Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pop culture characters like Lt. Commander Data seem anachronistic now.
It was Second Technician Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSc., SSc. all along.
I thought it was Queeg
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
241–250 of 346 posts
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#242I 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's complex to generate correct machine code, but we trust compilers to do it all the time.
Generating correct machine code is actually pretty simple. It gets complicated if you want efficient machine code.
> So, then - why don't people embrace AI with thinking mode as an acceptable form of automation? Can't the C-suite in this case follow its thought process and step in when it messes up?
> I think people still find AI repugnant in that case. There's still a sense of "I don't know why you did this and it scares me", despite the debuggability, and it comes from the autonomy without guardrails. People want to be able to stop bad things before they happen, but with AI you often only seem to do so after the fact.
> Narrow AI, AI with guardrails, AI with multiple safety redundancies - these don't elicit the same reaction. They seem to be valid, acceptable forms of automation. Perhaps that's what the ecosystem will eventually tend to, hopefully.
We have not reached AGI yet; by definition its results cannot be trusted unless it's a domain where it has gotten pretty good already (classification, OCR, speech, text mining). For more advanced use cases, if I still have to validate what the AI does because its "thinking" process cannot be trusted in way, what's the point? The AI doesn't think; we just choose to interpret it as such, and we should rightly be concerned about people who turn their brain off and blindly trust AI.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#243This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086... (I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)
This may be the first quote from TikTok reposted on a blog, that ends up this high up in HN.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#244This reminds me of a friend whose company ran a daily perl script that committed every financial transaction of the day to a database. Without the script, the company could literally make no money irrespectively of sales because this database was one piece in a complex system for payment processor interoperability. The script ran in a machine located at the corner of a cubicle and only one employee had the admin pass…
My last job at a telco I was in charge of a system that billed ~5 million dollars monthly.
When the machine was built, the guy that did it didn’t record the root password. He added me to sudoers before he left. I left a few years later, nobody took ownership.
Looking at the web interface, I can tell it’s still running, doing its thing. I’m sure its still running Linux from 2008.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#245Nay-sayers need to decide whether they fear AI because AI is dumb and will fuckup or because AI is smart and will take over.
Our product has many issues. You must pick one and must not discuss any other.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not just compute, its also the setup costs - How much did you have to pay someone to feed the AI Brenda's decades of knowledge specific to her company and all the little special cases of how it does business.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow…
Brenda + AI > Brenda
But execs aren't talking about that, they are talking about firing Brenda, or replacing her with a junior version.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#248I'm worried Excel will go "enterprise only". and only LLM based interfaces will be enabled on the "office+windows" for consumers tier.
e.g. MS Access is well on its way. as soon as x86 gets fully overtaken by ARM, and LLMs overtake "compilers" (also taken enterprise only).. then things like sqlite-browsers (FOSS "access") will be an arcane tool of binary incompatible ("obsolete") formats
(edits: this worry has not been easy to type out)
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#249I 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'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…
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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#250Earlier 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.
That's a known limitation of floating point numbers. Nothing buggy about that.