Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Havoc 1322 days ago
Of all the places spreadsheet is probably the one place you don’t want AI generated content. Half the time it’s financial info so sorta correct simply isn’t good enough
4 comments

Spreadsheets are used for _waaaay_ more than just finances. I don't think it's anywhere near 50% finances. I can't recall where, but I saw a study from I think the 90s saying most of the spreadsheets they found were being used as Todo lists.

Maybe like 1 in my past 2y of many, many spreadsheets has been financing related. I think you might be overgeneralizing to an ungeneralizeably large group -- the set of all human spreadsheets.

I don't remember where I read this (and my summary might be off) but the computerized spreadsheet is a great invention because it's a programming environment for non-programmers.

"I need to input a number of variables and find their sum and average [or even more]. And I need to see how the outputs change if I change an input...".

It does not matter the point stands. I can think of almost nothing worse than data in spreadsheets that LOOKS good but is wrong.
Most real-world spreadsheets contained significant errors in this 2005 review: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228662532_What_We_K...

Is there any reason to think the situation has substantially improved since then?

This is not a good excuse to actively and knowingly make it worse
I was going to say: This can only end well for the economy... /s
Let's see if we can tell what data was used to train the model by watching where the money starts to be moved around into offshore accounts and what not. Was the model trained on the data dumps of from those "off shore" banks recently-ish leaked.
When I see something is in a spreadsheet I immediately assume there are at least 3 things wrong with the data, 1 of which is obvious.