Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.

that doesn't work

You see, they took the efforts to replicate Microsoft excel experience.

And Libreoffice is great. I got through grad school using it. I had to look up a lot of the button locations and formulas but not having Onedrive hork up everything made it all worth it.

For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should've pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their "OOXML" format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office's behavior, bugs and all.

https://web.archive.org/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/...

Had the same reaction with the Photoshop ai clone when se already have projects like gimp

Decompilation projects are getting attention right now because AI models being able to do it is a new thing. Essentially the end of closed source is a huge deal and people haven't realized the implications..

LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳

I disagree, their efforts don't go unnoticed. Their recent no-AI claims prompted me to donate.

To be fair, neither does the real MS office

I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't think the kind of person who contributes to FOSS projects get into it for the fame and attention.

I don't like LibreOffice but any actual Open Source dev deserves infinite more respect than those prompstitutes.

Wow, it managed to perfectly replicate Microsoft office?

Jesus fuck did the LLM slop bots come out?

Why the fuck is everyone in favor of slop apps now?

The comments here are insane

This is actually one of the best things of this year. First they shit on adobe and now Microsoft, the two most hated and worst hurdles in the way of people switching to Linux. I’m actually predicting that there will be regulations now by the government over this stuff (it won’t work or do anything of course because it’s not even touching their code base) since our government loves money and corporations more than humans.

LibreOffice is great, but it has some glaring issues that keep it out of the mainstream. In my experience it can't handle multiple monitors with different scaling, comments on 365 don't import, formulas in sheets break, etc.

Some of these issues come from Microsoft, but other FOSS office suites like ONLYOFFICE have overcome them so it's doable.

I get the sense their tech stack is very rigid so that may be why iteration is slowed.

what is this referring to?

Tinfoil hat time:

A year ago, I did some reverse engineering. I figured a pattern matching engine has to be good matching patterns, so I threw the messed-up output of Ghidra into Claude to clean it up and to give me an overview of what the fuck happens in a certain part.

I was absolutely surprised. Sure, it got some things wrong, but it knew way more than it should have been able to guess from that short bit of fucked up, optimised not-quite-C. Including guessing context that it should not be able to guess. This was a firmware with not-yet-released functions that, to my knowledge, shouldn't exist outside of this bit of binary firmware. At least not for us non-NDA mortals.

At the time, Mistral had a new-ish model as well, so I figured I'd give it a try. It worked as expected, cleaned up things, gave variables reasonable names, made educated guesses and so on, but didn't act as if it had background info. And I was using Sonnet 4.x, so the small Claude which shouldn't be that much larger.

Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too. I have no idea how, maybe aggressively training on user inputs? Anyway, this does not help to allalleviate my suspicions.

I have played around in it for a few minutes and so far I'm impressed. The file size is tiny by modern standards. It loads super fast, is responsive, much better than the enshitified crap that is the "real" MS Word from what I can see. It is missing some of the more advanced features but most people won't be using them. What's there seems to be functional enough that a lot of people wouldn't even see a drawback.

I played around with the photoshop clone as well. I'm not 100% familiar with the modern photoshop since I use Krita for most of my needs but I've been able to do a few basic things to test out like drawing, filling, transforming an image, warping text and things like that and haven't found anything broken so far.

I hate AI but anything that pries away the enshitifying grip the likes of Adobe, Microsoft and Autodesk have on the industry I'll welcome.

Attention goes to that AI can fuck their creators though, not to the clone Programms.

My experience of using AI is it can save you a LOT of work, but you need to supervise it REALLY closely and give it sufficient code context for it to work properly. It only knows what it knows and if it doesn't know it will make shit up. But if you do use it within its limits it will identify bugs, generate tests, generate a lot of boiler plate and help you be more productive.

Being open source is not a reason to avoid it. However AI does produce slop and unattended it can produce execrable patches which are practically incoherent to anyone used to human coding patterns. So there should be rules about coding style, patch / merge / pull requests that diffs are self evident, concise and obvious. Most AIs will read a guidance file so this stuff can be defined. And if a person uses AI to generate a patch they should review this patch first before daring anyone else to look at it.

I see it as a proof of concept. Whether these products deliver or not doesnt matter. What matters is components within proprietary tools can now be replicated in a fast and effective way.

Not everything from AI is slop. AI in the hands of good developers can be powerful and help make open source projects more productive. It needs careful governance and quality control, but this kind of stuff helps level the playing field as resource limited projects can do more with what they've got.

a couple of months ago i asked about this one of local Forbes editors and they explained this phenomenon as "because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing". i decided not to continue this conversation because that's fucking stupid

Do windows next! WA and IG too! Might as well go whole hog on the corpos.

I might dislike ai, but if that thing ends up taking users away from microsoft, so be it. It's a greater cause

At this point I'd be surprised to find out they write code fully "by hand" and do not use llms anywhere in the pipeline.

Did libre office go strictly non AI? That'd be stupid because it wont go away. What i understand is not accepting 100 file PRs the author doesnt understand.

But the deeds AI can do during testing, planning, refactorings are invaluable.