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I'm excited to see what national disasters will be caused by auto-generated Excel sheets that nobody on the planet understands. A few selections from past HN th
by burkaman 1y ago
I'm excited to see what national disasters will be caused by auto-generated Excel sheets that nobody on the planet understands. A few selections from past HN threads to prime your imagination:
Thousands of unreported COVID cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689247
Thousands of errors in genetics research papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41540950
Wrong winner announced in national election: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197280
Countries across the world implement counter-productive economic austerity programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Methodological_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
- HPsquared 1y agoEspecially combined with the dynamic array formulas that have recently been added (LET, LAMBDA etc). You can have much more going on within each cell now. Think whole temporary data structures. The "evaluate formula" dialog doesn't quite cut it anymore for debugging.
- malthaus 1y agofrom my experience in the corporate world, i'd trust an excel generated / checked by an LLM more than i would one that has been organically grown over years in a big corporation where nobody ever checks or even can check anything because its one big growing pile of technical debt people just accept as working