NaibofTabr 164 points 3 days ago

I can't imagine anything more useless than a nondeterministic Excel function.

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GreenCrunch 69 points 3 days ago

WHAT ABOUT RAND()? CHECKMATE AI HATERS!!! (/s)

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terranoid 28 points 3 days ago

Randomness can still be deterministic and useful. Monte Carlo simulations and whatnot

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Aceticon 3 points 3 days ago

That's the funny bit - unlike rand() which is purelly random with a uniform distribution - a feature which as you point out is useful - and is reliably so, copilot at best has a wild-ass distribution with an the extremelly high dimensionality of its shape which is not even reliable because every time it's initialization parameters are tweaked or any model weights change, the shape of that distribution changes.

It's like they were trying to come up with the thing that's the closest possible to mathematically useless.

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StaticFalconar 2 points 3 days ago

But what if that is what casinos use to be random?

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Lodespawn 29 points 3 days ago

What, you don't appreciate when your excel function just makes shit up? Weird ..

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egrets -4 points 3 days ago

I realize this is the wrong community to post it in, but I can imagine it being useful for things like summarization and cursory sentiment analysis, and perhaps for chaotic test data generation.

As with all AI, though, it's a wildly risky tool as it requires the user to understand its limitations and fallibility (as well as the million other issues AI brings with it).

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Initech_vs_Initrode 4 points 2 days ago

I feel like that boils down to "I want a chart, but in words instead of visualization."

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jj4211 1 point 2 days ago

I suppose the idea would be like AVG, but for free form text comment cells. Can't really chart that.

Of course it would be non deterministic left as a "formula", so it's still a bad idea to encode that way, but guess they could have a "summarize this column" feature and then the user does as they will with the result.

Though having comments in a column in a spreadsheet has always seemed like a weird format choice.

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egrets -2 points 2 days ago

Kind of - it's the step that makes the data uniform and (nominally) useful so it can then be aggregated and reported on.

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bus_factor -13 points 3 days ago

It has some reasonable use-cases when dealing with text, the problem is that it's extremely easy for idiots to misuse it, either by trying to do math or by not supplying any cells in the optional second argument.

Not requiring the second argument was nuts, and it should probably have refused any query resulting in a number as well.

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wewbull 30 points 3 days ago

It has some reasonable use-cases when dealing with text

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Voroxpete 19 points 3 days ago

Ah yes, those idiots trying to do math in Excel.

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im_fine_sandy 6 points 3 days ago

Or trying to do text in excel?!

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bus_factor 3 points 3 days ago

You may not like it, but Excel has long been the tool of choice for people who should really use a database but already know how to use this nice hammer. COPILOT() was marketed as a tool where you could pull in a bunch of text fields and do crude sentiment analysis or summaries of the individual fields, for example.

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bus_factor 4 points 3 days ago

Idiots using a function without understanding what it actually does. Plenty of functions in Excel operate on text.

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jballs 43 points 3 days ago

I can't imagine why they're taking this function out

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Akuchimoya 4 points 2 days ago

Is this a real screen capture or are you having me on? Because did someone really ship this out????

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jballs 4 points 2 days ago

Came from this post about 10 months ago.

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hexagonwin 39 points 3 days ago

NOO! IT BREAKS MY WORKFLOW!! /s

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notabot 39 points 3 days ago

Don't worry, you can just replace it with a call to RAND() and scale it appropriately.

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dumnezero 26 points 3 days ago

LibreOffice Calc glows harder

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brown567 22 points 3 days ago

Turns out, "Math Program" didn't need a "Bullshit" button! Who knew?

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BigDiction 19 points 2 days ago

Microsoft is also unifying Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot into a single app as it simplifies how users access its AI tools across Microsoft 365.

Jesus is it really true that there are ~3 isolated teams working any mainline product at a given point? Using this stuff on iOS feels like it.

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BigDanishGuy 3 points 2 days ago

I think they may have some independent teams for the translations as well. Otherwise why the fuck would they translate function names?

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ChaoticNeutralCzech 5 points 2 days ago

They have been translating function names as far back as I can remember... Spreadsheets are meant for the general office worker who doesn't necessarily speak English

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AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor 19 points 3 days ago

Wonder whose was the excel sheet in which someone asked copilot to do some math and resulted in a few millions lost by "a honest mistake" of the artificial idiocy...

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the16bitgamer 18 points 3 days ago

How expensive was this to run for them? I kind of wanted to test it since there is a few outputs which would’ve been cool to see it be generated.

But I can imagine a 200 row sheet with COPILOT() being slow and very expensive to have.

Oh well

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Jesusaurus 17 points 3 days ago

And not even guaranteed to be accurate

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