It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes

Comments

• facow@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Not the point of this article but

  Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division

  Wasn’t it just a month or two ago that Zuc was poaching AI engineers with multi-million dollars sign on bonuses? These boom and bust cycles are happening at breakneck speed. Most efficient system btw

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  • frogbellyratbone_@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    100%. Meta did the same thing with VR back in like 2021 iirc. they’ll hire everyone in sight so competitors can’t hire them. and then those workers will just sit on their hands playing candy crush all day doing zero work.

    random link i found about it nypost.com/…/workers-at-meta-salesforce-say-they-…

    Former employees of tech giants including Meta and Salesforce say they were hired to sit around and essentially do nothing as companies embark on a course-correction and lay off extraneous workers during the current economic downturn.

    Levy added: “It kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us.”

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    • Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That bit about Bighead in Silicon Valley getting paid to do nothing wasn’t made up?

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• TomMasz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  And here you thought automatic date conversion was a problem.

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  • riskable@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I hate Microsoft and Excel but that date thing is exactly the kind of stuff that AI would be great at.

    Just not the kind of AI Microsoft probably plans to put in Excel 🤷

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    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Not necessarily. It would do better than current excel, but that’s a low bar… but it would also introduce less reliability / more randomness in date conversions, which is not what any business wants.

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• robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  i sort of don’t care when the LLM is wrong about things it’s not designed for. the functional problem they have is that they’re shit at what they are designed to do.

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  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    A big part the problem is also how they are marketed… Everyone is pushing AI as though it has the entire wealth of human knowledge inside it, it knows the right answer, and can explain it to you in seconds.

    Not, you know, we fed this machine a bunch of words and trained it to spit back out words that look like they fit together.

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  • Postimo@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Lets not lie by omission, a huge part of the problem is that they are wildly more expensive while being shit too. 🙂

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    • robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      there are a ton of social, ethical, and environmental problems with them, those problems would exist even if the worked properly. that they don’t work properly is the fondant on the shit cake.

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• frogbellyratbone_@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Tech stocks tanked Tuesday,

  lol… k… still up 0.5% over 1 month, 18% over the past year, and 87% over 5 years.

  when it goes down 15-40% lmk.

  i think it’s fair to say that though when this random normie author (likely an AI bot) is writing about an AI bubble it means it is real and here though.

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• who@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Finally, you say?

  To emphasize that bugs in implementations of floating point arithmetic are far from rare, we mention that the Calculator application in Microsoft Windows 3.1 evaluates f[(2.01 - 2.00) = 0.0.

  …ufpr.br/…/Higham_2002_Accuracy and Stability of …

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• SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I thought Intel already managed that with the GPU issues.

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  • SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Intel did this way before it was cool

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

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    • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I meant to write FPU. It got auto-mangled and I thought I corrected it; clearly not…

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    • tux0r@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Or rather, between two AI winters.

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• ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes

  I’ve leaked the source code

  function wrong_calculator(actual_answer) {
      return actual_answer + Math.floor(Math.random() + 0.5);
  }
  

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