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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

#291

Post by hunterpayne »

martin-t wrote: post #267
Esophagus4 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My knee jerk reaction is to disagree, but on second thought, I’m open to hearing the argument. What would that look like in practice?

I don't have a full theory yet, it's something I started thinking about recently. That being said, it's clear that in the current system, rich people can get richer faster than poor people. We have a two class system a) workers who get paid per unit of work b) owners who capture any surplus income, who decide hiring/firing/salaries, who can sell the company and whose wealth keeps increasing (assuming the company does…

Two things:

> - He owns 100% of the future value of the company despite being created only 10% by him. Well, not exactly, he was creating 100% for the first year and 10% from then on.

1) If you believe this, then you have a massively simplistic view of employee value. The distribution of actual value provided by employees is probably log normal, and certainly not normal (gaussian).

2) This is basically the labor theory of value. That is an economic theory that was discarded as wrong about 150 years ago. If it was true, the value of a newly discovered gold mine would be 0.

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

#292

Post by 0815beck »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I 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…

It is of course because algorithms can be repaired when they are buggy, but a large language model can not, because it is impossible to look at its weights and say, look, this is where the mistakes has happened.

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

#293

Post by hunterpayne »

andybak wrote: post #181
simonw wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The mismatch between what people not on it think TikTok is like and what it's actually like (once you get the algo tuned to your taste) is pretty crazy. But then the "new user" experience is so horrific in terms of the tacky default content it serves you that I'm not surprised so many people don't get past it.

This is something I think all short form video platforms struggle with. I think I know why. Its because the difference in the UI. Basically, a user doesn't choose what to see next. On YouTube, you get dozens of next videos recommended on each view. On short form video, you get one. This causes clickbait to work a lot better for short form video. The problem with platforms like TikTok is more about UI than algorithm or the length of the videos.

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

#294

Post by hunterpayne »

9dev wrote: post #111
RajT88 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paperclip problem is a bit hand-wavey about intelligence. It is taken as a given than unlimited intelligence would automatically win presumably because it could figure out how to do literally anything. But let's consider real life intelligence: - Our super geniuses do not take over the world. It is the generationally wealthy who do. - Super geniuses also have a tendency to be terribly neurotic, if not downright m…

To be clear, I don't think the paperclip scenario is a realistic one. The point was that it's fairly easy to conceive an AI system that's simultaneously extremely savant and therefore dangerous in a single domain, yet entirely incapable of grasping the consequences or wider implications of its actions. None of us knows what an actual, artificial intelligence really looks like. I find it hard to draw conclusions from…

> The point was that it's fairly easy to conceive an AI system that's simultaneously extremely savant and therefore dangerous in a single domain, yet entirely incapable of grasping the consequences or wider implications of its actions.

I'm pretty sure there are already humans who do this. Perhaps there are even entire conferences where the majority of people do this.

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

#295

Post by wat10000 »

samus wrote: post #251
wat10000 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Programs can be very close to 100% reliable when made well. > This is a tautology. No it's not. There are plenty of things that can't be 100% reliable no matter how well they're made. A perfect bridge is still going to break down and eventually fall apart. The best possible motion-activated light is going to have false positives and false negatives because the real world is messy. Light bulbs will burn out no mat…

> No it's not. There are plenty of things that can't be 100% reliable no matter how well they're made. A perfect bridge is still going to break down and eventually fall apart. The best possible motion-activated light is going to have false positives and false negatives because the real world is messy. Light bulbs will burn out no matter how much care and effort goes into them. All these failure modes are known and pr…

If you're willing to consider things in aggregate then software is perfectly predictable too.

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

#296

Post by Libidinalecon »

martin-t wrote: post #79
Esophagus4 wrote: post #25

Hmmm 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.

This is just not true at all.

It is always in my self interest to automate my job as much as possible. Nothing looks better for moving up than this. Even more so, nothing makes me happier than automating a business process.

There are always so many various road blocks to automation it is hard to count.

It is like there is a type of entropy that increases over time that people are largely getting paid to keep at bay with simple business processes that can be easily adapted as things change. So often automation works great for a short time until this entropy breaks the automation. It doesn't take that many times for management to figure out the investment in automation gives poor returns.

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

#297

Post by wat10000 »

stavros wrote: post #279
wat10000 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many calculators do I need to have seen in order to make the claim that there are many calculators which are essentially 100% reliable?

Note that I am referring to actual physical calculators, not calculator apps on computers.

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

#298

Post by agumonkey »

martin-t wrote: post #290
agumonkey wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> i don't dimiss the layers of HR managing legal and financial duties in a company and thus taking a cut I don't wanna dismiss them either but (along with management): - It's not positive-sum work. It doesn't produce positive value for society, it's just necessary work which needs to be done as a side effect of actual positive-sum work being done. - The pyramid should be inverted. Managers, layers, accountants, etc.…

it's an interesting question as of why the management layer has always been seen as more important than the builders, crafters, designers below

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

#299

Post by insane_dreamer »

Zigurd wrote: post #95

It's verifier law. Coding agents are useful and good and real products because when they screw up, things stop working almost always before they can do damage. Coding agents are flawed in ways that existing tools are good at catching, never mind the more obvious build and runtime errors. Letting AI write your emails and create your P&L and cash flow projections doesn't have to run the gauntlet of tools that were crea…

Another problem is that the AI may try to fudge the numbers to mask its mistakes so they look like they all add up while the rot is hidden away. Just like it tries to manipulate the unit tests so they pass without fixing the _actual_ bug. I've seen it happen.

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

#300

Post by stavros »

wat10000 wrote: post #297
stavros wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many calculators do I need to have seen in order to make the claim that there are many calculators which are essentially 100% reliable? Note that I am referring to actual physical calculators, not calculator apps on computers.

Well, to make the claim you actually made, which is that you haven't seen a single calculator that was wrong, anywhere from zero to all of them. It's just that the "zero" end of that spectrum doesn't really tell us anything about calculators.
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