Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was the printed copy a backup system or casual reading?
Yes.
<3 inclusive or.
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
131–140 of 346 posts
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#132Simon posting tiktok quotes on his blog was not on my 2025 bingo card.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transcription is arguably one of the must useful enterprise AI tools avaliable. But i sure as heck wouldn't trust the cloud with it.
Still find the Copilot transcripts orders of magnitude worse than something like Wispr Flow and they tend to allucinate constantly and do not adapt to a company's context (that Copilot has access too...). I am talking about acronyms of products / teams, names of people (even when they are in the call), etc.
Ye i didn't even think about advanced meetings summary bots. Just raw word for word transcription please. Wispr is pretty great.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#134I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…
I feel like it comes down to predictability and overall trust and confidence. AI is still very fucky, and for people that don't understand the nuances, it definitely will hallucinate and potentially cause real issues. It is about as happy as a Linux rm command to nuke hours of work. Fortunately these tools typically have a change log you can undo, but still.
Also Brenda is human and we should prioritize keeping humans in jobs, but with the way shit is going that seems like a lost hope. It's already over.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb. What would this be…
Fair - I was creating a straw man mostly to make a point. The people I’m thinking aren’t running SQL queries or scripts, they’re merely collection points for data. So one good BI developer who knows Tableau and Salesforce and Excel and SQL can replace those pure collection points with a better process, but they can also generate insight into the data because they have some business understanding from being close to t…
I think that is a fair point too. The person that builds the Tableau dashboard could just send Brenda a screenshot once a month and that saves everyone time.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds pretty bad. Not a great argument against AI: "Our employees have created such a bad mess that AI wont work because only they know how the mess they created works".
That is the luxury of theory. Yes, most situations are terrible compared to what would be if an expert was present to perfect it. Except if there isn’t an expert, and there’s a normal person, how do they know the output is right ?
not sure I get your point?
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#137Simon posting tiktok quotes on his blog was not on my 2025 bingo card.
This isn't the first: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/8/pearlmania500/ and https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/29/dealing-with-your-ai-o...
Also this fun diversion into Occlupanids: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/8/holotypic-occlupanid-re...
A lot of people complain that the internet isn't as weird and funny as it used to be. The weird and funny stuff is all on TikTok!
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#138I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…
In my opinion there's a big difference in deterministic and nondeterministic automation.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.
I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?
How much compute costs is it for the AI to do Brenda's job? Not total AI spend, but the fraction that replaced Brenda. That's why they'd fire a human but keep using the AI.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your mission critical process sits on some on-site box that no-one knows about, copilot being good or not is the least of your problems.
Everywhere I’ve ever worked has had that mission critical box. At one of my jobs we had a server rack with UPS, etc, all the usual business. On the floor next to it was a dell desktop with a piece of paper on it that said “do not turn off”. It had our source control server in it, and the power button didn’t work. We did eventually move it to something more sensible but we had that for a long time
with only one person on earth being able to access it? so if that person is hit by a car everything goes down?