymore (products that will last you a lifetime)
I cannot imagine that students, kids, or half the world where paying 3 usd a month is impossible, will keep using whatsapp when they have to pay a fee. They will look for alternatives immediately. Telegram?
But actually this is a good move. I tried to convince my family and friends to use alternatives, without success. But now I see hope.
Have stopped using FB and IG years ago, was stuck with WhatsApp because of half the world using it.
I used a predecessor of this almost thirty years ago to learn Scheme and work trough the book SICP. The Racket maintainers still ship updates and new features, that’s remarkable.
Scheme is a wonderful lisp dialect. It taught me basics of functional programming, about closures, about tail call recursion, about functions always returning values (which annoyed me a lot when I started learning Python, where .append or .sort returened `none` instead of the list, and were destructive).
So I have very fond memories of Racket (then DrScheme) and Scheme. Had also written my matrix multiplication library and my CAS system to mimic the functionality of my HP28s calculator.
Companies might need Microsoft, but why are people panicking who could replace ms office with other office suites? Why aren’t they abandoning Microsoft products? From office suites to windows?
I am a heavy user of Pandoc. As I write all my text in markdown using Obsidian, but have to create content for the MS Office environment, I use Pandoc to convert my markdown content into ms office formated content.
I would be lost had I have to use the Office tools to edit and format my text.
I used it to output my doctoral thesis in LaTeX from Markdown 10 years ago, and similarly for going back and forth between my supervisor's Word documents and the main thesis text.
Embarrassingly, a horrible little script for converting Pandoc's Markdown endnotes to inline format remains my most-starred GitHub repo: https://github.com/ltrgoddard/inliner/
Not lost because it's hard to learn, but because I don't like writing in ms office products. It's not just word, I write formated long emails in outlook as well.
The author is blaming llms alone. And is not even mentioning sites where you can download any and every book you wish. That might have led to decreasing sales as well.
Not everything can be answered with yes or no. I used to give thorough answers even pre-LLMs. When someone asks about a project and its details, I am supposed to give a one sentence answer because LLMs give lengthy answers and that sucks?
This is like people hating on em-dash because LLMs use them a lot.
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