"If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you’ll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.”

Ah yes Mr Engineer my impression of this structural assembly is it’s okay but could be really better over there. No need for a second impression.

Everyone would be a lot happier, that's all I'm saying.

I also enjoyed their writing.

Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick

Loved this 😂

Barry Petchesky is a real one

I really need to start actually reading articles and following authors instead of just scrolling through headlines.

Making a few digits worth of wrong division way down in the not very significant bits of the answer, is way better than encouraging all your users to use an LLM to generate the answers for their quarterly reports / tax forms / do we have enough food for the winter calculations. The Pentium division fuckup was barely worth fixing unless you were doing some kind of numerical analysis or simulation or something, which is why it slipped past all the testing initially. This is astronomically worse of a fuck-up.

Oh no, I remember that well. I was in high school 👴

If only that recall had actually bankrupted the company. I wonder where we would be today…

@dual_sport_dork @silence7 good times

If I remember correctly the Intel floating point thing didn't come up as a negative for most users like AI does.

Hah! That was my first thought, too, when I saw the headline.

I remember too, buddy. It's important to never forget.

Edit: oh, I guess it's important to forget.

I remember having to compensate for the Pentium float bug in the Turbo Pascal programs I was writing back then. I really didn't understand what I was doing at the time, and the 90s version of StackOverflow (A Tripod blog?) wasn't that enlightening...

So we lost our freedom?

excel math is fine if you use the syntax correctly. Its problems are mostly assume many number inputs as dates and other performance issues. Doing math wrong is not one of them.

How long back? IEEE 754 floating point was released the same year as Excel v1, and it'd be a while before there was hardware support. Floating point numbers were often dodgey back then on just about everything.

One of the many random numbers that live rent free in my head lol

even then the number was actually stored correctly, it's just excel lies to you and shows you a different number.

This AI will stack wrong calculations on top of wrong calculations and cascade everything.

Depends on what studying AI you mean. The whole ML field is still very much have its uses, the ones that would have a rude awakening are the ones "studying" how to do "prompt engineering"

BuT hAvE yOu HeArD aBoUt AgEnTiC wOrKfLoWs?!

Honestly, if they just made it easier to craft a formula (like, I dunno multiple lines, some kind of better color coding of matched parentheses, etc), that'd go a lot farther.

What? That’s not what the article says.

Excel is still doing the calculations, not the AI. The AI is helping to write functions.

This distinction is immaterial. This is like a big child grabbing a smaller child's hand and slapping them with their own hand saying "quit hitting yourself". It's like trying to get out of a speeding ticket by saying all you did was push the accelerator... Truely it was the fuel injectors forcing the vehicle to an illegal speed.

Just because you've adjusted the abstraction layer at which you've ceded deterministic outcomes, doesn't mean AI isn't doing it.

You can easily spot check a couple examples then apply that same formula down the column.

This may be appropriate in some scenarios, specifically:

• When accuracy isn't important

• When you will never need to justify what is being done to anyone (including yourself)

This, however, covers a decidedly small portion of professional work done using Excel.

If it didn’t use 100 gallons of freshwater and like 600kW of definitely-non-renewable-sourced electricity then ML trained to excel at Excel would be most welcome.

Does it run locally?