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!
Vibe accounting
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
I mean, it's on brand with everything else these days: https://www.newsweek.com/how-much-trump-worth-depends-how-he-feels-384720
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.
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
“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.
5/4 times that's true.
It's all about whether your accounts give a vibe of truthiness. Auditors need to chill.
Trillions of dollars to develop a calculator that's wrong sometimes.
I mean, most calculators are wrong quite often
I've never seen a calculator being wrong, and I'm genuinely curious what you're talking about.
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.
this one is just wrongerer
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"
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
0% of the time it works because I shut that shit off the first minute I saw it
Everyone else who's anti-AI:
- What is that smell? It smells like a used diaper filled with Indian food!
- What is that?! It smells like a turd covered in burnt hair!
- It smells like Bigfoot's dick!
- What is that stench?! It smells like the inside of a fake leg!
ITT: people who haven't seen the movie, I guess.
$20 of the time
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.
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