Highly recommend this CaptainDisillusion video that covers this topic of how cameras process colors in a very entertaining way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO3JgPUJ6iQ

Great tool, good job to the author. I am looking for something almost exactly like this. Lightweight GUI app for viewing tabular data. There's only one critical thing missing for this to be perfect for my desired workflow and that is automatically reloading on external file changes. Currently I use Visidata for the purposes of viewing the output of sqlite.

I write an SQL (or mainly PRQL these days) query on a text editor on a file which is being watched by entr which runs the query on a sqlite database which outputs a csv file which is then read by visidata and there I look at the data, do some basic manipulations. That my very simple, completely unix-style data exploration pipeline. What I miss a bit from Visidata is a bit more mouse control. I mainly want to select a range of cells to copy and paste somewhere else, which this does. But unfortunately this doesn't reload the file on change automatically.

Anyone has any recommendations for a data tool that would fit the workflow I described?

Everyone does thing is stupidly inefficient ways.

For example, we need technical drawings of parts, the only way is through a web interface that fetches from some remote server and you can only do one at a time. So you will often see people copy pasting (or even typing if they're reading from paper) each item code one by one and printing one by one. Another common thing, we use SAP for most things but Excel is required for some stuff by my direct leader but also higher management and there's a lot of sort of awkward getting things out of SAP and into spreadsheets in the right format. So here some basic data manipulation is needed and you see literally everyone doing everything manually most of the time.

In general, I just want to not be wasteful and do repetitive things manually while using a computer with Windows, which is something I'm not used to

Using tool websites is a bit annoying since so much stuff is just blocked

Assuming credentials there are many ways to browse | fetch files from remote servers that aren't web based - if you can work out a command line that accesses the remote server and logs in then file access in a batch fill or powershell script can follow.

Something in HN: CLI tools for CSV, etc. might click for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16784850

I'd look into writing and running your own browser extension for any of the web-based stuff. Javascript is more expressive (I believe) than AHK scripts and can easily manipulate the DOM/HTML to extract and parse data, fill in fields, or even do additional remote logins and fetches -- all without anything your admin has to install.

I don't know if your SAP is a desktop app or a website, but if it's a website, you can probably transform its output (or its AJAX calls) into some other format. Not too sure how you'd get it into and out of Excel after that (maybe via API if there is one, or you can generate a VBscript and use AHK to run it in Excel?)

You are in charge of what runs on your computer, nobody is forcing you to use Discord.

There's no jerk dictating what is allowed to run on your computer, there's someone offering a piece of software that you can willingly install on your computer if you want.

If you don't want that, you're always free to not use the software or use workarounds to avoid the things you don't like.

I, for example, hate ads and use adblock always. But I don't think it's fair for me to go and say that everyone should forced to not put ads on their stuff.

I'm not a fan but I understand that I have no right to dictate what people do with their software

This is not true for platforms. If a community decides they're going to use Discord, then you, the individual, are out of luck. You either use that or miss out on the community or convince the entire community not to use Discord.

How is that different from, say, being forced to buy a PS5 or an X-whatever to participate in a gaming community, or to get a Spotify membership to hear a particular podcast?

They aren't very different. With Spotify we actually gave up a lot of power that custom clients had for the lowest-common-denominator sort of stuff, which is really sad.

With each of these products we keep giving up more and more of the powerful variety that was available before. While the average person doesn't lose much, the average person doesn't really exist and we've really lost a lot of long tails of value.

I see the potential value, I just don't understand the principle that enables us to dictate that private companies provide it to us.

I feel a lot of laws dictate what private companies provide us. For example a butcher's meat cannot be covered in rat poison. A hyperbolic example but for giant chat services like this where the wield an incredible amount of power because of scale they are still subject to restrictions by the government for the benefit of the people. The government totally has that overriding right because your companies operating in there county. Don't like it the same way the user has no choice but to not use your interface the company has the right now to operate in the country. Personally I think the api format is a little ambiguous but it's incredibly naive to think that companies cannot be subjected to laws on how they do business just because they built a computer service. With adoption comes regulation to protect both users and companies

The same principle behind antitrust laws: dismantling monopolies is good for the public and good for innovation

Lacking an open-for-all-comers API is not in fact an antitrust violation.

I agree of course, it's not a violation of any laws. I just thought you were asking for some moral principle to justify pressing a developer to make an API available

I mean, it's just not antitrust, at all. A vendor is not coherently a "monopoly for their own products".

As the world changes, we can't always expect new behaviors to ideally fit existing moral principles.

Is there a moral principle preventing a power company from providing you with all your electrical appliances and forbidding you from using those not provided by them?

There are a LOT of jerks coercing people into being used by Discord. Not only that, actively defending it.

FOMO on "community" is a considerable factor. The regular person is quite likely a social being. They will care and value being able to use the same platform.

It is a personal sacrifice to resist it while it remains. Even when a Free Software alternative becomes wide-reaching enough for an exodus, it'll be years too late.

E-ink display though

>You could also do this easily on that $60 laptop or any chromebook

You couldn't because these devices don't have an e-ink screen. This would be the entire point of having a kindle as a writing device. Otherwise you would be correct

It's too bad that transflective displays didn't pan out, the OLPC display was perfectly workable and worked well outdoors too. It would be the ideal kind of display for such a device, which doesn't really need high resolution.

If two parties are in disagreement, it's useless if they just keep yelling at each other forever and get nowhere.

In any debate, people should at the very least be talking about the same thing

At some point you have to stop to reflect: "Wait, Am I really against the idea of people choosing what to see on the Internet"

In a world progressively more controlled by proprietary technologies and big corporations this feature is such a breath of fresh air

I would love to see a web browser offering user controllable filtering, reranking and reader mode working over search, social sites and news feeds. A "web sanitiser".

"Sussman and Wisdom make a bold experiment in communicating mathematical physics: they say exactly what they mean. Even a computer can follow their equations. By using this textbook, students painlessly master Scheme, a minimalist programming language, at the same time. This empowers them to go beyond the simplistic integrable systems that dominate the traditional course, to the richness of nonlinear resonance and chaotic dynamics. The hard core of rigor is softened by a personal and enthusiastic writing style"

How come I never heard of this before?

>Yea, who cares about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai. F those languages!

Despite your snarkiness, this is a perfectly valid point. If i'm not gonna use certain features in a piece of software, that feature may as well not be there. There are enough alternatives so that people that do need to use these languages are well served. But if that's not my case, there's no point in making my stuff compatible with it since it's not of any use to me

It's actually not. Text mode doesn't mean you have to use an 8-bit code like Code Page 437. You could just as well use Unicode. It really just makes GP sound like they're looking for an excuse to be snarky and they just come off sounding ignorant.

One would think that after going through this you would become more empathetic and understanding of the ordinary citizens side. But no, somehow the takeaway was that discrimination against innocent people based where they're from is OK