• dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • UnculturedSwine@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        They even say not to use it for financial calculations or high stakes scenarios. They can’t provide an example of using it in any way that is useful for getting actual work done. It’s a solution in search of a problem.

        • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social
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          6 days ago

          Yeah, and I’m only supposed to use this bong for smoking tobacco. It said so very very clearly when I bought it so you know they mean it.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

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

    • snooggums@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

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

      • thisisnotausername@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        Does AI comes up negative for most users? Surely here in Lemmy, yes. But out there I see/hear people using it -for dumb shit, mind you- all the time and being happy about it.

        • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 days ago

          This is only one study, but I saw an article a few months ago talking about a study by a major phone company that found that the vast majority of people (80% or more IIRC) either didn’t care about AI features on their phones or actively disliked them.

          I think most people don’t really care one way or another but hate that it’s being shoved into everything, and those who know the stats on how often it’s wrong are a lot more likely to actively dislike it and be vocal about their dislike.

          • thisisnotausername@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 days ago

            That sounds quite possible, AI features on phones/OSs go mostly unused –according to my study, which has a sample of size who the hell knows and a methodology of I feel–.

            But llms I think, although burning money, are quite accepted by the people who touch them, and do not understand what is actually going on or don’t care if the thing is wrong often.

            I sometimes use llms, but only to burn thru monkey work that I can fast and easily review and do if the result is too shity. But that is the extention of my ai use.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          A lot of people are fine with getting wrong answers about shit they don’t know already. That’s what gets spread in social media and what was used for a large portion of the training data and what is available when AI does a web search.

          It presents something that looks right, that is what most people care about.

  • Deacon@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • lazynooblet@lazysoci.al
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      6 days ago

      I also enjoyed their writing.

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

      Loved this 😂

    • Nailbar@sopuli.xyz
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      6 days ago

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

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

      • shoo@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        That’s a great question! I’ll be happy to help you count the lights. I see five lights.

        Here are a few ways you can improve indoor lighting:

        • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          That’s a great question! I’ll be happy to help you count the lights. I see five lights.

          This symbolizes the fact that for the last five hundred years white people have been victims of genocide in South Africa.

          Would you like to learn more?

  • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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?

    • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      "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.”

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 days ago

        “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

  • teft@piefed.social
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • Windex007@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • ch00f@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        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.

  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    They already did that with visual basic and excel. Anyone remember when excels math was, just sorta right?

    • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        No there were math errors. Was it using statistical functions? I can’t recall, I just know we had to double check everything.

        • addie@feddit.uk
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          6 days ago

          Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They’ve also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.