this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Memes

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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.


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[–] smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 days ago (3 children)

It obviously added "A+1+2+3" and got 15 after looking up the typical value of A.

[–] crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 2 days ago

And it was still wrong

[–] vrek@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71...

Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it's just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn't think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense... Wait holy shit... I got it

2+3 = 5

1 = 1

Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) "1"+(str) "5" = "15"

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It didn't consider any of the numbers, because the user didn't provide the context argument to the function.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can't confirm as I don't use excel but that seems to be the issue.

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No, it's a lot more basic than that. You provide =COPILOT() the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wait... Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can't see the data in excel? That's insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don't see why excel wouldn't be able to...

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you're working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wow, yeah most people who want to use a function like this will mess that up...

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I genuinely cannot think of a single use-case where you would want Excel to look at your entire spreadsheet without it being a horrible mistake. You definitely do not want AI to do math for you, and that is thankfully not what this thing is designed for.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

True but I could see using Ai to write a function which does the math... Like I write a prompt (simplified example as I'm on my phone) like "sum all the values above A4 and place result in A4" and the Ai should then write the function "sum(A1, A3)" and place it in cell A4

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You can certainly use AI to generate the function and paste it in, but that is not what =COPILOT() is for. You could just have any other LLM do that.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Maybe not what it's intended for but I promise that's what it will be used for...

[–] zikzak025@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Or A can be 10 in hexadecimal, but that wouldn't fit either.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago

Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I'm betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.

[–] smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

How many gigawatts did it take for you to figure that out?

[–] vrek@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] MakingWork@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The typical value of A is 9, according to copilot.

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago

Off by 1. Not too bad.