This is totally expected and also absolutely peanuts compared to Intel, who once released a processor that managed to perform floating point long division incorrectly in fascinating (if you’re the right type of nerd) and subtle ways. Hands up everyone who remembers that debacle!
Nobody? Just me?
Anyway, I totally had — and probably still have, somewhere — one of the affected chips. You could check if yours was one of the flawed ones literally by using the Windows calculator.
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.
Obviously, the problem is that you’re asking the wrong questions. The AI is infallible. We just need to get the end user to accept that sometimes 2+2 = 5. Just depends on what Big Brother tells you.
Somewhat off-topic, but that’s the first time in a long time I’ve read a random article on the internet and just instantly liked the writer’s writing style without respect to the topic.
That was a depressing article, but a very enjoyable read.
I also enjoyed their writing.
Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick
Loved this 😂
Imagine buying a car that works great except every now and then when you want to turn left it goes right. No one would willingly buy that.
They do, though.
Turn alt right by design/feature?
ITT: people who didn’t read the article.
Excel is still doing the calculations, not the AI. The AI is helping to write functions. You can easily spot check a couple examples then apply that same formula down the column. I don’t really see the issue.
Of all the things to shove AI into, the first thing that came to my mind years back was Excel. It’s handy when I’m presented a spreadsheet of data at work and I just want to do something like “write a function to extract just the number from a column containing data formatted like LPF_PHASE_OF_CARE [PAF 304001]” because I just want to copy paste all the numbers somewhere. It’s trivial to verify it works correctly, I can examine the formula, and I don’t have to wade through numerous shitty Excel tutorial websites to try and teach myself something I’ll use once or twice a year.
Quick shitpost images I share with friends and Excel functions are where I get the most utility out of AI, which in general I think sucks and is massively overhyped.
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:
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When accuracy isn’t important
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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.
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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.
You can already do multiple lines. Drag the divider between the entry box and the grid down to make it larger, and use Alt-Enter to make a new line in a formula. Been there since at least 2009. You’re welcome.
Microsoft announces new Chief Accuracy Officer, Jack Handey
Mr. Handey has released a statement:
Instead of having “answers” on a math test, they should just call them “impressions,” and if you got a different “impression,” so what, can’t we all be brothers?
"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.”
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
-Jack Handy
That’s a brilliant quote
Jack Handey was an SNL writer, “Deep Thoughts” was a series of one-liners that aired between sketches in the early 90s.
His books are also fun, The Stench of Honolulu was good, the opposite of a hard-boiled PI.
