The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really interesting.<p>It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and tablet space.<p>It's great to see people still working on interesting problems like this
It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space.<p>1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so <i>maybe</i> I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings, it's hard for me to gauge that.<p>2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough, is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6 cells right in the sheet?).<p>This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from. Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown.<p>It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.
This does a clever job of dealing with the multiple varied inputs to a scenario.<p>A real budgeting scenario might have 2 * 3 * 7 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 9 * 2 * 5 = 226,800 possible outcomes, so the obvious question is what UI do you use to consider/narrow down that beast? You need tools that let you slice and dice that output based on different sets of criteria.<p>The simplest might be something like, "rule out all solutions that total more than $5000" but you also need things like "I will only pay for a total of 3 streaming services, rule out all scenarios with more than that" and "if I choose not to have a car, then I have to get a transit pass and an e-scooter"<p>I almost feel like, as clever as this is, the harder problem is the one I describe above.
Re: computing with continuous distributions: I recall there was a "show HN" a while ago with a graph-style interface to do computations on continuous distributions, so you could very much budget by modelling a plausible distribution of gas prices within the month, of rental prices in your town, etc, and then see plausible distributions of monthly spending.<p>I'm still trying to find it: anyone remember this, or did I just Mandela Effect myself? I'm not sure whether it computed outputs analytically or through simulation.<p>(Hell, I might just recreate it on my own...)
This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release their product/code.<p><a href="https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/</a><p><a href="https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/</a><p>are very interesting and promising, but not available for use/experimentation.
Not a surprise that this comes from at least one person involved in dabbledb twenty years ago (later acquired by Twitter). Avi Bryant, now sponsoring very interesting work.
This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged on the financial modeling space.<p>[0]: <a href="https://causal.app/" rel="nofollow">https://causal.app/</a>
"Excel requires the user to manually enter every scenario—even in the simple example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and 2 Netflix plans would require entering 12 scenarios, with names like “Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix”. In contrast, an ambsheet automatically computes all combinations of the three amb values."<p>Presumably this tool only works for relatively small possibility spaces due to the problem of combinatorial explosion?
This + sports analytics.
So much of sports is about slightly different outcomes of related scenarios. There's not much difference between a home run and a flyball caught at the wall. But the data shows something very distinct and ignores the other almost-as-likely outcome. Amb values has the potential to give new ways of analyzing performance and outcomes.<p>(What I'm saying is get a big sports team to fund you)
I offer a post from my blog.<p>[Multi-Dimension Data Table MDDT Feb 2025](<a href="https://www.mathpax.com/multi-dimension-data-table-mddt-feb-2025/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mathpax.com/multi-dimension-data-table-mddt-feb-...</a>)<p>My preferred approach combines the ubiquity of Excel and the simple power of Python. The large combinatorial effect is addressed.
I think the best solution to this was Quantrix. The multi dimension, multi scenario modelling just felt right and natural. It still exists but seems to be locked into a different price point and target audience and outdated app UI. Someone should make an airtable like experience for what quantrix was.
If you liked this you might also enjoy this little toy project: <a href="https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spreadsheet/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spr...</a>
Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you are doing, which you don't address.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/</a>
This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)
I think it’s a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to do something similar in Python, specifically for financial analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love to see where it goes.
Being able to have multiple scenarios in cells is an interesting idea.<p>Although the thing is, that it would be nice to have weights too.<p>Usual answer is to keep various options in separate columns (e.g. worst case, normal case, best case), problem is that often you want more scenarios and some have 3 options while other have 10
Computation model behind this vaguely reminds me of the Epic Games programming model thing for Verse Calculus: <a href="https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/" rel="nofollow">https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/</a>
How could you do linear optimisation over unrelated terms in this? How could you implement the well known decision support methods from Operations Research in this? How does it compare to rows, or tables and extra columns?
"what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?"<p>Somebody is rediscovering why slide rules are nice. you get your answer but you simultaneously get nearby answers as well.<p>I am not sure what the modern ui equivalent would be. a plot?