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I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

simonwillison.net

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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#271

Post by martin-t »

agumonkey wrote: post #162
martin-t wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wag…

I had a broadly similar transition in feeling about my work.

It's not about how much I get paid. It's about realizing how much of the value I produce goes to me and how much goes to the owner class.

At least I never worked in a big corporation and I always had the ability to do work that directly benefited people using my code. But I still saw too much of the "I built this company" self-congratulatory BS from people who just shuffled money while doing 0 actual work.

I don't think ownership is theft, I just think it's distributed wrongly - to people who have money instead of to people who do work. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826823

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#272

Post by 7thaccount »

simonw wrote: post #223
7thaccount wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. The amount of folks in upper management that can actually use something like Tableau is very small. However it doesn't matter as none of those people have the time outside of very small businesses which probably don't need it anyway. The business intelligence person is supposed to deliver succinct insights to upper management to act on, not say "here's a cool system I built you... figure it o…

The view source link isn't there so upper management who don't know SQL can look at it. It's there so other people in the organization who do know SQL have the opportunity to check the work. At my last large employer I genuinely lost count of the number of times I saw a BI report which pulled numbers from our data warehouse... and then found out it had misinterpreted a key detail because the engineering team had chan…

We're talking about different things than. I agree it's helpful to have an open system that the technical staff can drill into. I'm just saying at the end of the day that the key decision makers don't care. They need some simple high level metrics that can be put into some relatively simple charts and tables.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#273

Post by maccard »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #256
maccard wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah. I mean, someone else would _eventually_ figure it out. There wasn't full disk encryption or anyhting on it, so if the guy got hit by a bus, and the machien turned off we probably would have just imaged the disk and got it running in a VM. But we didn't (and nobody was hit by a bus)

and you think that is good practice? sounds pretty terrible.

I never said it’s good practice, simply that it happens.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#274

Post by hunterpayne »

sswatson wrote: post #218
ryandrake wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to open my mind and "give AI a chance" lately. I spent all day yesterday struggling with Claude Code's utter incompetence. It behaves worse than any junior engineer I've ever worked with: - It says it's done when its code does not even work, sometimes when it does not even compile. - When asked to fix a bug, it confidently declares victory without actually having fixed the bug. - It gets into this mo…

Recently I've used Claude Code to build a couple TUIs that I've wanted for a long time but couldn't justify the time investment to write myself. My experience is that I think of a new feature I want, I take a minute or so to explain it to Claude, press enter, and go off and do something else. When I come back in a few minutes, the desired feature has been implemented correctly with reasonable design choices. I'm not…

Its great for demos, its lousy for production code. The different cost of errors in these two use cases explains (almost) everything about the suitability of AI for various coding tasks. If you are the only one who will ever run it, its a demo. If you expect others to use it, its not.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#275

Post by 1718627440 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #270
elevatortrim wrote: post #60

Earlier 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

Nit: no ML is deterministic in any way. Anything that is Generative AI is ML. This fact is literally built into the algorithms at the mathematical level.

First, they all add a source of randomness, and second deterministic according to the users model. A pseudo-random number generator is also deterministic in the technical sense, but for the user it isn't.

When the user can't reason about it, it isn't deterministic to them.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#276

Post by agumonkey »

martin-t wrote: post #271
agumonkey wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wag…

I had a broadly similar transition in feeling about my work. It's not about how much I get paid. It's about realizing how much of the value I produce goes to me and how much goes to the owner class. At least I never worked in a big corporation and I always had the ability to do work that directly benefited people using my code. But I still saw too much of the "I built this company" self-congratulatory BS from people…

even though my above message wasn't much about the corporate leeches, i did experience the fun of being my own boss in a way during covid doing mini gigs directly with people

there's a blend of "i'm my own man": i get the money and handle the responsibility on my own and it's thrilling feeling

i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut, but there's a kind of pleasure to also do your own business for a while

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#277

Post by 1718627440 »

stavros wrote: post #225
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mixed up correctness and reliability. The ios calculator will make the same incorrect calculation, but reliably, every time.

Don't move the goalposts. The claim was: > I've never seen a calculator come up with the wrong answer when adding two numbers. 1.00000001 + 1 doesn't equal 2, therefore the claim is false.

1.00000001f + 1u does equal 2f.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#279

Post by stavros »

wat10000 wrote: post #239
stavros wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't move the goalposts. The claim was: > I've never seen a calculator come up with the wrong answer when adding two numbers. 1.00000001 + 1 doesn't equal 2, therefore the claim is false.

Sorry, but this annoys me. The claim might be false if I had made it after seeing your screenshot. But you don't know what I've seen in my life up to that point. The claim that all calculators are infallible would be false, but that's not the claim I made. When a personal experience is cited, a valid counterargument would be "your experience is not representative," not "you are incorrect about your own experience."

Well if you haven't seen enough calculators to see one that can't add, a very common issue with floating point arithmetic on computers, you shouldn't offer your experience as an argument for anything other than that you haven't seen enough calculators.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#280

Post by buellerbueller »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #260
buellerbueller wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this repartee encapsulates a huge frustration with the tech sector: > op (as legacy business): BAU > you (as tech): disrupt! disrupt! disrupt! > me: no thank you; that's not necessary > you (as tech): stop being mean! Not wanting your "disruption" is not being un-nice. Your disruption was not asked for in the first place. Forcing it (Uber, Doge, et. al.) on marketplaces, often illegally, and vacuuming it up t…

Ah, I think I understand - this isn't about me... this is about a whole lot more than me. You just see me as a target to displace that onto. I'm the representative for what you believe is wrong with tech.

>You just see me as a target to displace that onto.

I see your hot take as emblematic of those issues. Why would you think any internet comment is about you?

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