Ah, for the days before we discovered that Adams always intended for Pointy Haired Boss to be the hero of the cartoon.

That's the kind of person who came up with this idea. They don't realize how utterly bizarre it sounds to normal people.

Still, even if they're only targeting the top 10% income bracket, that's 30 million American suckers to pull from. There's a type of person who will absolutely hit "subscribe" on a service that dumps a box of random trinkets on them every month, if the ad is good enough.

He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.

Your first full paragraph is 100% opinion. Run along now.

I distinctly remember people recommending use of a tablet with external keyboard as a substitute for entry-level subnotebook computers when the latter were discontinued in fourth quarter 2012. This despite that major tablets ship with operating systems locked down not to run the sort of lightweight software development environments that could run on the desktop operating system of a netbook.

If you are interested learning about actual science you can read the actual paper. It is not paywalled. Look up "speleothem isotopes" to learn about specific climatologic techniques for this study.

We do have records. We just can't read them. The Harappan language has never been deciphered. There are about 5000 inscriptions known.

That droughts led to the end of Indus Valley Civilization has been surmised for decades, this study provided a much more detailed account of the process.

For people to settle in "untouched tracts of land" you need to have water to irrigate it. Large empty areas on Earth require water for them to be "tamed".

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.

I guess the FAA should turn it over to the Ghostbusters, because something definitely tore the cable from the utility pole.

They only take that attitude with the weak.

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.