The opposing force is they are looking down the barrel of a demographic implosion that has already begun. Their labor force started shrinking in 2015.

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.

Not really. If you ask it what's going on in the news then you'll get an up-to-date response, because it knows in that instance to check and summarize the news rather than just generating something from its LLM.

And if you ask Gemini what time it is you'll get the right answer, for the same reason.

The fact that ChatGPT fails to do this is a problem with ChatGPT, not any inherent problem for AI. Probably in response to this embarrassing article it will be fixed within a couple weeks.

Shirley the thoroughness of the investigation is inversely proportional to the amount Amazon "invests" in Trumps latest scam.

The free ride for EVs was going to end at some point. If your only reason to get an EV was to evade a small amount of taxation, well you're SOL and should probably re-evaluate your priorities.

In the UK, you have a yearly car inspection called an MOT that registers your mileage at the point of inspection. In that way it's easy to determine what the per mile tax would be. Personally I'd rather a blanket tax on all EVs as it would be easier to administer but I don't have an EV.

However I feel that we're about to discover the hard way the dangers and downsides of the extreme amount of computerisation in modern cars. They're already sending telemetry to the manufacturer, often without the knowledge of the owner, what is to stop the cars from sending similar telemetry to the government? Your car becomes the snitch, especially if people start to fiddle with the mileage before an MOT. There's no need for a new GPS spying system to be installed, it's already there.

BTW, when it comes to diesel, modern cars can't really run off of chip fat from the local chippy and converting it to biodiesel would be more expensive than buying diesel (especially as it won't scale)... however something similar has already been a thing in the UK for ages as we have "red" diesel... which is diesel sold tax free for non-road use (industrial, mining, agricultural, generators and the like, vehicles and applications that would never use the road) with a red dye added for easy identification. A few people used red diesel for road going vehicles but it's never been such a significant issue that anything beyond token enforcement has been necessary.

We've formed a committee to limit the levels of incompetence in the previous committee.

If that referendum was held, Alberta would stay firmly in Canada. The separation group is loud, but very decidedly in the minority.

Most Albertans understand the semi-antagonistic relationship is just here to stay. What exasperates them is the two faced nature of it. If the rest of Canada is so appalled with that industry, they should stop taking the blood money. Exclude those revenues from the equalization calculation.

But that won't happen, so the country lives well off the proceeds while belittling the provider. In the meantime they're bent out of shape by the damaged auto industry in Ontario - an industry providing cradle to grave emission producing units.

Nobody likes hypocrisy.

It was a "planned" emissions cap and changing the rules around clean electricity won't mean much. They aren't going to run off and build more coal plants. And investment in carbon capture is the lip service being returned for that lip service.

And the deal to open the door to a new pipeline to the west coast is equally nebulous. It requires BC and a ton on indigenous groups to be on board. If it ever happens, it's years away.

None of this changes anything any time soon. All politics, no substance.

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

Given the rate at which AI will supplant the human workforce, it seems to me that an ethically intended label isn't an unreasonable ask. Most gamers will blow right past it anyway.

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

>What if he convinced you suicide was his best option?

I'm not a chatbot. I would go to the social workers and see what the best thing to do is, not help him commit suicide.

It's never the best option, unless you are talking about euthanasia instead of terminally ill people. But I differentiate. That's why we have different words.

So, they didn't have AI actually do any of those tasks, they said AI *could* do those tasks by looking at the task and looking at AI and saying "Yup!".

AI probably can't do those tasks, or people would be replaced already.

This is a cheerleading study on AI meant to drive more investment, that's all.

"Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research."

It was based on solving a maths equation.

(As a mathematician, yes, I could argue that I studied as a school of mathematical sciences inside a university but also...)

There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".

Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites trying to work out what the weird time-dilation problems were that they were seeing in every experiment. Instead, the maths was solved and TOLD you to go looking for them because on the face of it they appeared patently ridiculous and incompatible with what we knew of physics at that time.

Isn't Uber still losing money?

Amazon had a plan for profitability, so much so they took on more debt in the early days to scale up. A gamble that paid off because they had a solid plan to begin with, not a "hope the magic beans drop into our laps before we run out of money" type of plan that AI companies have. Uber's business plan was "lets keep doing illegal shit that our competitors cant and just hope we become big enough not to fail".