It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.

Does that include getting out of American influence also?

Yes, it is basically Netherlands office going rogue.

If it were a Chinese office with a Netherlands owning company, you can be sure the /. headline would be "Chinese Office Going Rogue Against Netherlands Owning Company".

By calling it "Civil War" the headline is misleading people into thinking both sides were on equal footing.

This is comically incorrect.

The whole problem with this approach is a) we don’t have all the systems we need individually at a level of capability that meets the current level of hype and b) we don’t have a capable enough system management AI architecture, just using some weighted tokens is horribly deficient.

For the record, maybe we shouldn’t call it a bug because they have rudimentary sentience and thinking ability. Maybe unproductive mutation would be more apt.

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.

For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet, it will be correct for the current year. No user has to think about that at all, they just load it and get a correct table. You can extrapolate this to basically any level of complexity because Excel has VBA and you can script everything. The user just follows instructions, and they aren't even allowed to edit any cells which could break anything.

In case anyone is going this far down the hole, it turned out great. Even though the item was shipped from the US, because the seller didn't respond I got a refund without having to return it.

So far Aliexpress has been responsive to 100% of my issues and I only have needed to be a little patient and not expect everything to be solved immediately or arrive immediately.

I agree that a database-backed application is the right way to go for that much data. However, Finance used Excel because they could. We all like to talk about how bad an idea it is to do that, but Excel brought financial computations on large data sets to people who can't write any code. It has enabled thousands upon thousands of businesses to do things they couldn't do before without paying a programmer to develop a solution they cannot maintain. The fact that other spreadsheets regularly crater when handed data that Excel has no trouble with is exactly why we have so much Excel.

I like to use Drupal to rapidly create database applications which can handle a lot of data without writing code. But I wouldn't expect someone in accounting to be able to do that at all, and that just shifts the problem domain. Instead of getting stuck with Excel, now I'm getting stuck with Drupal. All of the logic just winds up in a different system that you can't trivially transfer it out of, so you have the same exact maintainability problem, except more people know how to work with Excel.

I doubt it. The elites have capital to invest in the means of production. Absent this they have no real power or purpose.

When you no longer need to pay countless thousands of people to perform a task this is a double edged sword. It not only means you can make do with less it means anyone else can step in and accomplish the same tasks without you.

Chatbots are trained not programmed. If you have evidence OpenAI's chatbot was explicitly trained to manipulate people then FFS please don't keep it to yourself.