Comment by motoboi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motoboi | Hacker News Reader

Excel is the “beast that drives the ENTIRE economy” and he’s worried about Brenda from the finance department losing her job because then her boss will get bad financial reports

I suppose the person that wrote that have not ideia Excel is just an app builder where you embed data together with code.

You know that we have excel because computers didn’t understand column names in databases and so data extraction needed to be made by humans. Humans then design those little apps in excel to massage the data.

Well, now an agent can read the boss saying gimme the sales from last month and the agent don’t need excel for that, because it can query the database itself, massage the data itself using python and present the data itself with html or PNGs.

So, we are in the process of automating Brenda AND excel away.

Also, finance departments are a very small part of excel users. Just think everywhere were people need small programs, excel is there.

In most cases where the excel spreadsheet is business critical, the spreadsheet _is_ the database. These companies aren’t using an erp system. They are directly entering inventory and sales numbers in the spreadsheet.

Found the person who hasn’t seen excel in the real world.

Excel - whatever its origin story - is the actual Swiss Army knife of the tech world.

There’s easily a few billion people who use excel. There is a reason it survives.

20+% of the world population uses Excel? Any citations on that?

The post is clearly hyperbole obviously the sole issue being brought up isn't 'brenda losing her job may be bad for the company' you're being facetious.

You missed this bit “.. and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won't be able to recognize it because he doesn't understand because AI hallucinates.”

Brendas have fucked it up multiple times, by themselves or because their boss demanded

The underlying assumption is that Brenda generally does her job pretty well. Human errors exist but usually peers/managers (or the person who did it) can identify and correct them reliably.

If we have to compare LLM’s against people who are bad at their jobs in order to highlight their utility we’re going the wrong direction.

There are a lot of underlying assumptions: Brenda, the woman, is accurate and trustworthy and has mastered an accurate and trustworthy technology; the upper manager, the male, will introduce error by not understanding that the technology he brings to bear on the situation is hallucinatory. The woman is lower in status and pay than the male. The woman is necessary to the functioning of "the economy" and "capitalism," while the man threatens those. There are a lot of unsubtle political undertones on TikTok.

I was focused on a particular element but sure

Good luck with that.

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