Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Oct 21:46
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It’s about time all those math types learned to relax a bit. These numbers in these spreadsheets don’t need to be exact all the time. It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is. Error bars are there for a reason people!
xkbx@startrek.website
on 02 Oct 21:50
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“Please calculate the totals to reflect a favourable result”
It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is.
Just like the Xerox copier/scanners that helpfully kept scanned images small by reusing parts of the image elsewhere. Like, all these 6s on your scanned invoices can totally be replaced with 8s. There’s just a tiny degradation in the overall image, it shouldn’t be a problem!
Xerox should have just called it AI compression and people would have been throwing money at them.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
on 04 Oct 08:43
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Especially on blueprints, these small file sizes are important. Doesn’t matter if you replace these load bearing numbers with different ones, as long as the file is small
That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.
Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.
If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.
wucking_feardo@lemmy.world
on 03 Oct 08:29
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No, the user is wrong quite often, the calculator gives the answer to the question asked, not the answer to the question the user wanted to ask.
Garbage in, garbage out.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
on 03 Oct 18:14
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AI Agents having access to the functionality of Excel means that they won’t be wrong with the actual calculations though, since it doesn’t do 5x10 in the LLM but instead uses excels built in functions to do it.
AI and excel are a match made in heaven tbh. Same with AI and databases.
youngalfred@lemmy.zip
on 02 Oct 23:07
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Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why ‘copilot in excel’ (not agent mode) wasn’t designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn’t designed for it.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
on 03 Oct 18:15
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Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It’s solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There’s a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can’t remember how it goes.
Just look what they’re doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM… Kill all your main characters.
Forget Xbox, look at how they’re treating Windows lately. Loaded with ads and bloat, forced hardware upgrades with Win11, forced MS account sign-in with no option for local accounts unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…
unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…
That is the whole point. They’re squeezing the users they don’t give a shit about. But personal users almost never buy Windows licenses from Microsoft I’d bet. So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?
The money for Windows non-Enterprise is made with OEM deals. They probably wouldn’t even notice if nobody bought personal licenses anymore. Might as well make actual money from selling data about them.
Enterprise is a different story, once you squeeze too hard, companies will find ways to replace you; they are somewhat resilient to pain, but it does have limits.
So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?
Fortnite is probably going to be played on console in that case, and League had a Mac port for a while but I don’t know if it’s supported anymore after the switch to Apple Silicon.
I’m on Win11 and see almost none of the issues people like you are talking about. No doubt they exist! Maybe it’s because I’m on a plain vanilla ISO and I stripped the crap out early on? Same SSD I had 4 computers ago on Win10, just get moving it over. Talk like yours makes me afraid of a fresh install!
If it’s as bad as people say, I’ll give up and go Debian. I was largely staying Windows so I could be familiar and support my coworkers. Unemployed now. Who cares?
They’ve since relaxed a bit on the forced hardware upgrade part; you can install Win11 on ‘unsupported’ hardware now, you’ll just have click a prompt saying you’ll get no support and you’re on your own if you attempt that, where initially it wouldn’t even let you do that.
The forced MS account login is very much an issue with the consumer SKUs and the Enterprise/IoT SKUs still let you use a local account. Similarly, LTSC in particular is barren on the bloat front, while the consumer SKUs and even the non-LTSC Enterprise and IoT SKUs aren’t much better in this regard, come loaded with bloat.
You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.
You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.
Apparently my Microsoft account is some bullshit one I made for Xbox in 2006 and it thinks I’m a made up name from that time, which is pretty funny to me literally everytime I reset my PC … Which because I use win 11 is way more often than it should be
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
on 03 Oct 18:10
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How is adding new features that you don’t have to use but which can be insanely powerful “fucking with it”?
yep. it’s the one tool that is incredibly versatile in the workplace and for which I do not have a replacement
are there better tools? quite often. would those tools be able to be used by anybody opening the files you are sharing with them? nope. and keeping things in the same format means it’s very easy to move data across files and link things up.
forms, trackers, calculations, data logging, all easy to reference/transfer to one another and I can expect anybody on my team to be able to work with files I send them without having to teach them how to use a different program
And you dare not risk your financial data when plotting a migration! Been there, done that, no one ever suggested moving from Excel to another product.
Excel is such an incredible piece of shit. There’s many reasons to hate it for me, but what i hate the most is not being able to do relationships in any meaningful way. So often i need to have one to many relationships and this garbage makes it impossible. Data consistency? Nope. Opening a csv? Fuck you! Why the fuck are there online tools that are better at this shit? You had 40 years ffs. No amount of AI is going to fix this turd. God I hate Excel.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
on 03 Oct 15:06
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There’s a ton of reasons to hate Excel, I’m sure, but I don’t think lack of support for relational data is a reasonable one. There’s tools for that job, but Excel isn’t trying to be one of them.
Just because it doesn’t offer features a database has doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to use it as one
I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
on 03 Oct 16:28
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Yeah, not denying that people use Excel to do all kinds of crazy shit. People using the tool wrong isn’t the tool’s fault though, right?
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 03 Oct 20:01
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Wrong! If I am using a hammer to deliver babies I expect hammer manufacturers to put a rubber coating on the claw so it doesn’t scratch the baby as I pry it out.
I get that. But it’s a case that’s just so incredibly common. Tagging/categorization. We end up with multiple columns like ‘cat 1’, ‘cat 2’, etc. Or doing pivot tables. I guess to me there’s pretty much always something that can do the job better, but the reality is that in the corporate setting I operate in everybody uses Excel.
If I’m the only one doing it then I’d prefer to stick with sqlite. But the reality is that everyone I work with does these kinds of things in excel, and it’s a shitshow. Yes, u could say ‘don’t blame the tool’, but it’s ms shoving it down our throats and they could’ve done much better with the time they had.
With power query, Excel can perform more database-like functions, I use it all the time! It comes with it’s own quirks however
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world
on 03 Oct 08:17
nextcollapse
Some computer scientists really went “we made a computer that is programmed in a different way and is sometimes correct” and these idiot corpos went “wow put it in everything”
threaded - newest
It’s about time all those math types learned to relax a bit. These numbers in these spreadsheets don’t need to be exact all the time. It’s really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how “right” any individual field is. Error bars are there for a reason people!
“Please calculate the totals to reflect a favourable result”
Sounds like what accountants do already
Accountants tally the numbers and hand you the totals. Twisting them is unethical and can lead to them losing their licenses.
Analysts manipulate the numbers to push a message. No ethics allowed.
Signed, an analyst raised by an accountant. Interacting with other analysts is infuriating.
<img alt="" src="https://l.sw0.com/pictrs/image/459457a3-f5c2-4054-82a7-76bf9f5e9710.jpeg">
5/4 times that’s true.
It’s all about whether your accounts give a vibe of truthiness. Auditors need to chill.
It’s just the vibe of the… thing
Vibe accounting
I mean, it’s on brand with everything else these days: newsweek.com/how-much-trump-worth-depends-how-he-…
Microsoft literally calls the feature “vibe working.” Youre not far off the actual name.
They aren’t even pretending to care anymore.
Sounds like a good way to AI-wash any accounting fraud. Now you can just blame it on Microsoft.
Didn’t openai use sloptimized in thier ai video slop maker release too
Just like the Xerox copier/scanners that helpfully kept scanned images small by reusing parts of the image elsewhere. Like, all these 6s on your scanned invoices can totally be replaced with 8s. There’s just a tiny degradation in the overall image, it shouldn’t be a problem!
Xerox should have just called it AI compression and people would have been throwing money at them.
Especially on blueprints, these small file sizes are important. Doesn’t matter if you replace these load bearing numbers with different ones, as long as the file is small
$20 of the time
Damn thats high!/s
0% of the time it works because I shut that shit off the first minute I saw it
Trillions of dollars to develop a calculator that’s wrong sometimes.
I mean, most calculators are wrong quite often
this one is just wrongerer
I’ve never seen a calculator being wrong, and I’m genuinely curious what you’re talking about.
devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160628-00/?p…
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
Only when people use the wrong input, garbage in and garbage out.
In the same vein I can’t think of any instance where excel had calculated things wrong unless there was a fault in the formula that I made.
Except if you’re calculating dates from a long time ago. It famously takes some liberties with leap years.
That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.
Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.
If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.
Now, that’s a fine hair to be splitting.
No, the user is wrong quite often, the calculator gives the answer to the question asked, not the answer to the question the user wanted to ask.
Garbage in, garbage out.
AI Agents having access to the functionality of Excel means that they won’t be wrong with the actual calculations though, since it doesn’t do 5x10 in the LLM but instead uses excels built in functions to do it.
AI and excel are a match made in heaven tbh. Same with AI and databases.
Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why ‘copilot in excel’ (not agent mode) wasn’t designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn’t designed for it.
54% isn’t really low when people only get 72%.
Everyone else who’s anti-AI:
ITT: people who haven’t seen the movie, I guess.
Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It’s solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There’s a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can’t remember how it goes.
Just look what they’re doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM… Kill all your main characters.
Forget Xbox, look at how they’re treating Windows lately. Loaded with ads and bloat, forced hardware upgrades with Win11, forced MS account sign-in with no option for local accounts unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…
That is the whole point. They’re squeezing the users they don’t give a shit about. But personal users almost never buy Windows licenses from Microsoft I’d bet. So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?
The money for Windows non-Enterprise is made with OEM deals. They probably wouldn’t even notice if nobody bought personal licenses anymore. Might as well make actual money from selling data about them.
Enterprise is a different story, once you squeeze too hard, companies will find ways to replace you; they are somewhat resilient to pain, but it does have limits.
Like 99% of laptops and desktops sold come with a Windows Home license. Those are OEM deals but they’re also screwing those customers
Yeah, this wasn’t about whether they’re screwing the customers - they are - but about whether this has any negative financial implications for them
Fortnite is probably going to be played on console in that case, and League had a Mac port for a while but I don’t know if it’s supported anymore after the switch to Apple Silicon.
I think an Apple machine will set you back slightly more than a League capable Windows 11 machine
I’m on Win11 and see almost none of the issues people like you are talking about. No doubt they exist! Maybe it’s because I’m on a plain vanilla ISO and I stripped the crap out early on? Same SSD I had 4 computers ago on Win10, just get moving it over. Talk like yours makes me afraid of a fresh install!
If it’s as bad as people say, I’ll give up and go Debian. I was largely staying Windows so I could be familiar and support my coworkers. Unemployed now. Who cares?
They’ve since relaxed a bit on the forced hardware upgrade part; you can install Win11 on ‘unsupported’ hardware now, you’ll just have click a prompt saying you’ll get no support and you’re on your own if you attempt that, where initially it wouldn’t even let you do that.
The forced MS account login is very much an issue with the consumer SKUs and the Enterprise/IoT SKUs still let you use a local account. Similarly, LTSC in particular is barren on the bloat front, while the consumer SKUs and even the non-LTSC Enterprise and IoT SKUs aren’t much better in this regard, come loaded with bloat.
You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.
You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.
Apparently my Microsoft account is some bullshit one I made for Xbox in 2006 and it thinks I’m a made up name from that time, which is pretty funny to me literally everytime I reset my PC … Which because I use win 11 is way more often than it should be
How is adding new features that you don’t have to use but which can be insanely powerful “fucking with it”?
yep. it’s the one tool that is incredibly versatile in the workplace and for which I do not have a replacement
are there better tools? quite often. would those tools be able to be used by anybody opening the files you are sharing with them? nope. and keeping things in the same format means it’s very easy to move data across files and link things up.
forms, trackers, calculations, data logging, all easy to reference/transfer to one another and I can expect anybody on my team to be able to work with files I send them without having to teach them how to use a different program
And you dare not risk your financial data when plotting a migration! Been there, done that, no one ever suggested moving from Excel to another product.
Excel is such an incredible piece of shit. There’s many reasons to hate it for me, but what i hate the most is not being able to do relationships in any meaningful way. So often i need to have one to many relationships and this garbage makes it impossible. Data consistency? Nope. Opening a csv? Fuck you! Why the fuck are there online tools that are better at this shit? You had 40 years ffs. No amount of AI is going to fix this turd. God I hate Excel.
There’s a ton of reasons to hate Excel, I’m sure, but I don’t think lack of support for relational data is a reasonable one. There’s tools for that job, but Excel isn’t trying to be one of them.
Just because it doesn’t offer features a database has doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to use it as one
I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades
Yeah, not denying that people use Excel to do all kinds of crazy shit. People using the tool wrong isn’t the tool’s fault though, right?
Wrong! If I am using a hammer to deliver babies I expect hammer manufacturers to put a rubber coating on the claw so it doesn’t scratch the baby as I pry it out.
Reminded me of these two projects by some Dylan Tallchief on YouTube:
He first made a programmable drum machine, then a DAW in Excel.
I get that. But it’s a case that’s just so incredibly common. Tagging/categorization. We end up with multiple columns like ‘cat 1’, ‘cat 2’, etc. Or doing pivot tables. I guess to me there’s pretty much always something that can do the job better, but the reality is that in the corporate setting I operate in everybody uses Excel.
You are trying to use Excel like a database and that’s not its job. Use Access for that, if you must stick within the Office ecosystem
If I’m the only one doing it then I’d prefer to stick with sqlite. But the reality is that everyone I work with does these kinds of things in excel, and it’s a shitshow. Yes, u could say ‘don’t blame the tool’, but it’s ms shoving it down our throats and they could’ve done much better with the time they had.
With power query, Excel can perform more database-like functions, I use it all the time! It comes with it’s own quirks however
Some computer scientists really went “we made a computer that is programmed in a different way and is sometimes correct” and these idiot corpos went “wow put it in everything”
Brian, I’m gonna be honest with you: That smells like pure gasoline.