rhymepurple

tl;dr: A notable marketshare of multiple browser components and browsers must exist in order to properly ensure/maintain truly open web standards.

It is important that Firefox and its components like Gecko and Spidermonkey to exist as well as maintain a notable marketshare. Likewise, it is important for WebKit and its components to exist and maintain a notable marketshare. The same is true for any other browser/rendering/JavaScript engines.

While it is great that we have so many non-Google Chrome alternatives like Chromium, Edge, Vivaldi, etc., they all use the same or very similar engines. This means that they all display and interact with websites nearly identically.

When Google decides certain implementation/interpretation of web standards, formats, behavior, etc. should be included in Google Chrome (and consequently all Chromium based browsers), then the majority marketshare of web browsers will behave that way. If the Chrome/Chromium based browsers reaches a nearly unanimous browser marketshare, then Google can either ignore any/all open web standards, force their will in deciding/implementing new open web standards, or even become the defacto open web standard.

When any one entity has that much control over the open web standards, then the web standards are no longer truly "open" and in this case becomes "Google's web standards". In some (or maybe even many) cases, this may be fine. However, we saw with Internet Explorer in the past this is not something that the market should allow. We are seeing evidence that we shouldn't allow Google to have this much influence with things like the adoption of JPEG XL or implementation of FLoC.

With three or more browser engines, rendering engines, and browsers with notable marketshares, web developers are forced to develop in adherence to the accepted open web standards. With enough marketshare spread across those engines/browsers, the various engines/browsers are incentivized to maintain compatibility with open web standards. As long as the open web standards are designed and maintained without overt influence by a single or few entities and the open standards are actively used, then the best interest of the collective of all internet users is best served.

Otherwise, the best interest of a few entities (in this case Google) is best served.

I agree that Home Assistant's audit is a good thing. While I love that Home Assistant is open source, I'm not sure how that impacts the audit. Proprietary, closed source software can be audited with few differences from an open source software's audit. The biggest difference is that you, myself, or anyone could audit open source software, but it would not be easy for that to happen with closed source software.

Alerts, notifications, person recognition, object recognition, motion detection, two way audio, automated lights, event based video storage, 24/7 video storage, automated deletion of stale recorded video, and more can all be accomplished 100% locally.

Granted, much of this functionality is not easily accomplished without some technical knowledge and additional hardware. However, these posts typically are made by people who state to at least have an interest in making that a reality (as this one does).

What security benefits does a cloud service provide?

Your options will depend on how much effort you are willing to put in and what other services you have access to (or are willing to run).

For example, do you have a Network Video Recorder (NVR) or something like Home Assistant that can consume a Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) or Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) video feed? Can you modify your network to block all internet traffic to/from the doorbell? Are you comfortable using a closed source, proprietary app to setup the doorbell? Is creating your own doorbell feasible?

I'm not aware of a doorbell that you can buy which meets all of your requirements without at least one of the items I mentioned above. Additionally, I believe the only doorbell that meets all your requirements is building your own doorbell. However, some other brands that will get close to meeting your requirements are Reolink and Amcrest.

This is a "simple" question, but unfortunately the answer isn't as simple. Much of this isn't necessarily Google "individually and directly attacking people", but instead Google providing others with the (otherwise unavailable) means to do so.

Regardless, is this an example that you were looking for? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761

Would something like this work for the web or Teams versions of Excel?

Regardless, I agree. The license and remote only execution are horrible.

That's true. It wouldn't solve the dependency issue though (eg - I'm using Pandas v1.5.3, you're using Pandas v2.0.3) and I'm not sure how well it would work for some platforms like the web or Teams.

The code storage for Python is no different than regular Excel functions (eg - VLOOKUP(), SUM(), etc.), meaning that it is stored within an Excel cell. The only differences are that Python code is run remotely vs Excel functions running locally and the location of Python's code matters vs Excel's functions are location agnostic (ie - Python code runs in cells located left-to-right, top-to-bottom but Excel's functions can dynamically determine the calculation order/location).

I'm not sure that this new Python integration changes much about this use case (except for another way to accomplish the same/similar tasks).

I agree with all your points about Excel being capable. However, I'm struggling to think of examples where this newly announced Python integration within Excel would be helpful (with the exception of new/different visualizations) - especially for the reasons you stated about modern Excel.

Are there any use cases that you can think of where someone who knows Excel well would resort to "adding a little Python to patch up any issues"?

This integration won't allow you to do that. Python will not run locally, but instead on Microsoft's platform (likely Azure).

If you're just reading some simple data from Excel, there are several ways of accomplishing this already. For example, Pandas has read_excel() and there is also openpyxl. You could even use those tools to write the results back to Excel. Things get more complicated though if the Excel file is something more than just a simple list.

I agree! I'm not sure why you're being downvoted either.

This new integration just allows you to do data analysis and data visualization of existing data within an Excel file via Python. The output of your Python scripts is limited to the Excel file. The Python environment itself is also limited as it runs on Microsoft's platform and is controlled by Microsoft.

The (Excel) problem that people already using Python for data analysis/visualization is that they have to use Excel files. Reading/writing Excel files via Python can sometimes be tedious or limiting. Utilizing Python inside of Excel via this integration may help in some scenarios, but they won't be able to use custom libraries built internally, control the Python environment (eg - must use specific version of Python or Python library, can't utilize all Python libraries available on pip, etc.), connect to all necessary external data sources via Python, and utilize proper VCS tools like git.

The problem that people automating tasks via Python have is that there is no Python library nearly as capable of reading or manipulating Excel files as VBA is. This new Python integration does not change that.

The problem that Excel users have is that they want more advanced (or simple/easier) data analysis and data visualization capabilities. However, with Excel's dynamic array formulas, LAMBDA formula, Power Query, and Power Pivot, Excel is becoming much more capable than it ever was. If those tools cannot meet your needs, you likely need to move to something like R, Python, or some other tool. Embedding Python into Excel like this integration does still limits Python with all of Excel's current restraints (size, performance, etc.).

I'm not a fan of it either, but I'm not sure how else this could work seamlessly. How would you ensure that everyone you share your Excel file that utilizes Python has the expected Python setup on their machine? What if they have an older version of a library you used that breaks your script? What if they don't have Python installed at all?

While this will only work on Windows desktop at first, Microsoft plans to roll this out to "other platforms" over time. Is there any other way for this integration to work for Excel for web, iPad, and/or Teams?