this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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I can't imagine anything more useless than a nondeterministic Excel function.
WHAT ABOUT RAND()? CHECKMATE AI HATERS!!! (/s)
Randomness can still be deterministic and useful. Monte Carlo simulations and whatnot
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.
But what if that is what casinos use to be random?
I read that some have cameras pointed at a wall of lava lamps, they combine random pixel data, with timestamps to the nanosecond, to generate random data.
What, you don't appreciate when your excel function just makes shit up? Weird ..
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).
I feel like that boils down to "I want a chart, but in words instead of visualization."
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.
Kind of - it's the step that makes the data uniform and (nominally) useful so it can then be aggregated and reported on.
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.
Ah yes, those idiots trying to do math in Excel.
Or trying to do text in excel?!
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.I remember in 8th grade about 26 years ago being taught how to use Microsoft Works, including its word processor, spreadsheet, and its database.
Yeah for those who think it's a new problem for Microsoft to have multiple teams working on different overlapping projects, they've been doing that shit since at least the 90's. At one point in time they had at least three word processors in active development: MS Word, MS Works, and Wordpad.
MS Works was kind of MS Office Junior. It was packaged as one app instead of a bundle of several but you'd choose which function you'd want to use right now. It had a spreadsheet and the main difference between it and Excel was you were limited to one worksheet. And it had a database function which visually looked a lot like a spreadsheet, nothing like Access. Good enough for Dad to catalog his VHS collection. Except they stopped supporting works years ago, I think Word and Excel can open Works files but I don't know about Works database files are rather esoteric now. Then there's MS Access which is itself being killed off.
There's a rather big gulf between "just slightly misuse Excel" and "learn SQL."
Idiots using a function without understanding what it actually does. Plenty of functions in Excel operate on text.