Excel's February Existential Crisis

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The absolute irony is chef's kiss. You've got a post about Microsoft scaling back Copilot because nobody's using it, immediately followed by an ad for Claude Code that writes tests. It's like watching AI tools fight for relevance while developers collectively shrug and go back to Stack Overflow. The real kicker? That post has 18.6k upvotes and 2.1k comments—turns out the only thing developers love more than ignoring AI tools is dunking on them in the comments. Microsoft probably spent billions on Copilot just to discover that devs would rather suffer through writing boilerplate themselves than let an AI "help" them. Meanwhile, Claude's ad is sitting there like "Hey, we can write tests!" as if anyone actually enjoys writing tests enough to pay attention to ads about them. The juxtaposition is *perfection*—it's the tech equivalent of a weight loss ad appearing right after a post about how diets don't work.

Windows crashes aren't bugs—they're features . Just like Bob Ross turned mistakes into birds, Microsoft turns kernel panics into "happy little restarts." That blue screen isn't the digital grim reaper; it's just your OS taking an unscheduled meditation break. The best part? You didn't even have to click "restart"—Windows thoughtfully did it for you! Nothing says "I value your time" like forcibly closing all your unsaved work because some random driver decided to have an existential crisis.

Ah, the sophisticated approach of Microsoft solving complex tech problems: just hit it with a sledgehammer and call it "AI integration." Left side shows delicate digital infrastructure; right side shows Microsoft's solution of brute force. Why debug legacy code when you can just demolish it and slap "AI-powered" on the rubble? The perfect metaphor for when your CEO discovers ChatGPT and suddenly every product roadmap needs "AI transformation." Subtlety? Never heard of her.

Excel really woke up and chose violence today. You're sitting there, innocently trying to do something completely reasonable with your spreadsheet, and Excel just hits you with the "We can't do that to a merged cell" error like it's personally offended by your audacity. No explanation, no helpful suggestions, just pure rejection wrapped in a passive-aggressive dialog box. The merged cell feature is basically Excel's way of saying "I'll let you make your spreadsheet look pretty, but the moment you try to actually USE it for anything, I'm shutting this whole operation down." It's the ultimate betrayal—Excel gives you the tools to create the problem, then acts shocked when you need to work with what you've created. Truly the most toxic relationship in software.

Content Breaking: Mars becomes the second planet that has more computers running Linux than Windows. How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars Anything else you can share with us that engineers might find particularly interesting? This the first time we'll be flying Linux on Mars. We're actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we're using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago. So, you can get the software framework that's flying on the Mars helicopter, and use it on your own project.