To answer skyzouwdev - not sure why HN removed your post - we can connect to anything on the Internet. Popular services with better documentation tend to perform better. If you get stuck, you can augment and assist our AI by pasting instructions in the chat.
Hi Nicho, Andy (CTO Sourcetable) we have gone to extreme lengths to protect your security. We use a form of escrow encryption in maximum security mode to only send data through at the time of you using it. Data that you have selected in your spreadsheet or called upon in the context of the conversation can be used for mcp conversations. If you are really worried about sensitive data, you can always create a new sheet and only include data that you are 100% sure of. MCP is generally outbound (you choose what to ask) so unless you've directed the AI to do something that the MCP endpoint requires you should be ok.
We are a generally a generation ahead of sheets and excel. You might be able to do some of the things in the older software but it won't be a button press. The ability for you to run data queries (and let the AI do it for you) next to the traditional A1 notation we invented.
Also keep an eye out on the limit - we default to 10,000 to keep it snappy but if you want to make it larger its a click away. The "summarize table" button should auto limit to 1B+ rows.
The underlying datatypes we support in our data-warehouse support 3d and 4d data. So we can do vector queries on these and do transformations over different spaces. I think given what you need we can put your data in our data-warehouse, and then present it to the older engineers in an excel format with 3d plotting. We might want to chat about the details though, give me a holler at [email protected]
We use a heavily modified licensed engine that prevents us from open sourcing everything (for now). We have plans to open source our agentic/plugin framework, and other parts of the system. We also have a strong ethos of contributing back to open source where we can (contributed back to Arrow, DuckDB etc.).
I'd also add that while everyone knows how to use and work with spreadsheets, we also provide a SQL layer on top that you can use to query data sources as an advanced user (we developed a nomenclature to work within sheets/across sheets/files/our data-warehouse). This allows more technical users to work side-by-side in the same environment as non-technical users without crossing pythonic or reporting boundaries.
On top of this, the AI assistant can answer most of the questions you might have of all this data.
I think as ML gets more sophisticated, we will in general need to be less technical. The "tooling" might even disappear, but we will still need something to communicate important data centric decisions. Whether you like it or not spreadsheets are the foundation of human research and operations and have been for thousands of years, and I feel humanity will need less complicated "tools" and we will keep to our roots.
When Darren and I were looking at baremetal OS - we liked it because we could quantify what Xen and other kernels were missing - generic drivers - and we saw we could improve everything by making a system more specialized and what we wanted to use (think about what you actually put a commercial system on, there's not too much choice - especially for HPC). An example of this would be an athlete like a runner, and a shot-putter. Think of their body shapes - they are very different! Yet we all treat operating systems as if they are the same (for compatibility). Being more specialist is obviously not for everyone! Linux (or any other OS) is...
Regarding compatibility - my personal long term aspiration is to abstract the HW through LLVM which will eventually allow us to target Xen or other exokernel systems or run more close to the metal by running/developing a true erlang kernel through a mixed ERTS/BMOS (Baremetal OS) code-base.
As mentioned in earlier comments, erlang already has a pretty mean scheduler, and memory management system. Personally as an academic exercise - I'd like to see how this operates at a kernel level and in the future, I'll be spending more time on this. All other existing operating systems I personally believe are just getting in the way of best possible performance.
Finally erlangonxen which you mentioned above is not open source. That does not make sense to me, and it does not give me what I want... Doing this is a very selfish exercise, as it's what I want. Hopefully other people will want (and make sense of) this too, but atm I'm not fussed.