second post

But I don’t think that that is actually applicable to our current situation here,
because there are no super intelligent machines. There’s no software that anyone has built that is smarter than humans. What we have created are vast systems of
control. Our entire economy is this kind of engine that we can’t really stop.
That’s a different thing than saying we’ve created machines smarter than us. We
have built a giant treadmill that we can’t get off. Maybe.

Ted Chiang, Vanity Fair

www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/06/ted-chiang-on-how-to-best-think-about-about-ai

Apropos of nothing, I wrote an absolute garbage way to run something in excel headlessly via python mostly because I did not feel a very strong desire to fire up Wireshark and learn a bit more of the guts of certain Excel addons to reverse engineer something. I used ChatGPT to generate some of the VBA related items because it is the one language that I am perpetually in the state of forgetfulness and while it was…. approximately 40% wrong (including the part where it can’t seem to generate proper JSON to save itself), it was very handy on getting me started through all the tedious bits of building out a custom script job for work. Not entirely bullish on this AI binge, but it is very much like what Google was once upon a time - excellent pointer in the right direction if not necessarily the best teacher.