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It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (defector.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

They foresaw that. That's because python on Excel doesn't run locally, but in the cloud and then returns the result to you: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introduction-to-python-in-excel-55643c2e-ff56-4168-b1ce-9428c8308545

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Still sounds like you'd be shipping your data to the cloud, where it can be exfilled from there.

    Would potentially be a great phishing tool, just need to trick someone into putting sensitive data into a precooked excel file, and it gets exfilled.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Currently only for business customers which probably use OneDrive or SharePoint anyways, so it's not that they need that to exfiltrate data. But for a phishing/hacking attempt? There are probably some nice possibilities.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's the worst possible solution to that problem. Why can't they just develop their own script that's Turing complete but doesn't have any system calls?

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