> though I left MSFT in 2017 so some things might have changed since.
Honestly, I struggle to think about what has actually changed between Office 2013 and Office 2024 (and their Office 365 equivalents); I know the LAMBDA function was a big deal, but they made the UI objectively worse by wasting screen-space with ever-increasingly phatter non-touch UI elements; and the Python announcement was huge... before deflating like a popped party balloon when we learned how horribly compromised it was.
...but other than that, Excel remains exactly as frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a date string - today just as it was 15 years ago[1].
> I imagine waiving around normalization forms was a good gig for consultants in the 1980 but I bet even then the real practitioners had a skeptical, arm's length relationship with them.
Real-talk: those consultants are absolutely essential - and are the unsung heroes of so many "organic" database projects that would have gotten started as an Excel spreadsheet on a nontechnical middle-manager's workgroup-networked desktop, which grew over time into a dBase file, then MSAccess/JET, then MSDE or MSSQL Express if they (think) they knew what they're doing, and then if it's the mid-2000s then maybe it'll be moved onto dedicated on-prem Oracle or MSSQL box - but still an RDBMS; I remember in 2014 all the talk was about moving data out of on-prem RDBMS siloes and onto Cloud(TM)-y OLAP clusters (trying to hide the fact they're running stock Postgres) which acted as a source for a Hadoop cluster - all to produce dashboards and visualizations made with the $100k Tableau license your company purchased after their sales guys showed your org's procurement people a good time in Cancun.
None of the evolution and progress described above could have happened if not for the awful DB designs in that initial Access DB - the anti-patterns would be carried through the DB whenever it ascended to the next tier of serious-business-ness, and each and every design-decision made out of innocent ignorance gets gradually massaged-out of the model by the regular and recurring visits by DBA consultants - because (and goddamnit it's true): a depressingly tiny proportion of software people (let alone computer-people) know anything about DB design+theory - nor all the vendor-specific gotchas.
What I still don't understand is how in 2026 - after 30 years of scolding beginners online - that we've successfully gotten greenhorn software-dev people to move away from VBA/VB6's dead-end, PHP's unintentional fractal of bad design, and MySQL's meh-ness - and onto sane and capable platforms like TypeScript, Node, and Postgres - all good stuff; and yet on my home-turf on StackOverflow, I still see people writing SQL-92 style JOINs and CREATE TABLE statements covered in more backticks than my late grandmother's labrador. I honestly have no idea where/when/how all those people somehow learned SQL-92's obsolete JOIN syntax today.
So in conclusion: the evidence suggests that not enough people today truly understand databases well-enough to render expensive DBA consultants irrelevant.
> Also, personally I think that 6NF should be foundational, but that's a separate matter.
I share your ideal, but there exists a slight problem: no RDBMS I'm aware of really facilitates 6NF or DKNF (or even Codd's full relational concept; or newfound essentials like relational-division, and so on...).
There are also genuine ergonomic issues to contend with: pretty-much every RDBMS design and/or administration tool I've used in the past 20 years (SSMS, SSDT, DBeaver, MSAccess (lol), phpMyAdmin, etc) will present the database as a long, flat list of tables - often only in alphabetical order (if you're lucky, the tooling might let you group the tables into logical subfolders based on some kind of 2-part name scheme baked into the RDBMS (e.g. "schemas" in MSSQL).
...which starts being counterproductive when 6NF means you have a large number of tables that absolutely need to exist - but aren't really that significant alone by themselves; but they always need to remain accessible to the user of the tool (so they can't be completely hidden). So you'll turn to the Diagramming feature in your DB GUI, which gives you a broader 2D view of your DB where you can proximally group related objects together - instead of endlessly scrolling a long alphabetical list; and you can actually see FKs represented by physical connections which aids intuitive groking when you're mentally onboarding onto a huge, legacy production DB design.
...but DB diagrams are just too slow to load (as the tooling needs to read the entire DB's schema, design; all objects first before it can give you a useful view of everything - it's just so incredibly grating; whereas that alphabetical list loads instantly.
Sorry I'm just rambling now but anyway, my point is, 6NF is great, but our tooling sucks, and the RDBMS they connect to suck even more (e.g. SQL-92 defined the 4 main CONSTRAINT types seen in practically all RDBMS today (CHECK, FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, and DEFAULT); over 30 years later we still have the same anaemic set of primitive constraints; only Postgres went further (with its `EXCEPT` constraint). As of 2026, and almost 40 years since it was defined, no RDBMS supports ASSERTION constraints; wither DOMAIN constraints and a unified type-system that elegantly mediates between named scalars, relations (unordered sets of tuples), queries, and DOMAINs and the rest.
...this situation is maddening to me because so many data-modelling problems exist _because_ of how unevolved our RDBMS are.
I broadly agree with you, so I want to pick your brain a bit:
What would your ideal RDBMS / tooling look like, that facilitates 6nf effectively? Do you think it's more a limitation of the query/storage engine, or the query language (SQL), or the user interface? Do you think founding on Datalog (or similar), which kinda lends itself to "narrow" relations, instead of SQL which kinda lends itself to "wide" relations, would help here?
(I ask as one of my personal hobby-horses is trying to design better query languages and tooling, and 6nf/datalog maintains a kinda special place in my heart)
I could have worded my post a bit better - I didn't mean to imply DBeaver only showed a flat list of tables/objects; but DBeaver is hardly unique in having DB diagrams; my point was that every DB-diagram feature/tool/workspace in a DB admin/IDE (like DBeaver, SSMS, SSDT, etc) is necessarily performance-constrained because they need to load _so much_ metadata before they can show an accurate - and therefore useful - picture of the DB - even if it's just a subset of all tables/objects.
I'm pretty sure what you're describing is this long-standing bug[1] I've experienced only when using Mobile Safari on Reddit - affecting both old.reddit.com and the (horrible) modern Reddit. It just doesn't happen in other browsers/engines except on iOS. It's especially annoying on an iPad when I tend to use back/forward instead of open-in-new-tab-then-close on iPhone.
Even manually typing reddit.com/r/all (or r/All, which was a workaround for a while) in the address bar on iOS Safari redirects you to reddit.com/. Since I'm guessing you're not browsing reddit.com, what client are you using?
I'm not sure what exact device you're using, but on iPhone 12 Mini, old.reddit.com is borderline unusable, very different experience compared to if you could access r/all like before via the actually usable web+mobile version, a comparison: https://imgur.com/a/AVGjjCN
Anyways, the end result has been I don't use reddit at all on the phone, so kind of ended up being good for me anyways.
I'm using an iphone 13, although I prefer to turn sideways and browse in landscape mode. What you consider borderline unusable is just how I prefer to browse reddit.
“Borderline unusable” is such a hyperbolic way to describe a fully functional design that doesn’t happen to be responsive. Hacker News must be borderline unusable for you as well then, no?
> Hacker News must be borderline unusable for you as well then, no?
On my phone? Yes, absolutely, impossible to hit the links correctly even if I zoom in. Both old reddit and HN is "Fully functional" on desktop, agree, but far cry from "fully functional" on my arguably tiny iPhone.
Is that a ios browser difference? I browse hn all the time on my android phone and I didn't think my screen was unusually big. Maybe they implement some different scaling?
I almost solely use HN on my iPhone browser. It works very well and the scaling is well implemented, although it is a little too easy to accidentally fat finger and vote/flag something without realizing it. I actually find the desktop site (on my laptop) to be a bit hard to use due to its narrowness and small font size, but I'm not sure how universal that is.
You and I are very different Reddit users. I don't think I've even seen r/all for at least a decade. I exclusively view Reddit via the old.reddit.com URL in desktop mode with the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on + uBO + a custom CSS theme. I'm automatically redirected to my 'Subscribed' page showing only the dozen or so niche subreddits I care about, none of which have more than 100k subscribers (most are under 25k). It's glorious... like a time machine to before Reddit enshittified itself and spammers, astro-turfers, shills and influencers took over.
For mobile Safari on iOS/iPad, the back button imo is just completely broken. It’s either a bug, or Apple might say I’m ‘holding it wrong’.
One version it just stopped doing its one job correctly and it’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:
Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab. (???)
Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.
Right; in 2006-2007 we all watched uploaded rips of The Simpsons between class in high-school; Original content on YouTube had a really limited appeal.
You can probably find a million situations where doing less is terrible.
I think first step would be to define for yourself what doing less actually means - it could mean taking a walk instead of chasing dopamine -> doing less but you move more.
But whatever it’s a philosophical question and there aren’t any right or true answers
Enshittification specifically is when a product/service/platform gets worse from the user’s perspective because the platform vendor can directly profit from user-hostile design; for example, Google intentionally serves up bad results on the first search results page so the user clicks-through to the second page of results, resulting in more advert revenue to Google[1].
…whereas I feel what you’re describing is another Tragedy-of-the-Commons.
You have to give NodeJS, somewhat individual, access to the system by clicking various prompts that pop up the first time it tries to access some things, in a relatively naggy way. This includes incoming network access. You also have to give terminal access to do anything.
So there's explicit permission, that you granted, involved.
But, I understand your point, and agree. It should be possible, I just doubt think it works result in something anyone would use. There's obviously a compromise between security and letting developers use their computer in ways that aren't possible on an iPad.
How? They run their scraping and training infrastructure - and models themselves - from within those “AI datacenters”[1] we hear about in the news - and not proxying through end-users’ own pipes.
[1]: in quotes, because I dislike the term, because it’s immaterial whether or not an ugly block of concrete out in the sticks is housing LLM hardware - or good ol’ fashioned colo racks.
Honestly, I struggle to think about what has actually changed between Office 2013 and Office 2024 (and their Office 365 equivalents); I know the LAMBDA function was a big deal, but they made the UI objectively worse by wasting screen-space with ever-increasingly phatter non-touch UI elements; and the Python announcement was huge... before deflating like a popped party balloon when we learned how horribly compromised it was.
...but other than that, Excel remains exactly as frustrating to use for even simple tasks - like parsing a date string - today just as it was 15 years ago[1].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4896116/parsing-an-iso86...
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