It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes | Defector
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It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies’ generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that […]

Money quote:

Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      10 hours ago

      It can’t be … but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow circa 2008 and running afoul of some dude there who was like the last living Access consultant on Earth. I’ve never encountered defensive rage like that before or since.

      Fun Access fact, the Diebold-manufactured voting machines that featured prominently in the 2000 presidential election cycle used an Access database as their underlying data storage mechanism. Access DBs did incorporate an audit table - which was manually-editable.

      • PokerChips@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        8 hours ago

        That explains why they didn’t want anyone investigating the machines. Did proper authorities finally get access (no pun intended lol) to investigate? Or was that already known?

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          7 hours ago

          No, this came out after the election was settled. There was a woman that maintained a website covering all these details called BlackBoxVoting or something like that (long gone now).