Earlier quoted context omitted.
You... could have given the job to Brenda instead, unless the irony was the point?
The global economy isn't going to crash if I make a mistake with the transcript.
That's how it starts.
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
161–170 of 346 posts
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#162Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management. “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking e…
Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue. If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company. To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.
it's a large human behavior question for me, the notion of work, value, economy, efficiency .. all muddied in there
- i used to work on small jobs younger, as a nerd, i could use software better than legacy employees, during the 3 months, i found their tools were scriptable so I did just that. I made 10x more with 2x less mental effort (I just "copilot" my script before it commits actual changes) all that for min wage. and i was happy like a puppy, being free to race as far as i want it to be, designing the script to fit exactly the needs of an operator.
(side note, legacy employees were pissed because my throughput increase the rate of things they had to do, i didn't foresee that and when i offered to help them so they don't have to work more, they were just pissed at me)
so for 6x more money you get a lot less (if you deliver, sometimes projects get canned before shipping)
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#163I 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…
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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as black-and-white as "Brenda good, AI bad". It's much more nuanced than this. When it comes to (traditional) coding, for the most part, when I program a function to do X, every single time I run that function from now until the heat death of the sun, it will always produce Y. Forever! When it does, we understand why, and when it doesn't, we also can understand why it didn't! When I use AI to perform X, ever…
> When I use AI to perform X, every single time I run that AI from now until the heat death of the sun it will maybe produce Y. Forever! When it does, we don't understand why, and when it doesn't, we also don't understand why! To make this even worse, it may even produce Y just enough times to make it seem reliable and then it is unleashed without supervision, running thousands or millions of times, wrecking havoc pr…
Exactly. Fundamentally, I want my computer's computations to be deterministic, not probabilistic. And, I don't want the results to arbitrarily change because some company 1,500 miles away from me up-and-decided to "train some new model" or whatever it is they do.
A computer program should deliver reliable, consistent output if it is consistently given the same input. If I wanted inconsistency and unreliability, I'd ask a human to do it.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#165Co-pilot and AI has been shoved at the Microsoft Stack in my org for months. Most of the features were disabled or hopelessly bad. It’s cheaper for Microsoft to push this junk and claim they’re doing something, it’s going to improve their stock far more than not doing it, even though it’s basically useless currently. Another issue is that my org disallows AI transcription bots. It’s a legit security risk if you have…
The worse part is to see it creep on developer stack at places where it should not be. I am all good for nice completion on VS, or help decypher compiler errors, but lets do this AI push with some contention. Also what I really deslike is the prompt interface, AI integrations have to feel natural transparent part of the workflow, not trying to put everything into a tiny chat window. And while we're at it, can we plea…
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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#166Don't worry, in Teams it bothers me just one time a day, and with the click of a button it's gone... For another whole day.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was brought up on the refrain of "aren't computers silly, they do exactly what you tell them to do to the letter, even if it's not what you meant". That had its roots in computers mostly being programmable BASIC machines. Then came the apps and notifications, and we had to caveat "... when you're writing programs". Which is a diminishing part of the computer experience. And now we have to append "... unless you're…
We have absolutely descended, and rapidly, into “computers do whatever the fuck they want and there’s nothing you can do about it” in the past 5 years, and gen AI is only half of the problem. The other half comes from how incredibly opinionated and controlling the tech giants have become. Microsoft doesn’t even ALLOW consent on windows (yes or maybe later), Google is doing all it can to turn the entire internet into…
We have come a LONG way from the "Where do you want to go today?" of the 90s. Now, it's "You're going where we tell you that you can go, whether you like it or not!"
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#168Earlier 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?
My kneejerk reaction is the sunk cost fallacy (AI is expensive), but I'm pretty sure it's actually because businesses have spent the last couple of decades doing absolutely everything they can to automate as many humans out of the workforce as possible.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
No contradiction here: When we say “machine”, we mean deterministic algorithms and predictable mechanisms. Generative AI is neither of those things (in theory it is deterministic but not for any practical applications). If we order by predictability: Quick Sort > Brenda > Gen AI
If you think programs are predictable, I have a bridge to sell you. The only relevant metric here is how often each thing makes mistakes. Programs are the most reliable, though far from 100%, humans are much less than that, and LLMs are around the level of humans, depending on the humans and the LLM.
Programs can be very close to 100% reliable when made well.
In my life, I've never seen `sort` produce output that wasn't properly sorted. I've never seen a calculator come up with the wrong answer when adding two numbers. I have seen filesystems fail to produce the exact same data that was previously written, but this is something that happens once in a blue moon, and the process is done probably millions of times a day on my computers.
There are bugs, but bugs can be reduced to a very low level with time, effort, and motivation. And technically, most bugs are predictable in theory, they just aren't known ahead of time. There are hardware issues, but those are usually extremely rare.
Nothing is 100% predictable, but software can get to a point that's almost indistinguishable.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#170I 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 you've squashed a 3D concern (automations at different levels of the tech stack) into a 2D observation (global concerns about automations).
Human determinism, as elastic as it might be, is still different than AI non-determinism. Especially when it comes to numbers/data.
AI might be helpful with information but it's far less trustable for data.