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Why so many?


FWIW when I do txt2img or img2img locally I have the batch set to 8-12 (so 12 variation images are generated from the same seed in the same gen) so it’s fairly easy to numerically end up with tens of thousands, which are usually 99% not good.


On some level economies of scale and improving technology don’t warrant maintenance


0.9 C warmer on average vs location specific volatility + acidification


I doubt that holds up personally

I would guess reliance on excel is declining


> I would guess reliance on excel is declining

In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.

Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.

I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.

--------

[0] Probably less than that 10%

[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.


If the general public knew how big decisions are done based on some ancient Excel sheet they'd faint.

It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.

Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).

...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.

Anecdote:

A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.

But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.


Excel spreadsheets built 30 years ago likely pin people to excel


Nah it just got promoted as the database for PowerBI. /s


Works for government funding


> I guess they don't teach objective reasoning in school.

You should have gone to school!


Completely wrong direction. AGI will not emerge from getting smarter. It will emerge from being a stateful system in a real environment.

You need context from internal system state that isn’t faked with a giant context window.


The validity of the Turing test doesn’t change the fact that the bots are better than humans at many tasks that we would consider intellectual challenges


You’re reading it backwards. He is not praising that behavior, he is complaining about it. He is saying that bots _should_ parse smiling face emoji’s as smiling face emoji’s, but they don’t do that currently because as text they get passed as gross unicode that has a lot of ambiguity and just happens to ultimately get rendered as a face to end users.


Wouldn’t the training or whatever make that unicode sequence effectively a smiley face?


Yes, but the same face gets represented by many unique strings. Strings which may more may not be tokenized into a single clean “smiley face” token.


Don't ask ChatGPT about seahorse emoji.


That's caused by the sampler and chatbot UI not being part of the LLM. It doesn't get to see its own output before it's sent out.


Don't ask humans either, apparently.


Sell the loan to someone else.


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